NEW DELHI: Homosexual men in Chechnya are being whisked off to and held in "concentration camps", where they are being subjected to torture and beatings, media reports said.
This is the latest in a series of claims made by human rights activists, alleging gross mistreatment of members of the LGBTQ community in the Muslim-dominated region. Last week, a reputed Russian newspaper bolstered their claims in a report that said over 100 homosexual men had been rounded up and imprisoned in Chechnya, with at least three people allegedly killed.
Russian daily
Novaya Gazeta reported that abuses allegedly included men being taken outside and beaten several times a day, having their hands electrocuted and being forced to sit on bottles.
Svetlana Zakharova, a representative of the Russian LGBT Network, painted a dark picture of what goes on in these alleged concentration camps. In a chilling reminder of the Nazi purge of Jews, she said gay people are being summarily rounded up and detained in Chechnya.
"Those who have escaped said they are detained in the same room and people are kept altogether, around 30 or 40. They are tortured with electric currents and heavily beaten, sometimes to death," Svetlana told
Mail Online, adding that her organisation is working to evacuate people from the camps.
According to reports, one of these camps is located in Argun, a former military township.
The reports were vehemently denied by Chechen authorities, who offered a simple explanation to back their statement: No one in Chechnya is homosexual.
"You cannot arrest or repress people who just don't exist in the republic. If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them since their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return," Alvi Karimov, spokesperson for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, told Interfax news agency.
Alexander Artemyev, from
Amnesty International in
Russia, told the Daily Mail: "We can only call on the Russian authorities to investigate the allegations. Homosexuals in
Chechyna are treated very harshly and prosecuted daily and they are afraid to talk about it."
According to sources, President Razman Kadyrov allegedly ordered the clampdown, although officially his regime denied the arrests.
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