Chechnya makes divorced couples reunite to tackle the rise in extremism and crime
ALMOST 1,000 separated couples in Chechnya have been pressured to get back together after leader Ramzan Kadyrov declared that divorce lay at the root of the republic’s social problems.
Chechen state television announced this week that “948 families have been reunited” by special commissions of government, law enforcement and religious officials.
The mostly Muslim republic in Russia’s Caucasus Mountains has grown increasingly conservative and authoritarian under Mr Kadyrov, who was recently reappointed by Vladimir Putin and is seen to be able to act with impunity so long as he suppresses the region’s Islamic insurgency.
The campaign began after Mr Kadyrov said in July that children who don’t live with both parents are more vulnerable to extremists. He claimed that most of the young men who had committed crimes in Chechnya in recent years grew up in “incomplete families” and argued that “out of 100 of those families, at the most five or six are normal”.
“Our first task is to return women who left their husbands, reconcile them,” Kadyrov said.
Rasul Uspanov, head of one of the commissions, the Grozny headquarters for the harmonisation of marital and family relations, said it finds out about separations and divorces through a confidential hotline and calls the couples into its office to speak with a mullah, the BBC’S Russian service reported.
According to Mr Uspanov, some wives have returned to a husband who has remarried and become his second wife, “since under Islam a man has the right to marry four times”.
Rustam Abazov, head of a department for communications with religious and public organisations in the administration, denied that anyone had been reunited by force since “here in Chechnya there are no human rights violations and there can’t be any”.
But several residents have told Russian publications that couples are often coerced into getting back together.
“If you refuse then you’re going against not just religious institutions and traditions, but also against [Mr Kadyrov’s] wishes. It’s this form of pressure,” one woman in Grozny said.