Ensnared in Chechnya, Gay Men Face Torture

GROZNY, Russia — It was supposed to be a night out. But for the young man who calls himself Maksim, as for scores of other gay men arrested in a pogrom in April in Russia’s Chechnya region, it pivoted into nearly two weeks of beatings and torture.

Maksim said it had started with a chat room conversation with “a very good old friend who is also gay,” and who suggested that they meet at an apartment. When Maksim arrived, however, he was greeted by agents who beat him. Later, they strapped him to a chair, attached electrical wires to his hands with alligator clips and began an interrogation.

“They yelled, ‘ Who else do you know?’ ” Maksim said, and zapped him with current. “I was hanging on with my last strength,” he added. “But I didn’t tell them anything.”

The targeted, collective punishment of gays that began in March under its pro-Kremlin leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, is a new turn in the region’s long history of rights abuses.

Novaya Gazeta, an opposition newspaper, first reported the pogrom, saying that at least 100 gay men had been arrested and three killed. Human Rights Watch corroborated the report.

Homosexuality is taboo in Chechnya and the mostly Muslim surrounding areas of the Caucasus region in southern Russia. Nevertheless, before the crackdown, gay men in Chechnya could at least lead social lives, if heavily closeted ones, Maksim said. They met largely through private chat rooms.

The crackdown began after GayRussia, a rights group based in Moscow, applied for permits for gay pride parades in the Caucasus, prompting counterprotests by religious groups, the men said.

The men were held for as long as several weeks, according to Human Rights Watch and to interviews with gay men who escaped. Some “returned to their families barely alive from beatings,” said Tanya Lokshina, a program director for Human Rights Watch. The group said one man died during torture and two others died later in “honor killings” by relatives.

Mr. Kadyrov’s spokesman, Alvi Karimov, said the reports of an anti-gay pogrom had to be false because such men did not exist in Chechnya.

In a televised meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on April 19, Mr. Kadyrov characterized as “libelous” reports that the security services in Chechnya had been persecuting gay men.

But it quickly became clear to Maksim and the other men that the Chechen authorities were applying the same tactics used by Russia and by Mr. Kadyrov to suppress an Islamist insurgency.

Security agents posed as gay men in chat rooms, or persuaded those they had captured to lure acquaintances, those arrested said.

The authorities briefly detained a young man, who identified himself as Nohcho, after a friend informed on him. “I don’t blame him,” Nohcho said of the friend. “We are not heroes. We’re just gay guys. They starve you. They shock you.”

When Maksim entered the apartment where he and his friend had agreed to meet, security officers roughed him up. Five other men were already in the apartment, lured by the same ruse, he said. All six were transferred to an abandoned build-

A pogrom marks a new turn in a region’s history of abuses.

ing, where they were tortured with electricity one by one, Maksim said.

After 11 days, he was released to a male relative, who was told that Maksim was gay. The security officers told the captives’ male relatives that, if they had any honor, they would kill the young men. Maksim’s father threatened to beat him but refrained when his son showed him the bruises he already had. Instead his father said, “I should kill you.”

The Russian LGBT Network, based in St. Petersburg, has established a round-the- clock volunteer group to help gay men like Maksim escape. After arriving at the group’s safe location outside Chechnya, several young men said they had suspected that the volunteer group was also a trap but had no other option but to accept the help, said Olga Baranova, director of the Moscow Community Center, part of the volunteer network.

“Gays in Chechnya and the North Caucasus are in lethal danger,” said Igor Kochetkov, director of the Russian LGBT Network.