Chechnya arresting, killing gay men, newspaper says

Russian President Vladimir Putin listens during a senior prosecutors meeting in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 14, 2017. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) Russian President Vladimir Putin listens during a senior prosecutors meeting in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 14, 2017. (Alexei Nikolsky/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) Photo: Alexei Nikolsky, Associated Press Photo: Alexei Nikolsky, Associated Press Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Chechnya arresting, killing gay men, newspaper says 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

MOSCOW —First, two television reporters vanished. Then a waiter went missing. Over the past week, men ranging in age from 16 to 50 have disappeared from the streets of Chechnya.

On Saturday, a leading Russian opposition newspaper confirmed a story circulating among human rights activists: The Chechen authorities were arresting and killing gay men.

While abuses by security services in the region, where Russia fought a two-decade war against Islamic insurgents, have long been a stain on President Vladimir Putin’s human rights record, gay people had not previously been targeted on a wide scale.

The men were detained “in connection with their nontraditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such,” the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, reported, citing Russian federal law enforcement officials, who blamed local authorities.

By Saturday, the paper reported — and an analyst of the region with her own sources confirmed — that more than 100 gay men had been detained. The newspaper had the names of three homicide victims and suspected many others had died in extrajudicial killings.

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A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.”

“You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” Alvi Karimov told the news agency. “If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return.”

The sweep, like so much else in Russian politics today, was entangled in the country’s troubled politics of street activism. It began, Novaya Gazeta reported, after a Moscow gay rights group, GayRussia.ru, applied for permits to stage gay pride parades in four cities in Russia’s predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region, of which Chechnya is a part.

The group had been applying for permits for gay parades in provincial cities around Russia, and collecting the inevitable denials, to build a case about gay rights and freedom of assembly with the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France. Nikolai Alekseev, a gay rights activist coordinating the effort, told Novaya Gazeta he had chosen this tactic rather than staging risky, unsanctioned gay parades.

In the restive Muslim regions, Putin has empowered local leaders to press agendas of traditional Muslim values, to co-opt an Islamist underground. The gay pride parade applications became a galvanizing issue.

“In Chechnya, the command was given for a ‘prophylactic sweep’ and it went as far as real murders,” Novaya Gazeta reported.

According to the report, the authorities set to finding and arresting closeted gay men, partly by posing as men looking for dates on social networking sites.

Andrew E. Kramer is a New York Times writer.