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Russian LGBT+ Network exposes horrific violence and collusion by Putin regime

The Peter Tatchell Foundation has circulated a report from the Russian LGBT+ Network exposing a horrific campaign of intimidation, abuse and torture against the LGBT+ community by the Putin backed Chechen regime.

It’s an extensive report – a tough read – and you can see it here. It’s 57 pages long and hugely distressing, so we’re not going to reproduce it all here, but we are going to let just a small proportion of the many victims speak for themselves without further comment from us.

AB: “I endured as much as I could, but I broke when they showed me a video of the tortures. They filmed it themselves. They caught a guy, and he allegedly had contacts with terrorists. They brought in a hollow tube and a barbed wire. They put a tube inside of him. In his anus. Then, they put the barbed wire inside this tube. Then they took the tube out. And then they were slowly pulling the barbed wire out. When I saw that video and realised they had already brought the tube and the barbed wire, I broke. They enjoyed the torture. We were force to beat others up and electrocute them. They instructed other inmates to do whatever they wanted with us.”

CD: “They took our documents and phones away from us. We were led out into the hallway and chained to to power unit. We just sat on the cold floor all night long. Everyone passing by kicked us, spat on us, and insulted us. The were utterly angry with me at the fact that I had dated Russians. ‘You shouldn’t be sleeping with representatives of another nation,’ they said. The militants beat me using pipes, aiming below the waist: the hips and the buttocks. And from time to time I was tortured with electric current. They used a casket with wires that had tweezers at the end. They attached those tweezers to my body. They laughed when I cried.”

KL: “We were forced to lie on the floor with our bottoms up, and each person in the cell would hit us with a pipe three times. As the week went by there were already 18 LGBT people being detained and tortured. The youngest was around 17 years old, and the oldest was about 47 years old. We were not allowed to wash. some detainees developed open-cut wounds and the cell smelled like rotten meat.”

EF: “Each day I was transported to the premises for for torture. It was situated underground. I was beaten there even day. It was impossible to sleep there; you could be captured anytime and thrown into another place. There were no windows, nothing. It was always as dark as night. They put plastic bags on my head, and when I was running out of oxygen, they tore the bag away and hit my legs at the same time. We had no water inside.”

Visit the Peter Tatchell Foundation here

Visit Amnesty International here and search ‘Chechnya’

About the author

Rob Harkavy

3 thoughts on “Revealed. Heartbreaking testimonies of LGBT+ abuse and torture victims in Chechnya”

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