Public shaming for teenagers who criticised Chechen head

EIGHT teenagers from Chechnya have reportedly been forced to apologise for criticising the authorities.

Several Chechen pro-government online accounts posted videos of seven young men and one young woman offering their apologies for criticising officials in a public chat on the popular Telegram messaging app.

One of the men, who identified himself as a resident of a village west of the regional capital, Grozny, said in the video that he “repents” passing unspecified information to Tumso Abdurakhmanov, a Chechen dissident who runs a popular Youtube blog critical of Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic.

In February Mr Abdurakhmanov survived what he described as an assassination attempt.

A man in another confession video said that he was “caught” in St Petersburg and brought to Chechnya, according to the translation provided by the Caucasian Knot news website.

He was panting and looked visibly disoriented in the video, which carried a caption with his nickname and also contains an LGBT flag – an ominous sign for the notoriously homophobic region.

Russian human rights activists and the Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported a wave of extrajudicial killings in Chechnya in 2017. Some of the men were reportedly murdered on suspicion of being gay.

All the “confessions” appear to have been recorded in the same room.

Chechen police were not immediately available for comment.

Chechen authorities led by Mr Kadyrov have been accused of extrajudicial killings, torture and beatings, claims they have denied.

Public shaming on state television and on social media is one of Chechnya’s most common tools to keep people in check.

Over the past few years, Chechen authorities have forced apologies from people who have committed a variety of perceived offences, from complaining about poverty to performing “immodest” pop songs.

Public shaming in Chechnya typically results in collective punishment for entire families.

Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, director of the Conflict Analysis and Prevention Centre, a think tank which investigates conflict in the region, told The Daily Telegraph that in similar situations Chechen officials would beat, harass and humiliate those forced to publicly repent, and their relatives would get a dressing-down as well.