Torture, persecution and threats

In the post-Soviet space, 2017 will be remembered by an unprecedented wave of violence and institutional persecution of representatives of the LGBT community. Large -scale campaigns for "cleaning" and "prevention" forcing hundreds of gays to flee to other countries.

Nico is gay from Baku. He asked his name to change his name - he is afraid for his life. Now he is 27 years old, he suffers from epilepsy. In the fall of 2017, the authorities of Azerbaijan launched a large-scale campaign against representatives of the LGBT community, the victim of which was Nico. He told how four police officers detained him, beat him, tortured him, and then raped him.

“They raped me anally and orally. The police made me swallow their sperm.” Then he was raped by a police club. “He put the club in my anus, and I had an epileptic seizure. I don’t remember what happened later. When I woke up, I could not even walk.”

Nico spent the next 10 days in conclusion, where they continued to torture him. Once at the end of September, he tried to shun the police who knew about his sexual orientation for two months. Nico found himself four times in the hands of the police, who demanded bribes from him and forced him to oral sex under the threat of arrest for disobedience to the police. Nico says that he has not yet recovered from the shock experienced. In an interview with Radio, Freedom he spoke about his desire in any way to leave Azerbaijan and start a new life abroad.

International human rights organizations believe that the persecution of the LGBT community in Azerbaijan is similar to what happened in the early 2017 in Chechnya. In both regions, suspects of homosexuals were delayed, tortured and knocked out by the names of other gays, which in some cases became new objects of persecution.

According to Amnesty International, in the second half of September, at least 150 homosexuals were detained in Azerbaijan, 60 of which were arrested, 50 of them were kept in prison for at least 20 days.

In mid-September, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Azerbaijan denied the operation, but then stated that the goal of mass detention of homosexuals was the struggle with sex workers. Then officials changed their testimony: according to them, with the help of detentions, the police tried to identify people with a positive HIV status. But, according to the Ministry of Health, none of the detainees were taken to medical institutions for HIV analysis.

Nico told Radio Liberty that he was shocked when he heard about the pursuit of LGBT in Chechnya last spring: “It was terrible. I was suddenly born in my heart. But I did not think that the same thing would be in Azerbaijan. I could not imagine that they would act so cruelly.”

Amnesty International argues that the sex minorities in the countries of the post-Soviet space began to face aggression, fed for discrimination, homophobia and Russian rhetoric against the propaganda of "non-traditional sexual relations."

In their report for 2017, the AI also argues that defenders of the rights of the LGBT community in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are forced to work in an atmosphere of "increased discrimination" due to the influence of Russian media.

Repression for reposts

Human rights activists say that the growth of repression and violence against LGBT in the former Soviet republics is associated with the adoption of a law on criminal liability for the distribution of “distorted ideas about the social equivalent of traditional and non -traditional sexual relations” in 2013.

Evdokia Romanova

In October, in the Samara region, under this law, LGBT activist Evdokia Romanov was fined, despite the fact that in June the European Court of Human Rights ruled that this law violates the European Convention on Human Rights. Romanova published on social networks references to the Youth Coalition sites for LGBT rights and materials on LGBT movements, including the article on the BuzzFeed portal about the protest of LGBT activists in St. Petersburg.

Denis Krivosheev, Deputy Director of Amnesty International for Europe and Central Asia, calls Romanova a “sad illustration of a desperate situation in which LGBT activists in Russia are located. “Even the elementary right to share an article from the Internet with friends is now limited by frankly discriminatory and homophobic law,” Krivosheev said.

In an interview with Radio Liberty, he noted that after the adoption of this law in 2013, a wave of attacks on homosexuals swept in Russia, and by 2017 it covered the former Soviet republics in the form of official persecution, discrimination and hooligan attacks.

Squads of cleaners

In Uzbekistan, homosexuality is considered a criminal offense. Voluntary “Avengers” get acquainted with gays on the Internet to lure them to meet. Sometimes videos of bullying are on the Internet.

Erbulat, whose friend was beaten at a similar meeting, told Radio Liberty what this happens in Uzbekistan often, but the victims are afraid to contact the police.

“They also shot me on the video to humiliate me. I could barely get rid of them. If you contact the police, then they themselves are homophobes, they will mock you,” said Erbulat.

Gay register and violent examinations

The Soviet law on criminal liability for homosexuality was canceled in Tajikistan in 1998, but the government continues to discriminate against gays and violate their rights. In addition, organizations engaged in the protection of the rights of homosexuals were forced to close .

In October, the Prosecutor General of Tajikistan announced the creation of a list of gays and lesbians “to ensure their safety and prevent venereal diseases”.

Firuz, the 30-year-old gay from Dushanbe, told Radio Liberty that the LGBT community fears that the Gay Register will be used for the same persecution as in Chechnya and Azerbaijan.

“The government believes that it is above the law in this matter. They are not subordinate to anyone,” says Firuz, which was included in the register and subjected to forcibly medical examination after the police detained him during the raid in a nightclub in Dushanbe.

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Tajik gays are forced to live a double life - a report of the present

A nightmare in Baku

Nico first fell into the hands of the Baku police on the night of September 14, when he returned home from a supermarket, where he worked as a sales specialist. On the street, he met a familiar transvestite working in the sex industry. They had not seen each other for a long time and stopped talking, at that moment the police arrived at them. “The police knew my friend because he works on the street,” Niko said. “Then we found out that they were looking for us because one of our familiar gay gave them our names.”

The police put a friend Nico in the car. “I did not understand what happened, and went on,” Nico continues. “A few minutes later I felt a blow to the back of my head.”

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"Why is they doing this with us?" LGBT community of Azerbaijan talks about arrests and torture in prison

Nico and his acquaintance were taken to police department No. 19 in the Yasamalsky district of Baku, where they were beaten and tortured, according to the victim, until 4 in the morning.

“At first they beat with batons, hands and legs,” Nico says with a visible effort. “Then four police officers who have ended the shift, took me to the office of the deputy chief.” There he was raped several times and beaten until he lost consciousness.

In the morning, Nico and his acquaintance was taken to the court, who sentenced them to 10-day administrative arrest for “disobedience to the requirements of the police”. On the same charges during the September raids carried out by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Azerbaijan, 56 people were sentenced to various terms of up to 30 days. Krivosheev and other human rights activists claim that the authorities often are charging such accusations after illegal arrests.

“We were sent to the Binagadian investigative insulator,” Nico says. “But two days later we were transferred to the Office for the Combat Crime”, which is engaged in cases of terrorism, abductions of people, and extinction. Office employees beat and humiliated them, as well as “tortured another two days by electric shockers”. “I saw how they torture other gays,” says Nico. “I don’t know how many people were detained and tortured.”

After Nico was forced to name the names of other gays and transvestites, he was returned to a pre -trial detention center, where they shaved the head. He was released on September 25 after 10 days in prison.

The position of the authorities

Homosexual relations are not criminally punishable in Azerbaijan, but are considered unacceptable among the Muslim majority. The head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Ramil Usubov, in the official appeal to the Commission of the Council of Europe on Human Rights, called the persecution of LGBT justified. In a letter of October 13, he writes that during a police operation in Baku, held from September 15 to 30, 83 people were detained in accordance with the law for “violation of public order”, “insulting public morality” and “deliberate non -disobedience” by the requirements of the police.

In addition, Usubov assured the head of the European Commission that Brussels had no reason to talk about “oppression of the rights of representatives of sexual minorities” because the rights of all groups of people in Azerbaijan are “ensured without any restrictions. The situation with representatives of sexual minorities in our republic does not differ from the situation in most European states.”

Echo of Chechnya

Representatives of the UN and leaders of Western countries called on President Vladimir Putin to investigate the mass persecution of homosexuals in Chechnya, about which the New Gazeta told at the beginning of the year. Ramzan Kadyrov denies the detention, torture and murder of gays that journalists wrote about. He also categorically denies the existence of gays in the republic.

The St. Petersburg public movement “Russian LGBT network” said that it evacuated dozens of Chechens who were persecuted from the republic to other regions of Russia. Most of the gay gays say that in Chechnya they were threatened with detention and torture, as well as the so -called “murders of honor”, as the authorities gave them to relatives, urging “restore the honor of the family”. The Russian LGBT network said that homosexuals from Chechnya are not safe even outside the republic: relatives and police threaten them with a violent return home.

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Gay from Omsk openly named the name and told how he was tortured in a secret prison in Chechnya

Boris Ditrich, Director for External Relations of the LGBT Program Protection of LGBT Rights, claims that the Chechen authorities held raids in the houses of the escaped gays, threatening their relatives with arrest and torture if they return. “They left the house, but the Chechen authorities seemed to know where to look for them,” says Ditrich.

The Rainbow Railroad charitable organization from Toronto collaborates with the Canadian government and the Russian LGBT network to give the opportunity to move to a safe place pursued in Chechnya. In the spring, the head of the organization Kimali Powell visited Russia to meet those of them whom the Russian LGBT network posted.

In an interview with Radio, Freedom Powell noted that, as of the beginning of November, due to this cooperation, shelter in Western countries - mainly in Canada - found 45 people. Powell also confirmed that Rainbow Railroad is considering the possibility of helping the victims of persecution in Azerbaijan, but the authorities there forbid the work of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and LGBT protection organizations, so thereby have to operate through intermediaries in third countries.

In Chechnya, according to human rights activists, more than 100 people were detained and subjected to torture, at least three were killed. The leadership of the Republic of detention rejects, but human rights activists claim that they have evidence of a wave of violence in Chechnya.

Persecution and departure

In mid -November, Nico said that his life in the Azerbaijani capital became unbearable and he wants to leave, but does not know a single local organization that could help him. A few weeks after the arrest, he was fired from work and kicked out of the apartment. The family condemns his sexual orientation and, according to the young man, refuses to help. The sympathetic found Nichrous housing, but he understood that they could not help him forever. The police recognized him on the streets, and the persecution did not stop.

Nico had no documents and money to get a residence permit in Russia, where the Russian LGBT network could help him. He said that the only option for him is to leave for Turkey, where a visa is not needed. He moved to Istanbul at the end of November and settled in housing, which he was found in the Istanbul human rights group, which helps the victims of persecution in Azerbaijan.

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"I was divided naked and tortured." Representatives of LGBT - about their life in Azerbaijan