A Russian man who alleges that he was kidnapped and tortured in Chechnya’s ‘gay purge’ has appealed to the government in Moscow to properly investigate the actions of Chechen authorities.
Maxim Lapunov is the first person to go public with torture allegations without hiding his identity. At a press conference in Moscow on Monday, he said he was held in a basement for 12 days in March and beaten by Chechen security forces, who demanded to know whether he was gay and for him to give the names of his sexual partners.
Lapunov, an ethnic Russian who had lived in Chechnya for two years, said his interrogators told him they would not beat him as badly as ethnic Chechens, but forced him to watch them beat other detainees.
“I want to ask the government to investigate, because we are all people and all have rights,” said Lapunov, adding that he had worked as an events organiser in Chechnya and did not live an openly gay lifestyle.
Authorities in Chechnya, led by the Kremlin-backed strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, are accused of earlier this year rounding up and torturing dozens of gay men or those suspected of being gay.
The story was first reported by the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and confirmed by the Guardian, which spoke to four victims of the anti-gay campaign, one of whom said he had been subjected to electric shock torture. All asked to hide their identities, for fear of retribution from authorities or their families.
Lapunov has put a name to the allegations. He said he was grabbed from the street by two men in plain clothes. He was taken to what he believes was a police facility, where he slept on the floor in a cell with others.
“I often heard people shrieking or groaning with pain,” he said. He was punched and kicked regularly.
Kadyrov has repeatedly denied reports of a purge, based on his claim that there are no gay people in Chechnya. He told one interviewer that if there were any gay people in the region, they should be removed “to cleanse our blood”.
Igor Kochetkov, an activist with the Russian LGBT network, said that since April, 79 people have been evacuated from Chechnya after calling the organisation’s hotline to help those caught up in the purge. They included 27 men who had been detained and tortured, as well as relatives and partners of detainees who also feared for their safety.
Privately, federal Russian investigators have said they want to get to the bottom of the allegations, but analysts say the case shows the limitations to Moscow’s sway over Kadyrov, who pledges loyalty to Putin but often appears to operate outside Russian law with no consequences.
Kochetkov said he believed at least 15 people who were detained “were released to their relatives and have since disappeared without a trace”, raising widespread fears of “honour killings”.
Over the summer, activists were confident that there appeared to be motivation to investigate the allegations, particularly by Tatyana Moskalkova, the Kremlin’s human rights commissioner. Lapunov, as an ethnic Russian not originally from Chechnya and without family links in the region, was willing to submit an official statement.
Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch said: “Since we appealed to Moskalkova at the end of August, we have not spoken about this case in the press in any way. We wanted to give the state bodies a chance to do their work properly.”
She said the group of activists working on the case felt the time was right to go public because it was clear there were no serious attempts to investigate.
Igor Kalyapin of the Committee to Prevent Torture, which has handled a wide range of rights abuse cases in Chechnya and been targeted for its work, said: “There has not been any kind of serious investigation to check the veracity of what he has written on 26 sheets of paper. There has been absolutely nothing.”
Kochetkov said he believed the actions of Chechen authorities constitute the legal definition of a crime against humanity. “On the European continent, nobody has tried to destroy people based on their sexual orientation since the time of Nazi Germany,” he said.
