Moscow - Two men from Chechnya have told
Reuters they were detained by police and subjected to torture
and beatings because they were gay, which is considered a crime
by some in their deeply conservative region of Russia.
The two have since fled mainly Muslim Chechnya, but they
still fear being hunted down and persecuted. They spoke to
Reuters on condition that their real names were not used, and
their voices and faces disguised.
One of the men, who gave his name as Anzor, said he had been
detained by police as he was driving in the company of other men
from a Chechen village to the Caucasus region's capital Grozny
in February.
"They found some medicine on one of the guys," he told
Reuters Television. Seeing his rings and bracelets, the
policemen asked if he was "a faggot" and beat him severely, the
man said in an interview.
"Then they ... forced me to tie a cable to my little toe and
to my little finger. I was forced to do it myself, to attach the
wires. And then they started using electric shocks," he said.
The accounts that the two men gave could not be
independently verified by Reuters. They fit in, however, with a
pattern of persecution described by other sources.
Chechnya's Moscow-backed president Ramzan Kadyrov denies
human rights are routinely flouted in the region. His spokesman
has said there could be no attacks on gay men because there were
no such people in Chechnya.
The Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported in April that
authorities in Chechnya had rounded up over 100 gay men or men
believed to be gay and tortured them. At least three of the men
had been killed, the newspaper reported.
Kremlin critics regarded the report as further evidence that
Moscow allows authorities in Chechnya to run the region - which
has been consumed by two wars since the 1991 disintegration of
the Soviet Union - as a feudal fiefdom in exchange for keeping
separatist and radical Islamist sentiment suppressed.
The second Chechen man, who gave his name as Ramzan, said he
had been detained by police in April and told to give the names,
addresses and work places of his gay contacts. He was beaten
when he declined to obey, he said.
He was saved from more serious torture by saying that one of
his uncles was a law enforcement officer, he said. But that put
his life in danger after police handed him over to relatives who
handcuffed him to a radiator in a village house.
"There was only one thing left to do: to get rid of me.
Because it was such a shame for a military family, for a rather
big family. We (in Chechnya) have only one way to resolve this."
He said he managed to escape with the help of his sister.
Nikita Safronov, a Moscow-based LGBT activist, said almost
100 people from Chechnya had already got in touch via an
LGBT-network hotline, and that more than 40 of them had been
"evacuated". Some had already left Russia, he added.