A Damning New Report on LGBT Persecution in Chechnya

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

01 January 19

n October, 2017, a young man named Maxim Lapunov spoke at a press conference in Moscow. Flanked by L.G.B.T. and human-rights activists, Lapunov, shaky but collected, told the story of being kidnapped in the street in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and being held by the police for twelve days and tortured. “They started beating me with batons,” he said. “I’m not sure how long it lasted, but it was a long time . . . They hit my legs, hips, buttocks, back. They would hit me until I fell down, let me catch my breath, make me stand up, and start over.”

Lapunov, an ethnic Russian who grew up outside Chechnya but was working in Grozny, is the only person who has come forward as a victim of the anti-gay purges in Chechnya. Many other victims have spoken anonymously, but Lapunov went on the record in the hopes that his abusers would be prosecuted. Russian prosecutors, however, refused to open a case, and a Russian court has refused to consider Lapunov’s complaint. A report released on Friday, by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, confirms that what happened to Lapunov is by no means exceptional: kidnapping, torture, and even extrajudicial killings are the norm in Chechnya, as it is the norm for Russian federal authorities to ignore these practices.

There is a bitter poetry to the entire text of the report. The O.S.C.E. itself comes out of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, a major Cold War–era document that got the Soviet Union to commit to observing human rights—at least on paper—and thereby launching the Soviet dissident human-rights movement. The Moscow Mechanism, as it was called, was a 1991 addition to the agreements, designed to enable the O.S.C.E. to conduct investigations in signatory countries, and to compel these countries to participate in the investigations. Russia, however, refused to coöperate with the latest investigation. The rapporteur and Austrian academic Wolfgang Benedek sought fact-finding assistance from Russian authorities, and was turned down. Benedek had to rely on interviews with victims and activists, including Lapunov, who has fled the country for fear of retribution. “Having interviewed Mr. Lapunov myself I can confirm his credibility,” the report states. “His story also is nearly identical to similar stories from other victims.”

Benedek notes that by signing the Helsinki agreements, in 1975, the U.S.S.R. promised, among other things, that no one would be subjected to arbitrary arrest or arbitrary detention. Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation, which, in turn, is the legal heir to the Soviet Union’s international commitments. In Chechnya, Benedek writes,

Reports of a general practice of humiliation, inhuman treatment and torture in order to obtain confessions are confirmed by victims and witnesses, in particular with regard to certain groups like LGBTI persons, alleged drug users, Islamists and suspected terrorists, including human rights defenders and journalists. The use of electric shocks is a constant pattern which anybody picked up by the police has to expect. Cases of kidnapping and enforced disappearances exist in the context of extra-judicial killings and during the illegal detentions after which people might reappear.

The report focusses on the anti-gay persecutions, which, it suggests, are incited by the Russian federal law against so-called propaganda of homosexuality, but also on trumped-up prosecutions and on extrajudicial killings. Twenty-seven men were killed in Grozny on one night in January, 2017, the report indicates; they were suspected of “terrorist” activity and summarily executed. Two cases of torture are given as examples of a general practice: “Khizir Ezhiev, a senior economics lecturer at the Grozny State Oil Technical University, who reportedly was abducted, tortured and killed, after having participated in a group on social media, which was critical of the [Chechen] Republic’s leader, Mr. [Ramzan] Kadyrov. Another case is the reported abduction and torture of Khusein Betelgeriev, a former senior faculty member at the Chechen State University.”

The federal government in Russia has long willfully ignored the state terror in Chechnya at best; at worst, it has encouraged it. Chechen authorities, for their part, attack victims, witnesses, and their families when someone dares to come forward. Human-rights organizations in Chechnya have been forced to shut down because, the report says, “the harassment in recent years on human rights monitors has been so severe that it has become too risky to continue this work.” Right now, Oyub Titiev, the head of the Grozny office of the remaining human-rights organization, Memorial, is imprisoned and facing trial on what the report calls “obviously fabricated evidence.”

Following a standard format for such reports, Benedek makes recommendations for improvement to both the Russian Federation and its Chechen Republic. But so little hope is there for any improvement inside Russia that three out of five of the rapporteur’s recommendations to O.S.C.E. member states concern people fleeing Chechnya, especially those of them who are L.G.B.T.I. They should be granted refugee status, Benedek suggests, and given special security considerations, including safe housing and even new identities. As desperate as these recommendations sound, they may be as unrealistic as the hope that Russia will improve in its approach to human rights. Following an initial wave of international attention in 2017 to the fate of L.G.B.T. Chechens, when Canada and several European countries welcomed more than a hundred refugees, offers of protection have dried up. Dozens of cureently displaced L.G.B.T. Chechens will continue to struggle to find a safe haven.