A detained gay man from Chechnya declared that he would go to fight in Ukraine

Chechen Idris Arsamikov, detained by the police in Domodedovo on February 16 and deported to Chechnya, published a video appeal. In it, he declares that his rights are respected in Chechnya and that he is going to go and fight in Ukraine. Arsamikov received asylum in the Netherlands a few years ago. He claimed that in Chechnya he was persecuted because of his homosexuality, that he was tortured and that his family was threatened with death. Human rights activists believe that he could record the video under pressure.

In a short video, Arsamikov asks human rights activists to “step back” from him and “not to pour mud” on him and his family. He calls himself a “patriot and a man” and mentions that he intends to get married soon. In addition, Arsamikov reports that two of his brothers are fighting in Ukraine, and he himself would like to join them. Arsamikov’s mother and uncle are also speaking on the video: they are also asking the media to stop spreading information about his alleged homosexuality.

Activists of the human rights group “SK SOS”, which helps LGBT people and victims of violence in the North Caucasus, suggest that Arsamikov could record the video under pressure from relatives and law enforcement agencies. “Such public “repentance” in order to whitewash the authorities is a constant practice in Chechnya,” human rights activists emphasize. They also believe that sending Arsamikov to war can be a likely scenario for the Chechen authorities to get rid of the extra noise surrounding his case.

In 2018, Idris Arsamikov was able to leave Chechnya and obtain political asylum in the Netherlands with the help of “SK SOS” volunteers. He reported that in Chechnya he was persecuted because of his homosexuality, kept in the basement and interrogated. According to human rights activists, the Chechen Emu, like the majority of gays, is in mortal danger.

After four years of living in the Netherlands, Arsamikov came to Chechnya for his father’s funeral. On February 16, he was detained at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, where he was about to fly back to the Netherlands. As the mass media reported, the formal reason for the detention was the fraud case brought against him in Chechnya. Arsamikov himself says in a video message that he was detained because he “ignored several subpoenas”, without specifying what these subpoenas were. From Domodedovo, he was taken to Chechnya. Neither in Moscow nor in Chechnya did the detainee have a lawyer.

The “SC SOS” crisis group claims that Arsamikov was brought to Chechnya only on the basis of an unsealed letter from the head of the Internal Affairs Ministry in the Shelkovsky district of Chechnya, Rustam Geremeev. This letter did not contain Arsamikov’s data, references to the laws and grounds on which he should be detained. It was in the department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Shelkovsky district that Arsamikov was previously tortured.

• Chechen authorities regularly persecute representatives of the LGBT community in the republic. Information about this was contained in the report of the Austrian expert Wolfgang Bendek for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). He directly linked the campaign against Chechen gays with the position of both the republican and federal authorities. Among those responsible for the persecution, he named Ramzan Kadyrov and the Speaker of the Chechen Parliament Magomed Daudov.