NY'er: How a Russian Journalist Exposed the Anti-Gay Crackdown in Chechnya

[DonViejo]

By The New Yorker 05:00 A.M.

This spring, news of a campaign of repression against gay men in Chechnya, a republic in Russia’s North Caucasus, began to appear in the United States and Europe. Dozens of men suspected of being gay were reportedly being held in secret prisons; many had been tortured, and several had died. Fifty members of Congress signed a letter calling on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to raise the issue of violence against gay men with Russian officials. The State Department released a statement saying that it was “increasingly concerned” about the situation and that it “categorically” condemned the “persecution of individuals based on their sexual orientation,” but to date neither Tillerson nor Donald Trump has spoken publicly about the issue. Other foreign leaders have not been so circumspect. Last month, in a meeting in Moscow, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to exert his influence to “insure that minorities’ rights are protected.” On May 29th, at a testy joint press conference in Paris, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, challenged Putin on the need to protect Chechnya’s gay community, saying, “I will be constantly vigilant on these issues.”

In the years since the fall of the Soviet Union, Chechnya has fought two wars against Moscow’s rule, which have left tens of thousands dead and the republic in ruins. Islamist-inspired terrorism, and a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that emerged in response, have left the population deeply traumatized. Today, Chechnya has been rebuilt, and the Kremlin enjoys a nominal peace—but not without a cost. In exchange for professing loyalty to Putin and keeping Chechnya nominally part of Russia, its forty-year-old leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, is allowed to rule the republic as his own private fiefdom.

The original reporting on the arrest, torture, and murder of gay men in Chechnya was published in April, in Novaya Gazeta, an independent and muckraking Russian newspaper. Over the years, six of the paper’s journalists have been murdered, including, in 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, whose dispatches from Chechnya in the late nineties and early aughts made for uncomfortable but essential reading. Since Politkovskaya’s death, much of the paper’s coverage of Chechnya has been done by Elena Milashina, a thirty-nine-year-old reporter who has numerous confidential sources inside the republic, and who is no stranger to threats for her work. She is the recipient of numerous prizes, including, in 2013, an International Women of Courage Award, presented by the U.S. State Department. Milashina was the primary reporter at Novaya Gazeta who broke the story of Chechnya’s anti-gay campaign. Shortly after her articles on the subject appeared—sparking coverage in the West and an uproar among readers, activists, and politicians in the United States and Europe—Milashina, fearing for her safety, left Russia temporarily. The New Yorker spoke to her recently about her reporting, the situation for gay men in Chechnya, and the global outcry in response to her work.

NY'er: Given the extraordinary difficulty in reporting on the ground in Chechnya, how do you generally go about collecting and publishing information on what is happening there?

Elena Milashina: People have become terribly afraid to talk, because as soon as you show up—even if they refuse to speak with you—they will have problems. These days, I travel to Chechnya with an absolutely clean phone. I have several contacts memorized in my head, including numbers for some very serious people in the Russian Presidential Administration, so, in case anyone suddenly detains me, I can remember a number or two and try and transmit a message to Moscow, and ultimately to my editors.

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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-a-russian-journalist-exposed-the-anti-gay-crackdown-in-chechnya

[Leghorn21]

1. Unimaginable courage, heart and determination. All respect to Ms. Milashina.

cont from above:

I usually invite the people I need to interview to come to someplace outside of Chechnya. They will not talk in Chechnya; they simply are too afraid. The local authorities can do anything with the people you contact. You cannot protect them. One way around this is that I have a huge network of informants, who can send me information by phone or text, and which I then check with other people from my source list. I’ve found these people trust me for one simple reason: I do not release or publish much of the information that I obtain. When I sense that a piece of information is dangerous for him or her personally, I tell them, “You will be figured out, you are the only source, you heard it in person.” And so I cannot use it. Over time, these people understand that I am concerned not only with information but with security of my sources, and this creates trust.

How did you first hear of the anti-gay campaign?

In mid-March, one of the few local local human-rights activists in Chechnya informed me that a certain person had been detained and killed because he was gay. As is my usual practice, I began to check this information. It turned out this man had been detained, effectively tortured to death, and, indeed, the motive was his sexual orientation. But he was not the only one, I found out. There were others. And they had all been tortured, so that they would give up the names and contacts of other gay men, who were then themselves detained, and the cycle spread from there. It became clear very quickly that this was a purposeful campaign against gays.