Russian paper feels backlash over Chechnya gay torture story

MOSCOW — The journalists at Novaya Gazeta are no strangers to death threats. And so when an envelope filled with a mysterious white powder arrived at their office in central Moscow, the staff at Russia’s oldest independent newspaper did not panic. The return address on the envelope was given only as Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. It was the second such delivery in as many days, and a mobile chemical and radiation testing laboratory was parked outside their offices.

A week earlier, in mid-April, Muslim clerics in Chechnya, a mountainous republic in Russia’s south, had adopted a resolution vowing “retribution” against the newspaper over an article alleging that gay men were systematically tortured and murdered in secret Chechen prisons. The resolution was adopted after a public gathering in a mosque in Grozny that was attended by 15,000 people, including high-ranking Chechen officials.

It wasn’t the allegations of brutal violence against gay men that outraged Chechnya’s religious and secular authorities.

“They were insulted by the fact that our article said there were gay men in Chechnya,” Dmitry Muratov, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Novaya Gazeta, said, speaking at the paper’s offices in central Moscow. “They deny their very existence in the republic.

“We had no intention of insulting the Chechen people,” he added. “But this is our work — to defend anyone who needs help: homosexuals, war veterans, whoever.”

Though investigators quickly established the white powder posed no danger, Novaya Gazeta doesn’t take the threats from Chechnya lightly. Since it published its first edition 24 years ago, six of its journalists have been killed or died in suspicious circumstances. Two of them, Anna Politkovskaya and Natalya Estemirova, were shot dead after investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya.

“They were insulted by the fact that our article said there were gay men in Chechnya” — Dmitry Muratov, co-founder of Novaya Gazeta

“Chechnya’s spiritual authorities and influential public figures have appealed to all Chechens to defend the honor of both Allah and the Chechen people,” said Muratov. “What is going on now in the minds of those people who were led to believe that we were insulting their honor?

“We are taking precautions,” he added. “But we cannot sit in an armor-plated cupboard.”

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Novaya Gazeta, which broke the story of the alleged campaign to eliminate gay men from Chechnya in early April, reported that at least three men had been killed and about 100 others detained by Chechen security forces since February.

“They brought in new people every day,” Novaya Gazeta quoted one survivor as saying. “They told us we were dogs that did not deserve to live.”

The allegations of violence, including electric shock torture, have been corroborated by international and Russian human rights organizations. Russia’s powerful Investigative Committee, an FBI-style law enforcement agency that answers only to President Vladimir Putin, has said it is looking into the reports.

A portrait and flowers mark the spot where opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down near the Kremlin in 2015 | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Chechen officials, meanwhile, have responded to the allegations with a mixture of scorn and hostility. Alvi Karimov, a Chechen government spokesperson, told Russian media that gay men did not exist in the mainly Muslim republic, because if they did, their own families would send them to a place “from where there is no return.”

Kheda Saratova, a prominent Chechen human rights official, said she would not listen to requests for help from gay men. Rather, Chechen authorities would respond with “understanding” to people who murdered their gay relatives, Saratova said. (She later said she regretted her “emotional” comments.)

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov broke a long silence on the allegations in late April, during a meeting with Putin in Moscow, when he called Novaya Gazeta’s articles “provocative” and denied that any arrests, torture or killings had taken place. Putin made no comment. Three days later, Kadyrov demanded an apology from Novaya Gazeta, saying the newspaper’s journalists should “beg for forgiveness on their knees in front of the Chechen people.”

Chechnya’s population is just 1.3 million — less than 1 percent of Russia’s total population — but Kadyrov is one of Russia’s most powerful politicians. Critics say he has carte blanche from Putin to do as he pleases in Chechnya and beyond, as long as he maintains a semblance of peace in the mainly Muslim republic, which was devastated by two wars with Moscow in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Opposition figures and human rights organizations accuse Kadyrov and his 30,000-strong private army of carrying out extra-judicial killings, including the murder of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader gunned down in Moscow in 2015. Kadyrov has denied the allegations, chalking up the grisly fates of his critics to a plot by “Russia’s enemies” to discredit him.

“Kadyrov is a figure of massive political importance who has given the finger to everyone in Russia with the exception of Vladimir Putin,” said Muratov. “He no longer considers himself merely the head of a small republic. He considers himself the commander-in-chief of a huge army that serves Putin. And he can get away with anything.”

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Muratov is in no mood to apologize to the Chechen strongman. Pausing occasionally to deliberate on his choice of words, he brought up Politkovskaya, the Novaya Gazeta journalist who was shot dead in the Russian capital in 2006 after investigating alleged abductions by Kadyrov’s force. Rustam Makhmudov — the Chechen gunman convicted of murdering her  — was only detained after the intervention of Moscow-based security forces.

“Our reporter’s life was far more valuable to me than any information from there” — Dmitry Muratov

“A fly doesn’t move in Chechnya without Kadyrov’s knowledge,” he said. “Yet Makhmudov was living there in his home village. And it wasn’t Chechen law enforcement [that] arrested him. He was only detained when the FSB and Alfa [Russian special forces] surrounded his home in a special operation. A special operation! As if it was Syria or Libya.”

No one was ever charged with ordering Politkovskaya’s murder. Three years after her death, Natalya Estemirova, another Novaya Gazeta journalist, was abducted outside her home in Grozny. Her bullet-riddled body was later found in the neighboring republic of Ingushetia. Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights groups, accused Kadyrov of orchestrating her murder — allegations the Chechen leader has, again, denied.

Novaya Gazeta’s grim history has taken its toll on Muratov and the newspaper’s staff. After Estemirova’s death, Novaya Gazeta stopped working entirely in Chechnya for several years.

“Our reporter’s life was far more valuable to me than any information from there,” he said. “But when Kadyrov started actively interfering in Russian affairs, far beyond the borders of Chechnya, it became impossible not to report on his activities.”

Beside the alleged assassination of Nemtsov, Kadyrov has openly threatened other Moscow-based opposition figures and critics. In a report published last year, Ilya Yashin, a prominent opposition activist, called Kadyrov a danger to Russian national security.

Russian activists hold portraits of slain human rights activist Natalya Estemirova in Moscow on July 15, 2010 during a rally to mark the one year anniversary of her killing | Oxana Onipko/AFP via Getty Images

Novaya Gazeta has, so far, survived against considerable odds. Founded with help from ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who donated computers and funds to the nascent newspaper in the early 1990s, the publication was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Other opposition-friendly newspapers and websites have been forced out of business since Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012 amid a wide-reaching media crackdown, but Novaya Gazeta has refused to buckle. Muratov attributes this, in part, to its fiercely independent character — and the fact that its staff owns 76 percent of the newspaper.

“We don’t have a rich owner that the authorities can pressure, by calling back state loans, for example,” he said. “We have never taken money from the government. We’ve always been poor, so it’s hard to pressure us financially.”

Novaya Gazeta will mark its 25th anniversary next year. But Muratov is in no mood to celebrate. “It would have been better if they had closed us down, rather than killed all those people,” he said. “For some people, the closure of the paper would be a catastrophe. But not for me. Screw it. For me, it would be better for me if all those people were still alive instead. But another way was chosen for us — to kill.”

Marc Bennetts is a Moscow-based journalist and author of “I’m Going to Ruin Their Lives: Inside Putin’s War on Russia’s Opposition” (Oneworld, 2016).