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Despite Reports, Kremlin Denies Gay Men Are Being Detained, Tortured, and Murdered in Chechnya

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‘We Do Not Have Any Reliable Information About Any Problems in This Area’

The Chief spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that the Russian government had not been made aware of the ongoing persecution, detention, and murder of LGBTQI persons in Chechnya, in Russia’s Northern Caucus region. 

“We do not have any reliable information about any problems in this area,” Dmitry Peskov told reporters. Homophobia is rife in the Republic and the Chechen authoritarian leader, Ramzan Kadyrov (photo, right, with Putin), is known to be fiercely loyal to Putin. 

The reports, corroborated by three leading human rights groups and a Russian group allege that the detentions continue and that the men held are undergoing torture and abuse.

BBC journalist Victoria Derbyshire told NCRM that the journalist who broke the story, Novaya Gazeta’s Elena Milashina, who is currently in hiding, told her Wednesday: “We know about four secret prisons. Two of them in the capital of Chechnya, Grozny, one of them in Argun – this is the first secret prison we discovered where LGBT people were detained, beaten, tortured and killed.”

“We got this information [a few] weeks ago and began to prove it. It’s pretty hard in Chechnya, especially to rescue LGBT people, because they’re a very closed network. The region is very hard on those people and they have to hide,” Milashina continued.

“The Chechen government denied [the allegations], although they don’t deny that if they found this kind of people in Chechnya they would be killed. They don’t deny this, but they deny the secret camps and they have denied that they detained more than 100 people and killed some of them.”

Earlier this month Novaya Gazeta published accounts of nearly 100 men who were detained in Chechnya, “in connection with their non-traditional sexual orientation.” The Russian independent opposition newspaper also published reports that alleged about a half-dozen people had been killed, while others suffered acts of torture at the hands of government agents in the Chechen capital of Grozny, and the city of Argun, in what were described as special detention facilities.

Milashina has been forced into hiding after one of the region’s largest mosques declared a jihadist fatwah against her as well as the paper itself.

According to the paper’s chief editor Dmitry Muratov, the Chechens’ spiritual leader, Mufti Salah-haji Mezhiev, had called for retribution against the paper and Milashina at a special meeting held in Grozny, on April 3. Speaking to the Russian news site RBC, Salah-haji Mezhiev said, “Allah will punish those who slandered the whole Chechen nation and Chechen Republic’s clerics. There will be retribution!”

In an open letter published after the Cleric’s public statement on Thursday, Muratov wrote that his journalists would continue investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya.

“We did not insult, neither had we the slightest intention to insult, the Chechen people,” Muratov said, calling for dialogue. “We urge the Russian authorities to do everything possible to prevent actions aimed at inciting hatred and enmity towards journalists, who are doing their professional duty.” Chechens have been linked to two murders of Novaya Gazeta reporters who investigated crimes in Chechnya, Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova. 

RELATED: REPORTS: Chechnya Opens Concentration Camp to Detain and Torture Gay Men

When the paper initially broke the story, a spokesperson for Kadyrov denied the arrests, telling the press that “such persons do not exist in Chechnya and even if so then their families will deal with them,” alluding to potential honor killings of LGBTQI persons.

The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United Nations have issued statements condemning the situation, asking that the Russian Government investigate the situation. Russian LGBTQ activists have told NCRM that private efforts are currently underway to get LGBTQI persons out of that region. 

Brody Levesque is the Chief Political Correspondent for The New Civil Rights Movement.
You may contact Brody at Brody.Levesque@thenewcivilrightsmovement.com

To comment on this article and other NCRM content, visit our Facebook page.

Image via The Kremlin

 

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‘Weak, Stupid, and Bad’: Trump Slams Conservative Supreme Court Justices in Wild Rant

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After delivering dozens of Truth Social posts in a 24-hour period, President Donald Trump is now lashing out at the conservative justices on the Supreme Court — again.

The president appeared to suggest that the conservative jurists should be loyal to his positions, and lamented that liberal justices “stick together like glue, NEVER failing to wander from the warped and perverse policies, ideas, and cases put before them.”

He also attacked Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, although not by name but by calling her “that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench (Sleepy Joe!).”

Calling it “unexplainable” and a “travesty,” the president appeared furious, once again, after losing his tariffs case at the Supreme Court, and was angered at what he expects will be a ruling against his administration on birthright citizenship.

READ MORE: How Trump’s Corruption Is Like a Thermonuclear Bomb: NYT Columnist

He wrongly called birthright citizenship “something which virtually NO OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD IS STUPID ENOUGH TO ALLOW,” and claimed that it “was meant for the babies of slaves, not for the babies of Chinese Billionaires.”

“No,” he continued, “certain ‘Republican’ Justices have just gone weak, stupid, and bad, completely violating what they ‘supposedly’ stood for.”

“If they rule against our Country on Birthright Citizenship,” Trump wrote, “which they probably will, it will be even worse, if that’s possible. It will cost America massive amounts of money but, more importantly, it will cost America its DIGNITY!”

Trump’s Wednesday remarks follow his Tuesday attack on the conservatives: “I put certain people on the United States Supreme Court who totally misrepresented who they were, and the true ideology for which they stand!”

READ MORE: ‘What Evil Looks Like’: Columnist Says Trump Presides Over a ‘Circus of Death and Chaos’

 

Image via Reuters 

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How Trump’s Corruption Is Like a Thermonuclear Bomb: NYT Columnist

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Calling President Donald Trump “corrupt” is like calling a thermonuclear device a “bomb” — technically true, but it misses the magnitude entirely, argues New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie.

Trump’s corruption is “so vast as to be a new phenomenon in American politics. The president and his family have leveraged his office to the tune of nearly $4 billion. They have received hundreds of millions of dollars from a network of branded cryptocurrency assets,” Bouie explains — for starters.

Citing a Wall Street Journal report, Bouie details the events surrounding Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother and national security adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates.

“Tahnoon’s investment fund purchased a half-billion dollar stake in the Trump family’s crypto fund, World Liberty Financial, just days before Trump’s second inauguration. Tahnoon has since successfully lobbied the White House for U.A.E. access to America’s most advanced A.I. chips, with a large portion going to Tahnoon’s A.I. company,” Bouie writes.

There are also Trump’s pardons.

Crypto firm Binance’s founder Changpeng Zhao, convicted in 2023 for violating the Bank Secrecy Act, donated software to Trump’s World Liberty Financial to launch its own cryptocurrency. He lobbied for — and was granted — a pardon from Trump, “raising the possibility that Zhao could recover his court-ordered fines — $4.3 billion to the U.S. government as punishment for allowing criminal actors to use Binance for a broad array of illicit transactions, including child sex abuse, illegal narcotics and terrorism.”

Later, another investment firm tied to Tahnoon announced it would buy a $2 billion stake in Binance, “using the cryptocurrency provided by World Liberty Financial. This deal could net the Trump family up to $80 million a year in interest.”

There are also Trump’s “monuments” — to himself, such as his ballroom, presidential library, and triumphal arch, which Bouie says “appear to be little more than state-sanctioned opportunities for graft.”

Trump has collected hundreds of millions of dollars for the projects, from wealthy donors and large corporations. In one case, tens of millions of dollars appear to be unaccounted for, Bouie writes, citing a report in The New Republic.

Then there is Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Trump’s lawyers are in settlement talks, which Bouie calls “tantamount to presidential looting of the treasury, little different than if he had stolen the money outright.”

Bouie also walks through presidential administrations history looking for evidence of similar corruption. He asks, “do we see anything like the self-dealing and naked personal enrichment of Trump and his family?” and concludes, “No, we do not.”

Bouie concludes with a warning.

To America’s founders, “corruption was poison, a cancer that ate at the foundations of self-government. A state so stricken was bound to succumb to political death.”

 

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Amid ‘Confusion and Disorder’ Prosecutors ‘Hit the Brakes’ on Brennan Probe: Report

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Just days after the U.S. Department of Justice removed the federal prosecutor in charge of its investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan, the DOJ reportedly has “hit the brakes” and begun to withdraw several subpoenas issued in the case.

MS NOW‘s Carol Leonnig and Lisa Rubin report that the criminal probe into Brennan includes “a purported conspiracy by the Obama administration to embarrass President Donald Trump,” according to people familiar with the matter.

“The dramatic shift in plans revealed some confusion and disorder in the controversial Justice Department investigation, which career prosecutors have privately criticized as lacking evidence and being politically motivated to please Trump,” MS NOW noted. The subpoenas had been served over the weekend, after the removal of the prosecutor, to witnesses “purportedly with knowledge of the Obama administration’s decision to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election.”

The subpoenas were seen by Trump allies “as a sign of progress the Justice Department was making in a top political priority for the president: to go after the architects of the Russia probe that eventually became special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s campaign and Trump himself.”

READ MORE: Breaking From Trump Republican Says Families Are ‘Struggling’ — But Points Finger at Biden

Some subpoenas were to be served to former government officials and some current and former intelligence agency officials, MS NOW reports, in the case where the DOJ is “looking to charge Brennan with making false statements about his and the CIA’s role in launching the Russia probe.”

Rather than serve subpoenas, DOJ will seek voluntary testimony.

The probe into Brennan is part of a larger “grand conspiracy” investigation into why the Russia probe was opened. But the critical loss of prosecutors “appears to have contributed to the whiplash decision to subpoena witnesses this weekend in Washington in the Brennan investigation and then withdraw them days later, according to the people.”

The prosecutor who had been removed had told colleagues that she had informed her supervisors there was insufficient evidence to charge Brennan.

READ MORE: The Supreme Court Is at War — With Itself: Columnist

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