From SPIEGEL ONLINE today [my translation]:
More than a hundred arrests and at least three dead: according to a report by the investigative journalist Elena Milashina of the Russian Novaya Gazeta, the Chechen authorities are currently severely cracking down on homosexuals and transpeople. ‘The names of three dead are known to us; our sources assume that there are many more victims,’ it says in the article.
Milashina cites information from LGBT activists, but also from representatives of various authorities, the ministry of the interior, the Chechen department of public prosecution, and local secret service circles. A notable Muslim cleric as well as two well-known TV moderators are said to be among those arrested.
Confirmation of the deaths and arrests is yet to come. The Chechen ministry of the interior said that the newspaper report must be an April Fools joke. A speaker for the authoritarian president Ramzan Kadyrov promptly denied the reports: ‘It’s not necessary to arrest or suppress someone who simply does not exist in our republic,’ Alvi Karimov declared. He added that even if there were homosexuals in Chechnya, the security forces would have no problem with them, ‘because their own relatives would send them to a place from which they would never return.’
Milashina emphasizes that none of those arrested has given any outward indication of homosexuality: ‘in the Caucasus that would amount to a death sentence.’ Indeed, the article quotes Cheda Saratova, a member of the Chechen Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, as having recently said that homosexuality is ‘the evil against which every Chechen will fight.’
In response, the Board of the Russian LGBT Network has issued a statement that concludes as follows:
Be aware, that the situation with the human rights in the North Caucasus is truly difficult. Now people’s lives are endangered and the only way to help is the evacuation. The Russian LGBT Network has the necessary resources to evacuate people, there is a team that already makes every effort to safe lives. That is why we ask everyone to share with us the information about people in need and any offers of assistance.
Of course no official help is to be expected. Dmitriy Peskov, Putin’s speaker, said that the reports would be reviewed. However, he noted smugly that he was ‘no great specialist in the matter of non-traditional orientation’ and said that the topic is not on the Kremlin’s agenda.
UPDATE
The SPON article includes a link to the original Novaya Gazeta article. Having forgotten virtually all of the Russian that I learned 50 years ago, I’ve run Milashina’s article through Google Translate; some of it comes through pretty clearly, and I’ve extracted some background information.
Milashina says that her sources in the secret services categorically linked the wave of detentions, which they called a ‘preventive sweep,’ to the following events.
At the beginning of March Russian LGBT activists, participants in the GayRussia.ru project, applied for a series of gay pride parades in four cities of the North Caucasus Federal District, Nalchik, Cherkessk, Stavropol, and Maikop. The Nalchik administration predictably turned down the application. (I assume that the other three applications were turned down as well, but the article doesn’t appear actually to say so.) Media coverage of the applications led to massive protests throughout the Caucasus and calls in social media for the murder of people with unconventional sexual orientations.
The Moscow LGBT activist Nikolay Alekseev told Novaya Gazeta that by applying for parades in various regions of Russia he is fighting for his constitutional rights, for freedom of assembly, and for repealing the law on the prohibition of gay propaganda. When these applications are turned down, he goes to court, and when he loses, he goes to the European Court of Human Rights. Unfortunately, he seems to have trouble seeing the trees for the forest, and the trees are suffering: when asked whether he knew that his announcement of his applications had led to the persecution of local LGBT activists, he said that the Novaya Gazeta reporter was speculating with unverified information, and that he himself knew nothing about such persecutions.