UPDATE APRIL 15TH: The United Nations did take action with a statement on Thursday April 13th. In a New York Times Report from London by Sewell Chan it was announced the UN has released a statement condemning the Human Rights Violations in Chechnya.
United Nations experts demanded on Thursday that Chechnya halt the abduction, detention, beating and killing of gay and bisexual men, after weeks of reports about violent repression there.
“These are acts of persecution and violence on an unprecedented scale in the region and constitute serious violations of the obligations of the Russian Federation under international human rights law,” the experts, a panel of five that advises the United Nations Human Rights Council, said in a statement.
The experts noted that much of the abuse was reported to have taken place at an unofficial detention center near Argun, a town about 10 miles east of Grozny, the Chechen capital.
“The arrested men are subjected to physical and verbal abuse, torture including with electric shocks, beatings, insults and humiliations,” the experts wrote. “They are forced to give contact details of other gay people and threatened with having their sexual orientation disclosed to their family and community — a move which could put them at risk of ‘honor killings.’”
I wrote about this 2 days ago on April 12th asking for Network and Cable News coverage of this URGENT CRISIS in Chechnya where Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov is holding gay men in a “Concentration Camp” torturing and murdering gay men!
At this point the only media coverage that has occurred is by Jake Tapper- The Lead on CNN and Joe Biden was covered by NBC asking President Donald Trump to speak out on this Human Rights Crisis! There has been no response from Trump, Secretary of State Tillerson or United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley. I WILL CONTINUE TO WRITE DAILY until the TV Network and Cable News media makes this a priority news story. Below is the story done on The Lead by Matthew Chance on April 12th: Activists say many gay men have been beaten and some even electrocuted in the Islamic Chechen society.
On nbcnews.com today a story was written by Mary Emily O’Hara. I will include several excerpts with links to the full article which I suggest everyone read for complete details.
On Friday, the former Vice President responded to growing concerns among international governments and human rights groups who have been pressuring the U.S. to take action and address the Chechen crisis with Russia.
"When faced with such crimes of hate and inhumanity, it is the responsibility of every person of conscience to speak out — to oppose this campaign of violence before it continues further," Biden said in a statement released Friday afternoon.
The reports of a violent, state-sponsored campaign targeting local LGBTQ men in Chechnya first arose on April 1, when the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta published a story revealing details of a prison-like facility near the Chechen town of Argun.
Novaya Gazeta spoke with Chechen men who reported being arrested and subsequently tortured with beatings and electric shocks, as well as being forced to supply authorities with the names and phone numbers of other LGBTQ people.
A St. Petersburg advocacy group, Russian LGBT Network, set up an emergency hotline to take calls from Chechnya — and now says it has received about 50 calls from people who were targeted or are trying to escape the region. As many as 100 men were believed to have been arrested for suspected homosexuality. Russian LGBT Network told NBC News it believes around 20 men have been killed by authorities as part of the roundups.
"People are very intimidated and not eager to talk. They are hesitant to even talk to us," Natalia Poplevskaia, the network's International Advocacy Officer and Monitoring Program Coordinator, told NBC News on Tuesday. "The people who have been targeted by the campaign need some time to get back to normal life."
The Russian LGBT Network said it is helping to evacuate Chechens who have been tortured or are currently in danger.
But on Friday morning, the group's website briefly stopped functioning. Communications manager Svetlana Zakharova told NBC News that an IT investigation revealed the Russian LGBT Network website had been the target of a DDoS attack — a tactic used by hackers to crash a website by overwhelming it with traffic.
On Thursday, Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper that first reported the Chechen atrocities, was also hit with a DDoS attack. The paper also published an open letter stating that it had been threatened by Chechen leaders, who referred to reporters as "the enemies of our faith and our homeland" and promised that "retribution will overtake the true instigators ... without a statute of limitations."
In response to a growing international outcry about the reported LGBTQ torture campaign, Chechen leaders mocked concerns by claiming there are no gay people in the region and even encouraging citizens to "hunt down" anyone they believe to be LGBTQ.
Russian authorities have largely taken a hands-off approach, though Chechnya is technically under Kremlin rule.
Biden called for further action on Friday. His calls joined previous statements by the United Nations Human Rights Council, the U.S. Department of State and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, among others.
"Unfortunately, the human rights abuses perpetrated by Chechen authorities and the culture of impunity that surrounds them means that these hate crimes are unlikely to ever be properly investigated or that the perpetrators will see justice," Biden said on Friday. "But that does not mean that we should fail to defend basic human rights, fundamental freedoms, and universal values."
I’m also including my article I wrote on April 12th below.
I am not a professional journalist, just a blogger who is truly concerned about LGBTQ Rights not only in the United States but around the world.
“I know there are many countries that not only outlaw being LGBTQ, but also allow the murder and torture of our community by civilians and it goes unpunished.”
The rounding up of LGBTQ people in Chechnya in the last few weeks has only made an impact in print publications and I’ve yet to see major media coverage of this situation by any major network.
In the past few weeks over 100 gay men have been rounded up and thrown into Gay Concentration Camps. It is apparent that in Chechnya their belief is that if someone is gay, they have a target pinned to their back. Chechnyans don’t believe that LGBTQ people exist in their province.
In an article in The New York Times on April 1st, there was one of the few articles that has been written on this crisis. Here is an excerpt from the article that explains how LGBTQ people are not only seen, but treated and disposed of, in Chechnya: ” The men were detained “in connection with their nontraditional sexual orientation, or suspicion of such,” the newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, reported, citing Russian federal law enforcement officials, who blamed the local authorities.
By Saturday, the paper reported, and an analyst of the region with her own sources confirmed, that more than 100 gay men had been detained. The newspaper had the names of three murder victims, and suspected many others had died in extrajudicial killings.
A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.”
“You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” the spokesman, Alvi Karimov, told the news agency.
“If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Mr. Karimov said.
If we the people of America do not call out our own main stream media networks and demand that this issue be covered, we are complicit. This should be covered not only in print media but also on network and cable news stations! We too should be held accountable if we do not fight for this part of our LGBTQ Community in Chechnya!
A number of leading human rights organizations have spoken out against the allegations. On Tuesday, GLAAD President Sarah Kate Ellis called on U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to condemn the alleged attacks and press for an investigation.
Both GLAAD and Human Rights Campaign HRC have tweeted to U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to take action on this horrific tragedy being allowed to take place in Chechnya.
Amnesty International UK has started a petition that we must ask main stream media of all forms-Cable news, Network news, Newspapers and all forms of Web news sites to promote and share this petition.
Hundreds of men suspected of being gay are being abducted, tortured and even killed in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya.
The Chechen government won’t admit that gay men even exist in Chechnya, let alone that they ordered what the police call 'preventive mopping up' of people they deem undesirable. We urgently need your help to call out the Chechen government on the persecution of people who are, as they put it, of 'non-traditional orientation', and urge immediate action to ensure their safety. Click here to go to the link for the Amnesty International Petition.
WE MUST TAKE ACTION NOW! SIGN AND SHARE THIS PETITION TO ALL FORMS OF SOCIAL MEDIA!