The World Is Still Silent on Chechnya's LGBT Crackdown

Prison camps and concentration camps; words that rightly make us shiver. The images such places invoke: the mass torture, the sickening violence, the concerted attack on those simply for some part of their identity send shivers down my spine as I type.

It wasn't long ago that my ancestors were being rounded up into concentration camps in Eastern Europe. I just need to look back two generations to hear the stories of fear, of violence and of persecution first-hand. I'll never forget sitting down with my grandpa as a kid to produce a family tree at my grandma's insistence, he reeled off name after name of family members – many children among them – who were murdered by the Nazi regime. Some he knew the date and place of death for. For many others he didn't.

My grandparents and their parents were the lucky ones, if you can call it that. They are the Jews who survived the Shoah – the mass-executions of Jewish communities during the worst days of the Second World War. It's easy to forget that this was just 70 years ago.

It would be comforting to think that orchestrated state violence and prejudice is very much a thing of the past, that lessons might have been learned from those dark days in Russia and in Europe. You would hope that that when it rears its head that as an international community we'd be ready to respond.

And yet in Chechnya, hatred is bubbling once again, against a backdrop of near silence. Reports suggest LGBT people are once again coming under state-sanctioned attack. In the Chechnyan Republic, an area in the east of the Russian Federation accountable to Putin's Kremlin, gay men and women are dying.

It was in April this year that reports first surfaced of over 100 queer people being rounded up, tortured and beaten. Three are said to have been killed. Since then others have come forward, a list of 27 others murdered has been published (many thought to be gay). Just days ago the attacks are said to have once again started.

A few weeks ago a VICE News journalist gained access to one of the alleged makeshift detention and torture centres, the team shown around by Ayub Kataev – the town of Argun in Chechnya's head of the ministry of internal affairs.

"Imagine if there are gays – would we, the Chechens, communicate with them at all?" he said to camera.

"My officers would not even want to touch such people – if they exist – let alone beating or torturing them."

If the chief of police offers little comfort for those of us alarmed about the prospect of more violence, surely Kheda Saratova, Chechnya's Human Rights Commissioner and government advisor, would be more sympathetic?

"I have never seen a single gay and none have ever brought me a statement, or even a verbal complaint. How can I confirm they exist?" she told VICE's reporter.

"Today if there was a member of the LGBT community, this person, knowing our traditions, could have simply gone to a train station, purchased a ticket and left without announcing it."

Another spokesperson told a Russian newspaper a few months back that allegations were nothing more than an April Fool's gag. Clearly LGBT Chechens are being erased from public consciousness. The half-arsed, homophobic denials being proffered by officials should offer little solace when first-hand accounts of gay men and women are read. And yet from some corners of the international community there has been deathly silence.

Watch: GAYCATION's Ian Daniel Discusses Chechnya's LGBT Crisis

While Theresa May sent a message to London Pride, she and world leaders sat around a table posing for pictures with Putin at the G20. There are no reports of an intervention about Chechnya – hardly a display that these murders are being treated as an urgent concern. Merkel has in the past put pressure on Putin to investigate the atrocities. The leader of the free world, Putin's pal Donald Trump, has failed to do so.

LGBT people are being abused tortured, even murdered and around Europe it seems we're expected to carry on as normal. If history teaches us anything, the experiences of my ancestors included, then whatever the scale of the violence, we must do anything but watch silently on.

@MikeSegalov