“They are devils”, “They are for sale” and “They are not people”, this way Ramzan Kadyrov has described gay men, while he was answering on a journalists question about Chechyna’s persecution of gay men in April.
To refresh your memory, in April 2017, an article in Novaya Gazeta newspaper brought the assaults on gay men in Chechnya to global audience, reporting that over 100 men had been arrested and tortured by police, with three being killed. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen president, denied any reports of a “gay purge” in the region. He said if there were any gay people in the autonomous Russian region, who he referred to as “devils”, “for sale” and “not people”, they should move to Canada.
Governments of many countries of the world already gave their negative comments on the situation in Chechen Republic and, finally, US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said, her department found these comments to be “very concerning and also upsetting”. She also claimed the administration was raising the issue with Russian authorities “at the highest levels”. However, both Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have refused to speak about Chechnya’s human rights abuses with President Vladimir Putin in the past few weeks.
