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You could smell this one coming. Last year, horrific reports emerged from the southern Russian republic of Chechnya that authorities were rounding up gays in detainment camps, and subjecting them to torture—the first time this kind of thing has happened in Europe since Nazi Germany. Now the reign of terror is being extended to drug users and small-time dealers, who are facing grisly torture at the hands of Chechen security forces as part of the same ultra-puritanical campaign. Reports describe electric current being applied to suspects’ fingertips to induce them to “confess.” No one has survived such questioning without eventually admitting their crime, the victims were told.
The Report
This report was brought to light by a January 16 account in Britain’s The Independent, which translated journalism from the Russian publication Republic, one of the courageous few free media voices in Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian state. According to Republic’s investigation, at least dozens and possibly hundreds of arbitrary arrests of drug suspects have been carried out in Chechnya over recent months, often resulting torture and “extreme interrogation techniques”—in an almost an exact mirror of what was called the “gay purge.”
The official number of drug arrests in Chechnya last year is given as 507, but the rate has escalated in recent months, in what appears to be a coordinated campaign of repression.
Chechnya’s President Ramzan Kadyrov, a key ally of Putin, won Moscow’s support by putting down the Islamist insurgents and separatists in the Caucasus republic. But Kadyrov’s regime is being given free rein to impose his own brand of Islamist rule in Chechnya as the price of his loyalty to Moscow. Ironically (if predictably), his rhetoric conflates