Male homosexuality was always perceived very badly in Chechnya. Even gay men themselves considered themselves sick, damned, inferior. Very many of these men have families and children, and are trying to cope with the situation somehow. They understand that, deep down, their status is not acceptable in their society. If they were found out, families would choose to close their eyes to this fact—having a male relative who was known to be gay would be too great a shame for the family, or even the whole clan, which can run to hundreds of people. Chechen families are very sensitive to their image and how their extended clans are perceived.
Honor killings against women—that is, women who, in the opinion of their relatives, somehow disgraced the family or their clan—are, sadly, rather common. Before this current campaign, we did not have a record of such honor killings targeting men in Chechnya. If a man was found out to be gay, he was not killed, but very often Chechen security forces would use it as an excuse for blackmail. The taboo was a pretext for extortion. But there were never killings, let alone on a mass scale. This became possible only after the signal passed from above, from the Chechen authorities. [...]
We know of six cases in which families were told by the authorities to kill male relatives who were said to be gay. Of those, at least three, maybe four, such killings actually took place. And this is a big problem, because in this way the authorities make people complicit in their crimes. From the very beginning, when we realized this was a campaign against gays, we knew it would be very difficult, that no relatives would want to confirm anything to us. For many Chechen families, the accusation of homosexuality is much more terrible than the charge of supporting terrorism. That accusation—sympathy for terrorists, involvement in extremism, having ties to Wahhabi cells or even isis—is a familiar one. It is, in a way, routine. It is considered a kind of norm. But the charge of homosexuality is very serious. No relatives will want to confirm this, because, first, it is a shame for the family and, second, in many cases the authorities force them to kill their relatives who are suspected of being gay. And family members who have committed an honor killing will not want to talk about it. They don’t want to testify against themselves or implicate their family further. [...]
In the beginning, the Kremlin simply did not believe that such a thing could happen. They asked for confirmation. We at Novaya Gazeta were asked to provide information through the Russian human-rights ombudsman. We were guaranteed that the confidentiality of victims would be preserved, that their names would not end up anywhere. Officials in the Kremlin wanted to understand how serious the situation is, and whether or not we, in fact, have data on the dead and the number of detainees. When they demanded this information from us, I began to understand that, in general, the Kremlin does not quite understand what is happening in Chechnya and, again, in principle, they do not believe the facts of the anti-gay campaign. The first statements of officials in Moscow showed this: they said it was nonsense, it cannot be, it’s unbelievable.
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