Photo by Илья Астахов. From https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LGBT_in_Chechnya.jpg.
Judas Stooge. October 2018.
A Russian pop star that disappeared. A teenager being thrown out of a building. A captured drug dealer. Sporadic events of violence with one common factor. The men were all out as homosexual, or heavily rumored to be so.
As these events kept occurring, with gay men disappearing or killed, the LGBT+ community began urgently pleading for an investigation to occur in Chechnya — there was no way all of this was a coincidence, they claimed.
Amnesty Official had made up their mind — to begin investigating. By mid-2017, they had come to a grim conclusion: Chechnya was in the midst of conducting brutal anti-gay purges. Primarily focussing on homosexual and bisexual men, the number of those who had disappeared was fast nearing a hundred.
The stories being told of those who had escaped from the horrors of sodomy, and continuous abuse and starvation, caused a ripple effect, of different communities and leaders, most notably Angela Merkel, demanding an answer to what was occurring, till Vladimir Putin caved in, and agreed to begin an investigation. However, for now these are empty promises, as a victim; Maxim Lapunov filed an official report – and the investigation for it is yet to begin.
Still on-going, the delayed response has lead multitudes of LGBT+ people and organisations into challenging Russia’s failure to comply with human rights. With communism and Islam both well known for their notable lack of homosexuality, many pinned that as the inspiration behind the anti-gay purges. A victim who believes that nationalism is the inspiration behind the genocide, recounts “The [sic] openly told us: ‘You were brought here because you are faggots. You bring shame on our people. You shouldn’t exist. We will catch all of you. We will fight homosexuality in the Chechen Republic.'”
A boy reporting on many things in the form of glorified tumblr posts.
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