“If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning.” Alvi Karimov, spokesperson for Chechnya’s President Ramzan Kadyrov

In April 2017, the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta – a paper who has had numerous editors murdered in previous years – broke the story of a ‘gay purge’, in which dozens of men were reportedly abducted, tortured and killed. The spokesperson for the Chechen President has denied all allegations, noting simply that “you cannot detain people who simply do not exist”. Disinformation and threats to brave organisations reporting human rights violations have made reporting difficult and dangerous. Since then, threats and attacks have continued with little sign of abating.

Join us for a panel to discuss the dangers for LGBT+ citizens in Russia – and why it’s been so hard to get the story out. The panellists will also look at the situation for refugees from Chechnya and around the world who’ve had to flee their homes as a result of persecution for their gender or orientation.

Chair

Jake Hall is a Sheffield-based freelance journalist whose work covers everything from porn and sex work to drugs and queerness. He is also studying for a PhD in Gender & Sexuality at the University of Birmingham. You can read his recent reporting for i-D on the situation in Chechnya here.

Speakers

Peter Tatchell has been campaigning since 1967 on issues of human rights, democracy, civil liberties, LGBT equality and global justice. In 2009, he co-proposed a UN Global Human Rights Index, to measure and rank the human rights record of every country – with the aim of creating a human rights league table to highlight the best and worst countries. On the first day of the 2018 World Cup, Tatchell was arrested in Moscow after staging a one-person protest near the Kremlin in support of LGBT+ people in Chechnya, highlighting the ‘homophobic witch hunts’ in the republic.

Moud Goba is a Zimbabwean lesbian, refugee, and founding member of UK Black Pride. She is an LGBT+ activist with more than 10 years of experience working with Black LGBT+ groups in the community, in addition to running her own small business. She is currently employed as a Project Manager for Micro Rainbow International, an organisation that addresses LGBT+ poverty across the globe. In 2015, Moud was named one of the top 100 most influential LGBT people in the Britain by the Independent newspaper, and was the recipient of Attitude Magazine’s Pride Award.

The Russian LGBT network was founded in April 2006. In October 2008, the All-Russian Conference of civic organizations in support of the LGBT movement was held in Moscow. During this conference, the network transformed into an interregional public movement. The Charter and Strategy were created, and governing bodies were elected. The network is an interregional, non-governmental human rights organization that promotes equal rights and respect for human dignity, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. 

In 2014, 14,792 asylum seekers arrived in Denmark, 2,940 of them were children. At Home in the World follows the day-to-day lives of those children whose families are seeking asylum in the EU.

This remarkably intimate and touching documentary focuses on one Danish Red Cross school for refugees, where classrooms are filled with children from more than twelve countries. The students have had to learn Danish while adjusting to new surroundings and, in some cases, dealing with the traumas of conflict. While some students thrive and find friendship despite their difficult pasts, others act out with feelings of alienation and frustration. Some are denied asylum and sent back to their countries of origin, while others are granted residence and graduate to standard Danish language schools.

With stunning and unobtrusive camera work, director Andreas Koefoed masterfully captures the social and psychological impacts of displacement from the outlook of young people and the educators who are tasked with guiding them – and at times their parents – through daunting new experiences.

Directed by: Andreas Koefoed
Produced by: Sara Stockmann
Production company: Sonntag Pictures
Runtime: 58′
Country: Denmark
athomeintheworldthefilm.com

Language, neuroscience, and cinema come together for this unique evening at the Frontline Club showcasing the work of ethnographic filmmaker and sound artist Vincent Moon, in collaboration with A World Without Words.

A World Without Words is a project by writer and filmmaker Lotje Sodderland, with poet and curator SJ Fowler and artist and material engineer Thomas Duggan, inviting audiences to engage with the nature of human language. With a series of events around London, including exhibitions, screenings and performances, A World Without Words calls into question how meaning maps into the brain.

A selection of Vincent Moon’s short observational documentaries — shot around the world and capturing local folklore and diverse musical rituals — will be screened in alternation with an informal discussion by the director of London’s Institute of Philosophy Dr Barry Smith.

Dr Smith will explore the neural correlates of meaning, music, and language in the context of each film, to offer the audience an explanation of the role of language in subjective mental life.

From Sufi rituals in Chechnya, to ancient folk songs in Columbian’s pacific rainforest; from an Eastern Orthodox family portrait in Tbilisi, to shamanic healing songs in Peru, we will experience how the brain ascribes meaning to music and sound – even when words are obsolete.

The film lineup:

Le Grand Jihad (8 min) – A Sufi ritual in Chechnya

Nur-Zhovkhar (9 min) – Folk songs from Chechnya

Belogorskiy – (12 min) A rare liturgy in Russia’s hidden cave monastery

L’école du Vent – (7 min) Contemporary maestros of Azerbaijan

Erdm Ensemble – (12 min) Songs from Kalmoukie

A portrait of Justina – (16 min) A shipibo shaman in Peru healing villagers with song and ayahuasca

Vincent Moon is a French independent filmmaker and sonic ethnographer who rose to prominence with the Blogotheque’s Take Away Shows, a web-based project recording field work music videos of indie rock musicians as well as some notable mainstream artists including Tom Jones and Arcade Fire. In recent years the focus of his work has been documenting local folklore, sacred music, and religious rituals worldwide for his label Petites Planètes, amassing a vast collection of rare recordings.

Dr Barry Smith is a professor of philosophy and director of London’s Institute of Philosophy, a partner in the Sensory Research Network (Toronto, MIT, Harvard, Glasgow), and co-director and founder of the Centre for the Study of the Senses in the University of London which pioneers collaborative research between philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. He appears frequently on BBC Radio and writes for mainstream publications on self-knowledge, and the philosophies of language and mind. In 2010, he was the writer and presenter of a four-part series for the BBC World Service called The Mysteries of the Brain.

Twenty years have passed since the beginning of the first Chechen war. How has the country changed in this period and what happened to the many men and women who fought for independence?

With this starting point, journalist and filmmaker Manon Loizeau revisited Chechnya, a country where she had previously lived and reported from during the war. The resulting documentary, Chechnya, War Without Trace, was screened ahead of its premiere on Al Jazeera on Friday 12 June to an audience at the Frontline Club.

“Chechnya is a schizophrenic land,” said Loizeau, describing the reality she faced on her return to Grozny. She found people who were once proud and fierce now scared and passively accepting of the regime of Ramzan Kadyrov, who “has tried to be Putin’s best pupil.”

History in Chechnya is re-written everyday: those who fought and died for independence are forgotten, and Putin’s birthday is a national celebration. How has this happened?

Loizeau told the Frontline Club audience that she had originally intended to interview those people that she had met decades before during the war against Russia. However, very few were willing to speak with her.

Loizeau said, “Lots of people I knew that fought during the war are now working for Kadyrov himself for lots of money.”

Before the annexation of Crimea, Chechnya received the highest amount of financial support from Russia. Kadyrov consequently bribed regional clans, buying their support. But money alone could not have achieved such a radical turnaround in national sentiment: terror and fear have also played a significant role in allowing Kadyrov’s grip to tighten around Chechnya.

Human Rights Watch estimates that 5,000 people disappeared during the second Chechen war alone, and – as Loizeau‘s documentary highlights – many families still don’t have an answer as to what happened to their loved ones.

Terror in Chechnya is commonplace, with rampant threats, intimidations, disappearances and murders. Few are those who risk their lives and livelihoods to denounce and actively oppose Kadyrov’s police state, but the lawyers of the Committee Against Torture are among those who take a stand.

“In December, the Committee was burnt down,” Loizeau said. “They managed to reopen three weeks ago. The sad thing was that the Committee was raided again by common people, and now they’re thinking of not reopening the office […] There should be a European campaign on what happened to the Committee against Torture.”

Entire chapters of Chechen history have been erased. When prominent Chechen politician Ruslan Kutayev referenced at a public conference the deportation of 500,000 Chechens by Stalinist Russia, he was subsequently arrested on charges of drug possession and sentenced to four years in jail.

In response to an audience question on how Putin’s policies had reached such heights of popularity in Chechnya, Loizeau responded:
“During the war, Putin said that they had to ‘Chechenise’ the war, and they managed to. Kadyrov has managed to break down the Chechen identity; he has managed to divide the society. Now brother denounces his own brother – they’re killing and fighting each other.”

More information on Chechnya, War Without Trace is available here.

In the space of just a few years, Chechnya has undergone a remarkable transformation. Gone are the minefields and piles of rubble, which have now been replaced by broad avenues, luxury boutiques and glass-fronted skyscrapers. It’s virtually impossible to see that there was ever a war.

Award-winning journalist Manon Loizeau has spent the past 20 years covering the Chechen conflict. In Chechnya, War Without Trace she returns to the places she knew well, filming undercover, to examine the lasting effects of conflict with Russia.

Behind the gleaming facade of the new Grozny, Loizeau discovers women and men seemingly more terrified now than during all the years of war and occupation. Although a fifth of the population vanished during the war, a fear of persecution has led to a collective forgetting of history.

Loizeau mixes the moving stories of those who search in vain for their loved ones with footage capturing the newly-polished surface of Chechnya, a country that remains internally traumatised and restless.

Chechnya, War Without Trace won the Grand Prize of the World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) at 2015 FIFDH (Human Rights Forum and Film Festival) in Geneva.

The film shows as part of the Witness strand on Al Jazeera on 17th June at 9pm.

Directed by Manon Loizeau
Duration: 90′
Year: 2014
More info: www.javafilms.fr

Letters to Myself, which screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 14 April, follows Russian photographer Oleg Klimov as he returns to the places he documented during the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and into the 2000s. The film combines Klimov‘s memories with the stories of the people he photographed at the time.

Director Masha Novikova spent some time filming Klimov in Chechnya in 2000 and later in 2003–05 whilst working on a different film but has known Klimov for over 20 years and has wanted to film him at work for just as long but it took some time to secure funding.

Novikova said through a translator after the screening:

“It was my first war and my first time in a ruined city and of course it was quite tragic for me . . . for Oleg it hasn’t been the first time so . . . he was much more cynical than I was.”

Klimov, speaking through the translator via Skype from his mother’s home near Moscow which appears in the film, spoke about how he felt being the subject of the film instead of being behind the camera:

“It did take us quite a long time, Masha and I, the crew, everybody was looking for the people we were asking about, trying to find out about their stories and it was a very moving, very emotional time for me, as you can imagine 20 years later. It took me back to those times.”

Oleg Klimov speaks via Skype at the Frontline Club

A question from the audience asked what he thought had changed in Grozny, having been back to since the war? Klimov said:

“I’ve actually seen Grozny during three times, pre-war, wartime and post-wartime. . . . These are three completely different realities.

 

“The first reality is basically Chechnya the republic, just like perhaps the majority of post-Soviet republics. People just lived normal lives, it was not very exciting, nothing was really happening. Although you could see that conflicts started breaking out.

 

“ . . . The second reality is the reality of war which is again quite similar to any . . . place which is in the state of war, which is terror and horror.”

 

“ . . . The third reality, which I’ve witnessed the most recent time I’ve been to Chechnya was last year, . . . that feeling was basically surreal, because when you walk down the street knowing about the two previous realities, having seen all that I’ve seen, the question rises that you do not understand what it was all for, why did it all happen? . . . All this money that went first on the wars, and then to restore the city it’s just incomprehensible.”

A further question from the audience asked, how did Grozny change so quickly, who rebuilt it?

Klimov said:

“This can be what we call compromise at best for the Russian government. . . . Because they couldn’t win the war in Chechnya . . . the idea was to buy peace there. . . . They’ve invested a lot of money . . . but the price that the people are paying, that’s where . . . the fear comes from. . . . There is no freedom of speech, no freedom of expression. . . . That’s the price they pay for peace and stability.”

What was it all for? People versus characters: what's left when the motherland gets covered in skyscrapers @frontlineclub with @PhotoAmmon

— Rasa Jusionyte (@rasajusionyte) April 14, 2014

Novikova added:

“Even though it [the war] was a terrible time people did speak out very freely . . . about defending the land and about being free and independent. And I felt a huge respect and love for these people . . . but now I see that even my friends they try to avoid calling things as they are, they use very vague language.”

How does Klimov approach the wars he photographs? How does he feel about the wars as a Russian?

The translator explained:

“It’s very difficult being a Russian, while Russia is fighting Chechnya because of course this dilemma of being a citizen of Russia and being a journalist, . . . [he was] trying to find ways to be neutral, to be right on the front line, not choosing sides. It was really difficult. . . . At one point, Oleg decided that he is going to be guided by a principle, he is not actually going to choose a nation or a people but he is going to be empathetic with the weakest one or the side that is unarmed.”

And what are Klimov’s thoughts on the recent outbreak in Crimea?

“It’s a very absurd and strange situation when we have these polite armed men with Kalashnikovs who nobody knows who they are but everybody knows that they are either special forces or private army that is linked of course to Russia. But it’s not the official troops, it’s not the official Russian army so it’s a strange situation where everybody understands but nobody actually names it or discusses it as official Russian army.”

In 1997, Camilla Carr and Jonathan James were kidnapped and held for fourteen months in Chechnya. Speaking neither Russian nor Chechen, armed with good intentions and a car full of toys, the two Britons had volunteered to help traumatised children in Grozny. They were soon kidnapped, and this book – The Sky is Always There: Surviving a Kidnapping in Chechnya – is a ghastly tale of casual violence and the kidnappers’ contempt for their hostages.

Many who travelled to Chechnya at this time got into trouble. A tough and resourceful Russian woman journalist I knew also worked with children in Grozny. Galya thought she knew what she was doing, but the Chechen man she most trusted betrayed her and she was taken captive. After her release, she fostered half a dozen Chechen children in her tiny flat in Moscow. She did not return to Chechnya.

Around the same time the authors and Galya were seized, I was held under armed guard while attempting to track down President Dzhokhar Dudayev in hiding. Luckily, one bearded fighter recognised me from an afternoon when we had sheltered from shellfire together. The atmosphere lightened, and we were sent on our way to Dudayev. Afterwards, I too stopped working in Chechnya.

So how did the woefully unprepared Jon and Camilla think they would get away with it? Unable to talk to their captors, the couple were reduced to making sense of their situation in their own terms. They deployed healing visualisations, yogic breathing exercises and a strategy of appeasement. They even gave the gunmen massages. One captor raped Camilla many times over a prolonged period, with Jon listening in the next room. Eventually, she made it clear that the experience was terrible. The rapist claimed to be surprised, as he ostensibly thought that western women enjoyed rape. Camilla wondered whether she should have registered her objection sooner. The couple did not ask to be kidnapped, abused and raped, but the lesson is that people should think about the risk of going into an environment already known for the likelihood of kidnapping.

This is a car crash of a book, a how-not-to essay in on working in a war zone. Much of the time, one wants to shake the authors and ask them what they thought they were doing. Jon’s dreadlocks, their massages and Camilla’s clumsy confusion of eating and toilet utensils which so appalled their captors leave the impression that the authors didn’t do their homework. Apparently, they were arrogant enough to think they didn’t have to.

Reviewer: Richard Pendry is a lecturer in broadcast journalism at the University of Kent. He reported from all over the former Soviet Union, including Chechnya, for Frontline News in the 1990s. The Sky is Always There: Surviving a Kidnapping in Chechnya by Camilla Carr and Jonathan James is published by Canterbury Press and costs £14.99

One Soldier’s War in Chechnya has just been published in English translation from Russian. I don’t speak or read Russian, so could not have read the original. Then it dawned on me.  The increasingly tedious takes of brutality, excess, drunkenness and incompetence reminded me of the dog-eared copies of the Sven Hassel books about the Nazi Penal Battalion on the Russian Front in World War II that were passed from hand to hand at prep school.  They were about a group of conscripts fighting in a vicious war, poorly equipped, and badly-led, with their only seeming motivators being the brutality of their officers and NCOs. Here it all was again, in Chechnya.

What a disappointment this book is.  It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know about the Chechen wars. It confirmed my worst fears about a demoralized conscript army; and it was boring, repetitive and exhausting to read. Unfortunately, much of it rings true. It is always depressing to read of young soldiers thrown into a war without proper leadership by an uncaring government and with inadequate equipment.  The war in Chechnya was hallmarked by extreme brutality on both sides.  Reading this book, I’m not surprised. It is a pitiful indictment of the Russian Army at the time: “all this bollocks as if our lives depended on it.  But no one explained to us how to staunch blood, or pinpoint a sniper in night fighting.” It gets worse: “… the Kombat [Company Commander] was not popular in the Battalion. He treated us as cattle, talked down to us and used his fists a lot; he thought of us merely as cannon fodder…” Inspiring stuff.

One Soldier’s War in Chechnya is not one of the great classics of military history. Nor, unfortunately, was it a particularly enlightening account of life on the front lines.  I did not buy extra copies for presents at Christmas. Nor should you in the new year.

Reviewer:  Tim Spicer, OBE, is a British former soldier and CEO of Aegis Defence Services.

His picture is one of eight in the frame next to the bar, a permanent memorial to Frontline TV journalists who died. In the six years since Roddy’s death, the idea of setting up an active memorial to his work has been growing, and the Roddy Scott Foundation will be formally launched at the club on 26th September, the anniversary of his death.

The fund is aimed at helping Chechen refugees living in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia. Already Roddy’s parents, Rob and Stina, have helped one student from there through journalism school, with money raised in annual Easter Egg hunts on their Yorkshire farm, and after making several trips to the region, they have ambitious plans to do far more – encouraging business and tourism, and funding a school for Chechens from this small part of Georgia, a neglected minority in a poor country.

The reason for the tight local focus of this charity is the high regard that the Chechens had for Roddy. He was clearly much loved and had been considered as one of  their own, spending time with wounded fighters in hospitals and safe houses, and playing football with children. An old shepherd told Roddy’s parents that he had been tougher than some of those born in the mountains. That’s why the guerrillas were willing to take him with them on their attempt to make their way back to fight the Russians in Chechnya, turning away more than 20 other journalists who also wanted to join them.  The journey turned out to be Roddy’s last when the column was ambushed by Russian forces.
 
Another Frontline club member, Vlad Lozinski, now living in Georgia with his diplomat wife Fabienne, has been a vital local link, advising in the early stages of the Roddy Scott Foundation, and it is clear that a small amount of money will go a long way. One of the first simple aims is to buy more balalaikas for the village. When Rob and Stina were serenaded by their guide, while staying in a leaky shepherd’s hut during a recent trip, they discovered that his balalaika was the only one in the valley.

And they saw the potential for tourism, writing ‘We saw sheep flocks being mustered to move further into the mountains for summer grazing; we had a brief view of the splendid scenery before rain closed in again and learned that we were on the route that Roddy’s group had taken; we were entertained by a Georgian shepherd in his hut(dry!), with home-produced vodka, many toasts and speeches, and a lamb stewed with herbs in a huge cauldron over an open fire. While the lamb cooked we sat round the smoky fire, and watched the shepherd make cheese from the morning’s milking.’

We are launching the Roddy Scott Foundation at Frontline on 26th September. Do come and join us for a drink. 

John Russell’s Chechnya – Russia ‘s “War on Terror” builds a careful case that exposes Putin’s lies. His central theme is that the Russo-Chechen war has more to do with three centuries of Russian subjugation of Chechnya  than with global terrorism. Obliterating history – as Israeli policy did with the Palestinians, Putin said that sufficient force would make the Chechens give up. As early as the 1780s, the Russian commander in the Caucusus, Lt.-Gen. Pavel Potemkin, concluded the only way to subdue the Chechens was to exterminate them. An estimated 200,000 Chechens, about one quarter of the population, have died in the two modern wars of 1994-1996, when the Russian army was driven from Chechnya, and 1999 to the present. Russia has lost about 25,000 troops, more than in Afghanistan. Chechens did themselves no favours when they ran a gangster state during their brief de facto independence. Some of their “terrorist spectaculars,” like the Moscow theatre siege and the Beslan school hostage-taking, revolted even supporters.

During the second modern war, I reported on a group led by Shamil Basayev, considered the most radical Islamic leader. His men were fearless, loved fighting, spoke of honour and guns and their love of their mountains. Rather than chant Koranic verses, they talked of the good days in Grozny when they drank themselves silly on vodka. At their cave headquarters, instead of enforcing Wahhabi male-female segregation, their leader shouted, “There are no women here, only a journalist,” and gave me a place on a bed for 25 fighters.

John Russell, senior lecturer in Russian Studies and Peace Studies at the University of Bradford , writes a fluent, well-documented plea for Chechnya rather than a history. His book is not for readers new to the conflict (e.g., only by page 62 does he mention that Chechnya declared independence in 1991 and the war began in 1994). But his scorching analysis of Putin’s dual policies of force and installing puppets to “Chechenise” the violence demonstrates that neither works.

Reviewer: Marie Colvin is foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times.