One spokesperson from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggested to a Finnish journalist that Kadyrov might organize a tour so that he could see for himself whether gays existed in Chechnya-an offer that sounded like a threat.Ĭhechnya is one of the eighty-five constituent regions of the Russian Federation, and is ostensibly a secular state. Kremlin spokespeople have for the most part dismissed or laughed off questions about the violence. Following media reports of the purges, the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, declared that gay Chechens did not exist.
Some have been released, but others have been handed over to their relatives, who, according to survivors, are expected to kill gay family members. Some media reports have claimed that Chechnya has confined gay men to “concentration camps,” but survivors’ testimony points to the existence of half a dozen detention facilities, where men are held for as long as a couple of weeks. Under torture, the man reportedly gave up the names of others, and the police began arresting them.
He had seven drinks of water in all, which means that his captivity lasted more than a week. Ali counted the days by the number of times he was allowed to perform his ablutions, then to drink the dirty water. Eventually, he was thrown into a cell and left there without food. He knew that his phone would yield no information.Īli lost track of time. Each time Ali was interrogated, the boss demanded that he admit that he was homosexual and give him the names of other gay men. The jailers tortured Ali and then brought him back upstairs to face the boss, then back to the basement for more torture, then back up. The cells held men and women, who screamed as they were beaten with fists and batons. In one chamber, officers dunked prisoners’ heads in a vat of ice water in another, they attached clothespin-like clips wired to a large battery to earlobes or extremities. The men took him down to a basement, where there was a large central room, with cells and small chambers around the perimeter. I kept saying that I don’t know anything, I’ve never even heard that there were gays here in Chechnya.” He said to the police that he knew the man only as a business client. “I knew that if they tortured him he’d break and give everyone up,” Ali told me. That morning, the man had called Ali and suggested that they meet. “He says, ‘You take it up the ass.’ I start denying everything.” The boss asked Ali about another man, whom Ali knew to be gay. “Their boss is sitting there, sprawled out,” he continued. One of them said, ‘I told them everything.’ ”Īli was taken into a room. Ali saw two men he knew standing in front: “Their faces were all swollen from beatings. Soon, the car pulled up to an unmarked building. “They pushed my head down so I wouldn’t see where we were going,” Ali, who is around thirty years old, told me. The men put him in the back seat of one of the vehicles and got in with him. They put him in a car and drove to a nearby street, where two cars were waiting. By the time he was done, two police officers were knocking on the door. Ali took the SIM card out of his cell phone, inserted it into a spare, blank phone, and hid his regular handset.
“Get dressed, we have to take you in,” the man said. In late February or early March, Ali was in his apartment in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, when he got a phone call from a local police officer.