Authorities in Chechnya request that parents kill their gay sons in Argun detention camps

Authorities in Chechnya are summoning “parents to prison camps to kill their gay sons” in Argun where gay men have reportedly been imprisoned, tortured and murdered following an order to “cleanse the nation” of LGBT people.

The Novaya Gazeta broke the story in April that over a hundred gay men were detained and several of them murdered by Chechen authorities in what has been referred to as a state-sanctioned ‘gay purge’.

Now the Novaya Gazeta is reporting that Chechen authorities brought families to the camps in Argun to kill over 30 gay men who had been detained there.

A man who escaped from Chechnya recounted the extreme persecution of LGBT people to France 24: “We’ve always been persecuted but never like this. Now they arrest everyone.”

“They kill people. They do what they want. They know that nobody will come after them because the order has come from above to ‘cleanse the nation’ of people like us.”

Humiliation

The escapee reveals that Chechen authorities in the camps are not only physically abusing their detainees, but are also employing psychological humiliation tactics to break their spirit.

“They torture people using electricity and deprive them of food. At night they would throw their leftovers in the cells instead of throwing it in the bin. It wasn’t to feed the prisoners, it was to see them humiliated by having to eat the leftovers,” an anonymous source said.

“They line them up and force them to give themselves a woman’s name. Some of them preferred to be killed rather than suffer all that.”

“Mamy resisted, but they beat them horribly. They gave them electric shocks. They always got what they wanted, because we can’t be heroes when faced with so much pain and humiliated.”

Honour Killings In Chechnya

Authorities in Chechnya are giving families a shocking ultimatum: the parents must kill their gay son, or those running the camps will do it.

“They tell the parents to kill their child. They say: Either you do it or we will. They call it ‘cleaning your honour with blood’.”

“They tortured a man for two weeks. They summoned his parents and his brothers who all came. They said to them ‘your son is a homosexual, sort it out or we’ll do it ourselves’.

“They replied: ‘It’s our family; we’ll do it’.

“The family took him and killed him in the forest. They buried him there. They didn’t even give him a funeral.”

The man revealed that if he did return home, he would suffer the same horrible fate at the hands of his own family.

“If I go home, my own family will kill me,” he said.

Last month the Irish LGBT community and their allies held a protest outside the Russian Embassy to raise awareness of the anti-gay persecution which continues to unfold in Chechnya.

GCN Editor Brian Finnegan interviewed a member of the Russian LGBT Network about their evacuation of gay men from Chechnya and suggested that pressure be applied to the Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Charlie Flanagan, by writing to him.