WITCH HUNTERS
Chechnya cracks down on “forbidden acts”, the Metropolitan Police try a sensitive approach and TikTok goes witchcraft mad...
CHECHNYAN WITCH HUNT
While much of Europe and the US spent Hallowe’en weekend trick-or-treating, in the Russian Republic of Chechnya it was an excuse for reinforcing the state’s crackdown on “sorcery and witchcraft”. After being secretly filmed for more than two weeks, Zulai Kurashevaya, Tumisha Kunumirovaya and Irina Adyevaya were rounded up by soldiers from the 249th Special Motorised Battalion and accused of witchcraft, having been found with maps, Tarot cards, and a “magical” stone one of them had obtained in the Buddhist region of Kalmykia. In undercover footage shown on Grozny TV, the state television channel, the “witches” are shown boasting of extraordinary powers including being able to cure tuberculosis and predict the future. On arrest they protested that they were simply natural healers and not in league with evil forces, but nonetheless they were passed over to the Republic’s “Centre for Islamic Medicine”, which plays a central role in witch hunts in the country. Chechnya is, at least nominally, an Islamic region.
Adam Elzhurkayev, an Islamic cleric who is head of the Centre, oversees operations to “rid Chechnya of sorcery”, claiming “dozens of victims” had come to him reporting a “variety of underhand schemes” to get vulnerable people to part with their money. “These women are engaged in forbidden acts under Islamic and Russian law,” he said. To deal with witches, Elzhurkayev collaborates with local law enforcement to conduct “healing” exorcisms on the people they round up. The method he uses depends on what he decides is wrong with the prisoners, and whether he thinks they are con artists, mentally ill or “possessed”. “We use oils, smoke inhalations, and the palms of our hands,” he says. “And we read Quranic verses. We can cleanse a person this way.” Once he is satisfied that the “witch” has been appropriately cleansed, she is released into the custody of male relatives – in Chechnya, prosecuted witches are almost always women – who have to ensure that she abides by an agreement to abstain from sorcery that Elzhurkayev forces all “witches” to sign. “We only let them go with a signature,” he said. Previously he has advised people to bathe in chicken broth to evade the “evil eye” and has appeared on Grozny TV brandishing a long stick at “sorcerers” accused of “selling their souls to the Devil”, getting them to confess on air to “consorting with djinn” while he points to the alleged evidence of witchcraft – ranging
Human rights activists are horrified by the crackdown
from bottles and chicken bones to dolls and inscriptions – laid out on a table. Other “witches” have been accused for writing inscriptions in a cemetery, for visiting graveyards to carry out rituals involving melting lead, and for allegations that they cast spells to separate wives from their husbands and to drive people mad; in one case, even a taxi driver who merely took someone to see a healer was detained. Since 2013, when the war against magicians and sorcerers was declared by the despotic head of the Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, dozens of people have been detained with some of them going missing.
Human rights activists are horrified by the crackdown, saying: “They’ve leaped back so fast that they’ve vaulted over the Renaissance straight into the Middle Ages.” “This is less about religious motives and more about police control, which is stronger there than in other republics of Russia,” said human rights researcher Mikhail Roshin. Kadyrov has been accused of numerous human rights abuses, including the mass detention of people suspected of being LGBTQ+; he has also restricted the public lives of women and used children for exhibition fighting. Forced disappearances and torture under Kadyrov’s rule have been considered so widespread that they qualify as crimes against humanity. dailymail. co.uk, 19 Sept; BBC News, 23 Sept 2019; eng.kavkazel.eu, 27 Sept; independent.co.uk, 2 Nov 2021.
POLICING WITCHCRAFT
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Metropolitan Police are getting new training in spotting signs of child abuse linked to witchcraft. This might sound alarm bells for anyone who remembers the “Satanic panic” of the 1990s (see FT57:46-62). Then, a relatively small group of fundamentalist Christians with a particular agenda managed to exert undue influence on law enforcement and social services, particularly in the US, but also to an extent in the UK, resulting in entirely innocent individuals being prosecuted for child abuse linked to supposed “Satanic rituals” after now-discredited techniques such as recovered memory therapy were used. However, this new training is aimed at preventing cases such