Chechnya opens world's first concentration camp for homosexuals

In June 2017 Chechen police had rounded up more than 100 men suspected of being gay and killed three. It's true.

Tanya Lokshina, from Human Rights Watch in Moscow, said:

'For several weeks now, a brutal campaign against LGBT people has been sweeping through Chechnya. It is difficult to overstate just how vulnerable LGBT people are in Chechnya, where homophobia is intense and rampant. LGBT people are in danger not only of persecution by the authorities but also of falling victim to "honour killings" by their own relatives for tarnishing family honour.'

Chechen society is strictly conservative, meaning that unlike other cases where relatives or rights activists may put pressure on authorities when a homosexual relative disappears, those suspected are likely to be disowned by their own families

According to the New York Times, gay men on the region have been deleting their social media profiles after it was reported authorities tried to lure gay men into dates and arrested them.

Gay men have never had an easy life in Chechnya. But the targeted, collective punishment of gays that began last month under its pro-Kremlin leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, is a new turn in the region’s long history of rights abuses.

Before the crackdown, gay men in Chechnya could at least lead social lives, if heavily closeted ones. They met largely in private chat rooms on social networking sites with names like the Village or What the Mountains Are Silent About.

Homosexuality is taboo in Chechnya and the mostly Muslim surrounding areas of the Caucasus region in southern Russia.

“Gays in Chechnya and the North Caucasus are in lethal danger,” Igor Kochetkov, director of the Russian LGBT Network, said in a telephone interview. “People whose partners are detained have every reason to believe they will be arrested. It is very hard not to name the names under torture.”

An unknown number of the men, whom authorities detained on suspicion of being gay or bisexual, have reportedly died after being held in what human rights groups and eyewitnesses have called concentration camps.

The detentions began in February 2017 after a Chechen man who had allegedly committed a drug-related offense was stopped by police and arresting officers discovered contact information for other gay men on his phone.

A second wave of detentions began after the LGBT rights organization Gayrussia applied for permits to hold gay pride parades in four cities within the Kabardino-Balkar Republic in Russia's predominantly Muslim North Caucasus region, although not within Chechnya itself. The application in this district was denied by the Kabardino-Balkar authorities. An anti-gay demonstration followed, along with posts on social media calling for gay people to be murdered by various methods

Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov denied not only the occurrence of any persecution but also the existence of gay men in Chechnya.