A Russian newspaper reported this week
that authorities in Chechnya have rounded up dozens of suspected gay
men and killed three.
According to Novaya Gazeta, more
than 100 people have been detained in the anti-gay campaign,
including several well-known local television personalities and
religious figures.
Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has
denied the newspaper's claims, saying that there were no gay men in
Chechnya.
“You cannot arrest or repress people
who just don’t exist in the republic,” Kadyrov spokesman Alvi
Karimov told Interfax news agency.
“If there were such people in
Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn’t need to have anything
to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere
from which there is no returning,” he added, referring to honor
killings.
Ekaterina Sokirianskaia of the human
rights group International Crisis Group told The Guardian that
she believes the detentions are happening.
“I have heard about it happening in
Grozny, outside Grozny, and among people of very different ages and
professions,” she
said. “It's next to impossible to get information from the
victims or their families, but the number of signals I'm receiving
from different people makes it hard not to believe detentions and
violence are indeed happening.”
Chechnya is a Muslim-majority republic
of Russia that attempted to gain its independence from Moscow in the
1990s.