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LGBTQ

Russia’s New Queer Purge

Foreign Policy, August 6, 2024

In March, a little-known volunteer organization dedicated to “reviving the religious and secular unity of the Russian people” escorted agents from the Internal Affairs Ministry and the Russian National Guard on a raid in the remote city of Orenburg, a city of 500,000 near the Kazakh border.

Their target was a bar called Pose, which was locally famous for its drag shows. The volunteer organization, called Russian Community Orenburg, posted videos of the raid online, highlighting people in skimpy outfits, asking attendees why they were in a “faggot bar,” and showing clubgoers cowering on the floor as agents conducted their search.

“This is not [a scene from] the decaying West, this is from within the ranks of a country that is at war for a third year,” the group lamented when it posted the video online.

Conservatives in Orenburg had been outraged about Pose since it opened in 2021, according to the Russian outlet Mediazona, and a local media outlet published a sensationalist article about the club, complaining that laws like Russia’s longstanding “gay propaganda ban” did not give local law enforcement the tools to shut it down. That law, enacted in 2013, only bans materials made available to minors and carries light penalties.

The agents in Pose that night were armed with a major new weapon in Russia’s long crusade against its queer citizens. Last November, in a secret proceeding sealed to observers, Russia’s Supreme Court decreed the “international LGBT movement” to be an “extremist” organization, adding it to a list of banned entities that includes terrorist groups and the political operation of the late opposition politician Alexei Navalny. The decision is so broad that it can potentially be used against anyone who has—or simply “promotes”—a “nontraditional sexual orientation,” including people who are not LGBTQ but support queer people’s rights. People convicted under the law face up to 10 years in some of Russia’s harshest prisons, where queer people fear sexual violence or worse.

“This is not a decision to punish you for a few years. This is the death penalty, and it’s clear for everybody,” one longtime activist said, referring to the harsh conditions in Russian prisons. (The activist asked not to be named due to security concerns.) “We will not have a chance to survive there.”

Pose’s owner and two of its employees are now awaiting trial. A court announcement on Telegram notes they are accused of “being persons with nontraditional sexual orientation … who also support the views and activities of the international public LGBT association banned in our country.”

Others close to the bar are now living in fear. Only one regular Pose patron would agree to speak with me, and he said his friends had mostly stopped communicating with one another, afraid they could be discovered. Several had left the city or the country. He thinks he should maybe leave the country, too, but doesn’t have a passport or the money to go into exile, nor a safe place to flee to.

Pose, the patron said, “was my whole life. It was the only place where they accepted me.”

* * *

Homophobia became a major part of President Vladimir Putin’s political strategy in 2013. That’s when the Duma passed a national version of the “gay propaganda law.” The legislation was domestically useful to Putin, who was seeking to reinforce his political support by cozying up to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The law, which went into effect just before Russia was due to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, provoked an international outcry, and Putin detected homophobia could also be a tool of foreign policy. His government leaned into the controversy, portraying Russia as a defender of traditional values against a degenerate West that had lost its way. Kremlin allies also began using it in a more targeted way in Ukraine, where an oligarch close to Putin ran an ad campaign warning closer ties to the European Union would force the recognition of same-sex marriages. His decade-long strategy has used homophobia to try to drive a wedge between Eastern Europeans and the West, as well as to delegitimize fundamental notions of human rights and democracy.

To some Russian LGBTQ activists, it was inevitable that the Russian government would double down on going after queer people following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Swiftly, the Russian government made a broad effort to dismantle the last spaces for opposition to his regime. Other steps have included shuttering Russia’s remaining independent media outlets and effectively banning any speech critical of the war or of Putin.

The organization Coming Out, which held an eight-day annual public event in St. Petersburg as recently as 2021, decided to move its whole team outside the country almost as soon as Russian tanks rolled across Ukraine’s borders.

“A few weeks after the war started, I understood that things were not going according to the plan,” said Aleksandr Voronov, Coming Out’s former director, who led its relocation to Lithuania. “I understood that they were going to start looking for new enemies.”

Putin also justified the war partly as a crusade against the LGBTQ movement, which he initially derided in a speech announcing the full-scale invasion as part of a Western plot to “destroy” Russia’s traditional values. Then, in September 2022, he referred to the movement as “satanic” in a speech illegally annexing four Ukrainian regions.

As the war continued, the regime’s propaganda machine pushed outlandish stories, rushing a state television crew to an LGBTQ center in decimated Mariupol that it claimed was “practically under the direct patronage” of U.S. President Joe Biden. Russian lawmakers also responded, expanding the gay propaganda ban in November 2022 and enacting a draconian anti-trans bill in 2023 that would outlaw gender confirming medical treatment, prohibit people from changing their gender on legal documents, and prohibit trans people from adopting children.

“A special military operation is taking place not only on the battlefields, but also in the consciousness, in the minds and souls of people,” said Aleksander Khinshtein, a member of the Russian parliament and an author of the updated gay propaganda law, in a speech to the Duma in October 2022. “LGBT today is a tool of hybrid warfare. And in this hybrid warfare, we must protect our values. We must protect our society and we must protect our children.”

Despite many threats to Russia’s queer movement—the original gay propaganda law, a state requirement that forced many LGBTQ organizations to register as “foreign agents,” growing vigilante violence—Russia’s queer movement had remained vital throughout most of Russia for most of the past decade. (A notable exception is Chechnya, where local officials have detained, tortured, or murdered dozens of queer people.) Queer organizations continued to work and even hold major public events like St. Petersburg’s long-running QueerFest, a multiday festival of LGBTQ-themed talks and exhibitions ending with a large public concert. But the extremism designation is far more dangerous than any previous threat.

Part of the danger comes from the court’s secrecy around the ruling. It not only closed the proceedings, but also barred LGBTQ organizations from participating when they tried to challenge the Ministry of Justice’s petition. Technically, any group the government seeks to declare extremist has a right to respond to the allegations against it, but the Ministry of Justice brought its petition against the “international LGBT movement,” which meant no specific organization would have standing to respond. And even when a group of LGBTQ activists formed an organization called the International LGBT Movement in an effort to intervene, the court refused to allow them to participate.

In fact, the Supreme Court never officially made the order public. It only reached LGBTQ activists in their lawyers when prosecutors in the city of Nizhny Novgorod attached it to their filings in a case against a woman who was arrested for wearing rainbow-colored earrings. (The six-color pride flag and other LGBTQ symbols were banned by the order, and the court sentenced the woman to administrative detention, despite the fact that the woman’s earrings were not discernible pride symbols—they had seven colors and were shaped like frogs.)

Olga Baranova, who has been executive director of an LGBTQ community center in Moscow since 2015, told me that the movement is now backpedaling after years of encouraging people to come out. They used to believe visibility would gradually make Russian society more supportive of LGBTQ people. Now it’s just dangerous.“We’ve worked all these years just to be [out] and to be in the mainstream. And now we just say, ‘Okay, stop, stop, stop!’” Baranova said. Most people she knows who were visibly out have left the country, Baranova said—as has she—and she and other activists now advise people living in Russia to stay in the closet for their own safety.

Natalia Soloviova, chair of the Russian LGBT Network, a federation of more than 20 queer organizations from across the country, called the decision “absolutely horrifying,” but said that even despite it, the reality is that most queer people are not able or don’t want to flee Russia. The war has made it harder for LGBTQ people to reach countries that promise the most safety to LGBTQ refugees—like the United States or members of the European Union—because those countries have radically restricted visas for Russians. Georgia, which allows Russians to enter without visas, has become an important haven for Russian dissidents of many kinds in the past two years. But Georgia’s ruling party has advanced its own laws attacking LGBTQ people, one of many initiatives to bring the country closer to Moscow’s orbit.

Still, Soloviova estimates a significant exodus, with “hundreds” going abroad. Almost 40 percent of the Russian LGBT Network’s member organizations have relocated at least some members of their team abroad, generally visible activists or people in senior management. And many other queer people have been displaced internally, fleeing threats in their hometowns for larger cities where their pursuers are less likely to find them. Baranova acknowledged that if queer people all either leave the country or live in the closet, as she and others counsel them to do, “the movement will expire.”

Soloviova is one of those who’ve left the country. She first spoke to me in April from Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, but has since left Georgia. (She feared that country’s new propaganda law and also knew of three queer Russians who were attacked on the street.) She is from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk—Russia’s third-largest city—and said she’d never thought she’d live outside Russia until the extremism designation.

“We’ve worked all these years just to be [out] and to be in the mainstream. And now we just say, ‘Okay, stop, stop, stop!’” Baranova said. Most people she knows who were visibly out have left the country, Baranova said—as has she—and she and other activists now advise people living in Russia to stay in the closet for their own safety.

Natalia Soloviova, chair of the Russian LGBT Network, a federation of more than 20 queer organizations from across the country, called the decision “absolutely horrifying,” but said that even despite it, the reality is that most queer people are not able or don’t want to flee Russia. The war has made it harder for LGBTQ people to reach countries that promise the most safety to LGBTQ refugees—like the United States or members of the European Union—because those countries have radically restricted visas for Russians. Georgia, which allows Russians to enter without visas, has become an important haven for Russian dissidents of many kinds in the past two years. But Georgia’s ruling party has advanced its own laws attacking LGBTQ people, one of many initiatives to bring the country closer to Moscow’s orbit.

Still, Soloviova estimates a significant exodus, with “hundreds” going abroad. Almost 40 percent of the Russian LGBT Network’s member organizations have relocated at least some members of their team abroad, generally visible activists or people in senior management. And many other queer people have been displaced internally, fleeing threats in their hometowns for larger cities where their pursuers are less likely to find them. Baranova acknowledged that if queer people all either leave the country or live in the closet, as she and others counsel them to do, “the movement will expire.”

Soloviova is one of those who’ve left the country. She first spoke to me in April from Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, but has since left Georgia. (She feared that country’s new propaganda law and also knew of three queer Russians who were attacked on the street.) She is from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk—Russia’s third-largest city—and said she’d never thought she’d live outside Russia until the extremism designation.

* * *

Even today, key details about the Supreme Court order remain secret. For example, the order refers to a list of 281 individuals and 40 organizations considered part of the outlawed movement, but no one knows who is on those lists.

“The hardest thing here is that you have no opportunities to protect yourself,” Soloviova said. “You never know if you’re going to be prosecuted or not, and you will know only when the police come to your house directly and get you to prison directly.”

The charges in Orenburg are the first to reach court, but police appear to be flexing their new muscles across the country. In February alone, Mediazona reported several raids on “private parties” and a night club. LGBTQ activists told me they knew about several other similar incidents but didn’t want to share details, fearing publicity would put those involved in greater danger.

The arrests in Orenburg are just the beginning, worries Stanislav Seleznev, a lawyer with the Russian human rights organization Net Freedoms Project. Regional security officials generally have quotas for making significant arrests, and now LGBTQ people are an untapped pool of so-called “extremists” that can help them reach their goals.

“I’m compelled to assume that we are currently witnessing a model process that will be spread as much as possible all over the Russian regions,” Seleznev said. “Many more people are in a very dangerous situation now.”

Additional reporting contributed by a Russian reporter who asked not to be named, fearing that this article could lead to their arrest under the extremism law.

Categories
Human Rights LGBTQ

Putin Is Showing Us What Homophobia Looks Like as a Weapon of War

The New York Times, March 15, 2024.

Oleksii Polukhin.

Oleksii Polukhin’s 64 days in detention began when Russian soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint. They found that he’d been gathering information about Russian military positions to share with Ukrainian forces; they also discovered he was gay. Mr. Polukhin gave a detailed account of his detention to Projector, an Odesa-based human rights organization. He also confirmed the details to me in a series of interviews.

It was May 2022, just 10 weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Polukhin lived in Kherson, a southern city of around 250,000 people that the Russians conquered with blinding speed in the war’s early days. Mr. Polukhin, rail-thin and then 22 years old, was on his way to take pictures of a May 9 “Victory Day” parade organized by the occupying forces, which he planned to send to a network sharing information from occupied territory. He had been keeping close track of the locations of Russian checkpoints, he said, but this new one caught him by surprise. He was forced to unlock his phone for the soldiers, where they discovered L.G.B.T.Q. Telegram channels, including one that he ran.

Mr. Polukhin recalled one of the guards calling him an anti-gay slur and forcing him to strip naked on the street. (This is a common practice by Russian forces, nominally to search for nationalist tattoos.) After he was dressed again, Mr. Polukhin said that the soldiers took the opportunity to humiliate him further, calling over a random passerby to ask what should be done with gays in his city.

“I think that all of them should be killed,” Mr. Polukhin said the man responded.

Once they’d had their fun on the street, Mr. Polukhin said the soldiers forced him into a vehicle and beat him, called him homophobic names and demanded he give up the names of other queer Khersonians. They drove him blindfolded on a roundabout route before dumping him at a detention center, which Mr. Polukhin guessed had been a Ukrainian police station. He said he was left to stew for a time in a holding cell with four other prisoners, who told him the guards had said he was gay.

A Russian soldier soon appeared with a red dress. “Wear it or we will beat you to death,” Mr. Polukhin recalled the soldier saying. He did his best to act unafraid, asking the soldier if he could also have a pair of matching high heels. Then he was taken for questioning, the first of about five times he would be interrogated during a detention that lasted just over two months.

The beatings weren’t the only form of inhumane treatment Mr. Polukhin was subjected to. Once, he said, Russian soldiers forced him to swallow pieces of a Ukrainian flag several days in a row. The Russians demanded he name other pro-Ukrainian and L.G.B.T.Q. activists; he said they had several names of L.G.B.T.Q. activists they’d already identified and wanted him to give up their locations. Mr. Polukhin said that they pressed him for the location of the offices of L.G.B.T.Q. organizations, one of which was raided two days after he was taken into custody.

Mr. Polukhin later learned he was held in a detention center at 3 Teploenerhetykiv Street, one of Kherson’s most infamous detention centers. Torture appears to have been common in facilities across the city, Ukrainian and international war crimes investigators have since documented, including waterboarding, electrocution and sexual violence that ranged from electrocution of the genitals to sexual assault.

Mr. Polukhin did not want to discuss with me many details of what he experienced. But he described the detention center as an environment where Russian guards coerced sex from detainees, such as requiring that they submit to sexual acts in exchange for the right to shower. Iryna Didenko, who oversaw sexual violence prosecutions in Ukraine’s office of the prosecutor general until late last year, told me Mr. Polukhin is one of 200 victims in a case against seven Russians currently in a Ukrainian court. That case involves alleged abuses including illegal detention, ill treatment and torture. Ms. Didenko said prosecutors are still working to bring charges in Mr. Polukhin’s case that would also include sexual violence.

I first interviewed Mr. Polukhin in January 2023, six months after he was released from detention and just two months after Ukrainian forces drove the Russian occupiers from the city. I was then a senior research fellow focused on queer people in conflict at the L.G.B.T.Q. human rights organization Outright International. Mr. Polukhin was the first queer survivor of Russian mistreatment I was able to speak to about the experience.

But it is now becoming clear that his story is just a first glimpse of Russian persecution of L.G.B.T.Q. Ukrainians. During a visit to Ukraine last fall, I also interviewed a lesbian who said she was twice detained and tortured by Russian soldiers, including almost being forced at gunpoint to have sex with another woman for her captors’ amusement. I also heard about a group of men who were pulled off a bus by a Russian soldier who found intimate pictures of two men on a cellphone and threatened to execute them before another soldier intervened.

These stories are among those documented in a new report released on Friday by Projector and Insha, an L.G.B.T.Q. organization in Kherson, with support from Outright. (I collaborated with Projector in my role at Outright.) This work is just beginning, Projector’s director, Vitalii Matvieiev, told me. There are 30 additional allegations not included in the report, including multiple reports of rape, because Projector is still working to verify them. Projector is also preparing affidavits for survivors like Mr. Polukhin to submit to the International Criminal Court, which it hopes will investigate whether Russians violated international law by targeting queer Ukrainians.

Investigators have a chance to build a case in Ukraine unlike anything ever before seen under international law: that persecuting L.G.B.T.Q. people constitutes a crime against humanity. The targeting of queer people in conflict — such as ISIS making a spectacle of executing men accused of homosexuality by throwing them off buildings — has received much attention in recent years, but no international tribunal has ever held that this kind of persecution violates international law.

Jurists have done painstaking work to make clear how existing international law gives the court the power to investigate persecution on the basis of sexuality and gender identity. It is time to use it. Regardless of whether investigations lead to prosecutions, queer Ukrainians deserve to have their stories preserved so that no one can ever deny how their community has been a casualty of President Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical ambition.

Vitalii Matvieiev, director of Projector, at the Odesa Commercial Court of Appeal.

In the past decade, Mr. Putin has taught the world a master class on using homophobia as a political weapon. Now he is showing us what homophobia looks like as a weapon of war.

Mr. Putin embraced a so-called gay propaganda law passed in 2013 to help shore up his flagging popularity at home, part of a rebrand of his political persona as a champion of the Orthodox Church, and a Kremlin ally backed an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. campaign in Ukraine to try to drive the country away from closer ties with the European Union. Mr. Putin personally leaned into global controversy around the law before the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, a chance to dismiss concerns about human rights and pluralism as the ravings of Western degenerates.

The Kremlin doubled down on this strategy when it launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian state media spread outlandish stories about L.G.B.T.Q. people — for instance, that a queer community center in Mariupol was “practically under the direct patronage” of President Biden and the U.S. Congress. Mr. Putin himself sounded increasingly unhinged as his invasion bogged down, describing the attack on Ukraine as a holy war against the West’s “reverse religion of real Satanism” in a September 2022 speech announcing that Russia would annex Kherson and three other regions.

(The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told me that Russia’s domestic anti-L.G.B.T.Q. actions are “a different story” from Mr. Putin’s rhetoric surrounding the war in Ukraine and that conflating the two would be like “trying to put separate stories into one basket.” He did not comment on the allegation that Russian soldiers have abused L.G.B.T.Q. Ukrainians. Russia’s Ministry of Defense did not respond to questions about the allegations in this essay.)

The war was an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state with its own culture and history, which the Ukrainian government has argued amounts to genocide. There is evidence that Russian forces are committing many other crimes in the process: the mass killings of civilians, as in Bucha; the forced deportation of children, for which Mr. Putin has been issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court; and widespread sexual violence against both women and men. All of these allegations must be investigated and punished.

But international law must also recognize that Mr. Putin’s war against Ukraine is an explicit attack on L.G.B.T.Q. people and name that as a crime, too. While Russia is far from the first state to persecute L.G.B.T.Q. people — Nazi Germany is estimated to have sent thousands of queer people to concentration camps — it is the first superpower to deploy homophobia as a major justification for invading another country.

International law has never punished L.G.B.T.Q. persecution as a crime. In the case of World War II, for example, the Allies not only did not mention such persecution in charges against Nazi leaders but also allowed West Germany to leave in place Hitler’s law against homosexuality when they purged other Nazi provisions from West Germany’s books. L.G.B.T.Q. people have been persecuted in many modern conflicts, in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example. While there was some effort to highlight these situations — the United Nations Security Council discussed queer persecution in informal hearings on ISIS in 2015 and on Afghanistan and Colombia in 2023 — it has so far been toothless.

But things could be different in Ukraine.

The top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, issued a groundbreaking policy paper in 2022 arguing that L.G.B.T.Q. persecution should be tried as a form of what international law calls “gender persecution.” Written by Lisa Davis, a special adviser to the prosecutor, the paper states, “At their core, gender-based crimes are used by perpetrators to regulate or punish those who are perceived to transgress gender criteria that define ‘accepted’ forms of gender expression manifest in, for example, roles, behaviors, activities, or attributes.”

But Mr. Khan’s office will have to prosecute someone for L.G.B.T.Q. persecution to find out whether this argument holds up in international court. “Gender persecution” has been controversial since the treaty creating the court was negotiated in the 1990s, and only now, two decades into the court’s existence, are the first gender persecution cases in progress in The Hague. Prosecuting gender-based violence is often challenging because victims may be reluctant to come forward. That can be especially true in cases involving queer victims. Even if they have left the region and are somewhere safe to come out, there are risks of retaliation against extended family at home.

That’s what makes Ukraine so important for investigators. While many Ukrainians remain hostile to queer rights, L.G.B.T.Q. people have been highly visible in Ukraine’s war effort, leading to real progress toward the protection of L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Ukrainian law. Ukraine is the first conflict in which L.G.B.T.Q. people are likely to be victims of persecution in an environment where they could be protected if they come forward.

That doesn’t mean finding these cases will be easy. Many people refused to be interviewed by Projector, fearing the Russians’ return or retaliation against relatives in occupied territory. Victims may also be discouraged by the fact that the Ukrainian judicial system simply doesn’t seem to have the capacity to investigate the sheer volume of war crimes allegations. An association of some of Ukraine’s leading human rights organizations reviewed a sample of Ukrainian war crimes cases and found that 50 percent were never investigated.

L.G.B.T.Q. people have an added concern. “We know from our experience and from the experience of our clients,” Mr. Matvieiev said, “that sometimes when you go to a police station and you want to place a statement or tell them about a case, and it is related to your sexual orientation, what you get is discrimination or homophobia.”

Queer Ukrainians’ distrust of law enforcement may be justified, suggested Gyunduz Mamedov, the former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine, who established the department’s war crimes and sexual violence divisions. Mr. Mamedov said he ordered investigations of L.G.B.T.Q. persecution in Crimea after Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014, but no one from the community would cooperate with them.

“We didn’t have a methodology or experience of that kind of investigation,” he said. “Frankly speaking, I think we were not psychologically ready” for that work.

Are prosecutors psychologically ready to do it now? I asked him.

“I am not certain of that,” he said.

The prosecutor who led Ukraine’s sexual violence unit at the time of my visit, Ms. Didenko, acknowledged that law enforcement must work harder to build trust. (Ms. Didenko has since been promoted to deputy director of the prosecutor’s department of international legal cooperation.) She said her office had done a lot to make it safer for victims to report, including running special training sessions for prosecutors to preserve the “human dignity” of survivors and working with nongovernmental organizations to build community trust.

To make things even more complicated, many of the reported victims of sexual violence by Russian forces in Ukraine are men, while resources to support sexual violence victims tend to target women. Men fear a different kind of stigma when reporting sexual abuse and that may be compounded for gay men, who may worry that others may think they deserved it — or, perhaps even more horrifying, that they enjoyed it. “Practically, in every case, there is a sexual abuse,” Ms. Didenko told me. “The law enforcement system was not ready to recognize all the signs of the abuse.”

Even within the queer community, people have been afraid to confide in one another, said Albina Yermakova, an Insha employee who stayed in Kherson during the occupation. “In the L.G.B.T.Q. community there was a certain paranoia,” she said. “You never know who will be taken to the basement,” she added. “You couldn’t be sure what could you handle yourself under torture — how could you be sure about your acquaintance?”

Albina Yermakova.

Projector is now preparing affidavits from Mr. Polukhin and other victims to submit to the International Criminal Court. Their accounts pose a challenge to international law: Is persecution on the basis of gender identity or sexuality even a crime?

Mr. Khan, the court’s third chief prosecutor, is the first to say he believes that it can be. But international law moves at a glacial pace, and its standards lag far behind many people’s expectations of it. No one has ever been convicted under international law for persecuting women on the basis of their gender, for example. That may change soon. A judgment is expected any day now in a case out of Mali concerning the alleged persecution of women while the city of Timbuktu was controlled by Al Qaeda-affiliated groups from 2012 to 2013.

But it will be a major breakthrough if Mr. Khan’s team successfully brings someone to trial for persecuting L.G.B.T.Q. people. Even seriously investigating cases of L.G.B.T.Q. persecution would be a big step forward.

Whether the court pursues these charges against Russian forces for violence against L.G.B.T.Q. Ukrainians hangs on many factors that have nothing to do with the horrors victims experienced, like broad legal strategy, the quality of evidence and how far up the chain of command accountability can be proved. Either way, prosecutors — as well as the press and the community of human rights groups — must work to seek out stories like Mr. Polukhin’s precisely because there are so many barriers that prevent victims from coming forward.

The time has come to treat L.G.B.T.Q. persecution as a crime against humanity. This won’t stop that persecution from happening, just as the World War II tribunals did not bring an end to genocide. Perpetrators believe homophobia will not only let them get away with their crimes but also rally people to their cause. Charges will be a clear signal that queer people belong in a democratic world — and that the demagogues using homophobia are the ones who should be considered pariahs.

Without condemning the motivation of this violence, you don’t get to the logic that drove these crimes in the first place. And the failure to name the injustices of the past encourages persecution in the future.

That, ultimately, is why war crimes tribunals matter at all. A century of experience shows they don’t seem to deter future atrocities, nor are they effective tools for punishing wrongs after the fact. War crimes tribunals can never make victims whole. They can’t bring back the dead, erase the scars or wipe away the memories that haunt survivors. Even when prosecutions are successful, only a handful of perpetrators are usually convicted, and such trials often take so long that the convictions feel like far too little, far too late. Perpetrators often escape justice for all kinds of technical, legal and political reasons that have nothing to do with the horrors for which they’re responsible. And no punishment can ever match the crimes.

But prosecuting and investigating crimes against humanity has a value that far exceeds the years perpetrators may serve behind bars. Law not only punishes crimes, it is also a tool for setting the world’s standards of right and wrong. In the wake of war, tribunals provide a forum for defining the values a society will uphold in peace. Investigations and trials give victims a chance to engrave their experience in the historical record so that no one can deny what happened to them. We cannot condemn crimes we do not name.

The world recognized this fact in the first modern war crimes tribunals, the ones following World War II in which persecution of a particular group — Jews — was tried. And look at the history that followed: Naming the Nazi genocide led to countless actions to ensure the world never forgets the Holocaust; institutions were built to document and preserve the stories of survivors around the world; the U.N. adopted the Genocide Convention, laying the groundwork for prosecuting similar crimes in the future; and offices were eventually created in many governments to combat religious persecution and antisemitism in particular.

World War II also showed what happens when we leave victims out. As many as 200,000 women and girls are estimated to have been forced into sexual slavery by Japan in the Pacific, for example, but this was not charged at the Tokyo war crimes trials that began in 1946, and the mass rape of women would not be treated as a serious crime under international law until the 1990s. L.G.B.T.Q. people were among the first victims under Germany’s Nazi regime; they were not publicly recognized as Nazi victims by a German leader until 1985, and West Germany convicted around 50,000 men before its law criminalizing homosexuality was abolished.

The U.N. initially recognized that international law might someday need to punish the persecution of a broader range of groups when it first proclaimed genocide a crime in 1946. “Genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns,” the General Assembly declared in a 1946 resolution, “whether the crime is committed on religious, racial, political or any other grounds.” The phrase “any other grounds,” though left out of the full treaty on genocide two years later, is a reminder that justice must always evolve.

There are significant differences between the targeting of L.G.B.T.Q. people and the genocide of a religious or ethnic group. But many campaigns against queer people we see now around the world — in countries at war and at peace — seem to have what Maria Sjödin, executive director of Outright International, has described as a “genocidal ideology aimed at eradicating L.G.B.T.Q. people from public existence.” Russia and other governments are not only imprisoning, torturing and killing queer individuals, or encouraging their citizens to do so on their own, but also attacking queer cultural and political institutions, silencing speech about queer history and rights and going after L.G.B.T.Q. people’s allies.

The stories we remember from the past are the foundation upon which peace is built. And that matters far beyond Ukraine at a time when anti-democratic forces are trying to erase queer people in many parts of the world. If the world forgets how homophobia was turned into a weapon in this war, what hope is there that queer people will be included in a democratic peace?

Categories
Far Right Human Rights LGBTQ

The Russian Plot To Take Back Eastern Europe At The Expense Of Gay Rights

Russia and its allies in countries like Ukraine are fomenting anti-gay sentiment in an effort to push back the European Union’s eastern expansion. “Now, the fight [is] between East and West, Russia and Europe — Ukraine is the field of the battle,” said one LGBT activist.

Posted originally on Buzzfeed News on November 9, 2013, at 9:51 p.m. ET

KIEV, Ukraine — In recent weeks, billboards with images of same-sex stick figure couples holding hands began to appear on the streets of the Ukrainian capital. The text warned: “Association with the EU means same-sex marriage.”

The group behind the posters is Ukrainian Choice, an organization funded by Viktor Medvedchuk, a wealthy businessman and former parliamentarian who is so close to the Russian president that local media routinely allude to the fact that Vladimir Putin is his child’s godfather. Medvedchuk created the organization with the sole purpose of lobbying against Ukraine strengthening its ties with the European Union — and is stirring up opposition to LGBT rights as part of the process.

Since passing the “homosexual propaganda” law this summer, Russian leaders have increasingly used opposition to gay rights — along with an ostentatious embrace of the Orthodox Church — to define the country in opposition to the West. Now its homophobic nationalism is moving west as part of Russia’s campaign to retain its influence in the former communist nations being courted by the European Union.

The big testing ground is Ukraine, which is currently in a tug of war between the two sides. The EU wants it to sign an association agreement deepening ties — and has been urging it to release a prominent political prisoner as proof it is ready to move toward the west. Russia wants it to join a Moscow-led customs union instead — and has been warning of dire consequences for Ukraine’s “traditions” if it decides to forego integration with Russia in favor of closer ties with the EU. At the end of November, EU and Ukrainian officials are due to meet in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius to sign an association agreement, formalizing bilateral relations with the bloc.

Russia has not been shy about its message. On Thursday, Alexey Pushkov, the outspoken chair of the Duma’s foreign affairs committee, tweeted that an agreement with the EU would mean “pride parades will be held instead of Victory Day parades” in the streets of Kiev.

“Now, the fight [is] between East and West, Russia and Europe,” said Olena Shevchenko, executive director of the LGBT advocacy organization Insight. “Ukraine is the field of the battle.”

Anti-EU protesters in Kiev have zealously seized on the LGBT issue as they rally against closer ties with the West. They have carried signs showing stick figures engaging in anal sex with slogans like, “Homosexuality is a threat to national security.” They chant, “v Evropu cherez zhopu,” a Russian rhyme that carries the rough meaning of “Fuck you and your Europe.” Its literal meaning: “Go to Europe through the ass.”

Last week, an NGO called the Parents Committee of Ukraine held a rally in front of the German embassy in Kiev under the slogan “Traditional values—ja!,, Homosexuality, nein!,” nominally targeting two German foundations it says promote homosexuality in Ukraine through grants to LGBT rights groups and the promotion of sex education.

Yet it was clear the rally’s target was bigger. “We oppose the signing of the association agreement with the EU, because it will lead to the inevitable homosexualizing of Ukraine,” said the group’s co-head Aleksandr Skvortsov in a statement posted on the group’s website. Activists from Ukrainian Choice also joined in the rally, wearing signs that read, “European values are gays, lesbians, and corrupting minors.”

Speaking to BuzzFeed at his Kiev office, Skvortsov said that in its current form, the association agreement would establish “the dictatorship of homosexuality in regard to the whole society” in which religious schools would be forced to employ “teachers who are … covered with rainbow flags” and anti-gay parents would be denied the right to adopt. He insisted that his group was not officially calling for the whole agreement to be rejected — it simply wanted amendments that would exempt Ukraine from having to comply with EU rules concerning “public morality.”

While it does encourage some reform on LGBT rights, the EU’s only explicit requirement in that realm is that countries pass legislation banning discrimination against gays and lesbians in employment as part of a broad package of human rights protections. Ukraine doesn’t even have to meet that obligation at this stage — that only comes into play at the next stage of integration, when countries seek to liberalize travel rules to Europe.

Even that is too much for some. Ruslan Kukharchuk, who leads Love Against Homosexuality, another of the most visible anti-gay organizations in Ukraine, said employment protection for gays and lesbians would start a chain reaction that looked like this: next would come a request for civil partnerships, then marriage, then adoption rights, and, finally, the criminalization of those who speak out against gay rights.

This “scheme is implemented in all countries in which they start from this first law,” Kukharchuk said. “We are doing everything not to implement this first step.”

Under current EU rules, same-sex marriage won’t ever come into play — the EU charter restricts it from regulating family law, and many EU member states still do not recognize same-sex marriages or allow gays and lesbians to adopt.

But EU pressure has been critical in keeping Ukraine from following Russia’s lead in passing a “homosexual propaganda” ban. A similar bill was first brought up in 2012 and passed an initial vote in the Ukrainian parliament with a vote of 289-61, uniting Ukraine’s infamously warring parties like never before. EU officials vehemently opposed it. Štefan Füle, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, said at the time that “such legislative initiative … stands in contradiction to the requirements of the relevant benchmarks” for closer ties with the EU. The bill stalled.

Then, this past July, just as negotiators were working out the fine print on Ukraine’s association agreement and locked in a tussle over whether President Viktor Yanukovych would release his imprisoned rival Yulia Tymoshenko, a Russian-leaning lawmaker named Vadim Kolesnichenko reintroduced the propaganda ban bill. Support for the bill is broad — it has six co-sponsors from different parliamentary factions, and had support from the Yanukovych’s parliamentary representative.

Lawmakers may disagree about whether to side with Europe or with Russia, Insight’s Olena Shevchenko joked ruefully, but opposition to LGBT rights is “the only thing that can unite our parliament.”

Despite the timing, Kolesnichenko maintained that the bill was not an effort to derail the treaty, nor was it inspired by Russia. “This is an issue of protecting of our society from corruption and from an attack on the foundations of our society’s spirituality and an issue of fighting for health — our country’s population is dying out,” Kolesnichenko told BuzzFeed. “I do not connect in any way with European integration.”

And yet, he argued that Europe’s desire to spread its pro-LGBT rights agenda masked a deeper desire for conquest: Since “the time of crusades, Western Europe has practically always fought with … Eastern Christianity,” Kolesnichenko said. “I do not really believe that in the past 15 to 20 years, Europe has drastically transformed itself and for some reason begun to love Slavic people from Ukraine.”

That kind of jockeying appears transparently political to EU officials.

“I don’t think the more pro-Western [politicians] would necessarily be that much in favor of LGBT rights,” said Ulrike Lunacek, a member of the European Parliament from Austria and co-president of its intergroup on LGBT rights and sits on its foreign affairs committee. “But it’s very clear that the more pro-Russian side is using the … propaganda law that [means] you’re not allowed to talk about LGBT rights to enhance their political situation in the country. Very often the politicians in these countries … [use] the argument against LGBT rights to cover up problems that exist on the economic level.”

Some EU policymakers fear that pushing too hard on a nation like Ukraine could backfire, driving it into Russia’s arms and losing the leverage to shape national policy whatsoever. The challenge is evident in nations like Armenia, which abruptly decided earlier this year to walk away from its EU association agreement and join Russia’s Customs Union. EU opponents, assisted by the country’s church, had run a virulently anti-gay campaign invoking much of the same rhetoric seen in Ukraine.

Yet in places where the government is firmly committed to the EU — or where national economies are far too dependent on Europe to walk away — EU pressure has empowered national LGBT movements far beyond what they could have achieved on their own.

Ukraine’s post-Soviet neighbor, Moldova, illustrated this dramatically in October, when it suddenly repealed a law criminalizing any information about “any other relations than those related to marriage or family” that had been enacted in June. The country is also looking to formalize closer ties with the EU in Vilnius.

Desire for EU membership has also helped enable pride parades throughout eastern Europe, activists argue. The government of the former Yugoslavian republic of Montenegro, which is vying for EU membership, mobilized half the small nation’s police force to protect the first gay pride parade in its capital city late last month.

“On the road to European integration, the government of Montenegro has shown its democratic capacity, [and the pride march] shows that Montenegrin society is maturing in the protection of all minorities, including members of the LGBT community,” Suad Numanović, Montenegro’s minister of human and minority rights, told BuzzFeed last month.

Despite Russia’s best efforts — which have included economic bullying through freezing Ukrainian imports and withholding gas shipments — the EU still has sway in Ukraine. Polls show that a narrow majority of Ukrainians prefer the EU to Russia.

“For 22 years [Ukraine] has been trying to join the EU,” Valeriy Patskan, a member of the pro-European Udar party, who chairs parliament’s committee on human rights, national minorities and international relations, told BuzzFeed. He had just come from a meeting with a European delegation on the human rights terms of Ukraine’s association agreement and was convinced a gay propaganda ban would never pass. “Adoption of one legislative act in order to disrupt all these 22 years of efforts by the Ukrainian state is not realistic,” he said. “Though a number of pro-Russian deputies will, of course, be raising such issues … for their own public relations.”

Despite Patskan’s optimism, and apparent evidence that EU efforts have helped derail legislative efforts to enshrine anti-LGBT laws, widespread homophobia has continued to grow on a social level, buoyed, activists say, by Russia’s rhetoric next door.

Several high-profile hate crimes have recently hit Ukraine’s LGBT community, and Amnesty International has accused the authorities of burying the cases. Pro-gay speech is suppressed through vandalism and violence. One video, posted to YouTube by a Ukrainian Choice activist, showed a group of young men spray-painting over posters against the propaganda law posted in a Kiev subway, apparently with the tacit approval of police.

Hate groups similar to ones that have gotten attention in Russia, including Occupy Pedophilia, also operate in Ukraine. And gay rights activists are prevented from holding street protests even without a propaganda ban.

When Insight tried to protest the proposed propaganda law on Dec. 8, 2012, Shevchenko, as its executive director, was suddenly summoned to an administrative court hearing at 10 p.m. on Dec. 7. At the late-night hearing, the court acceded to police demands and banned the protest because “the mass action may be viewed as provocative by conservative-minded citizens and groups which could lead to the threat of conflict.”

Organizers pushed back — and moved the protest to another location. Shevchenko was subsequently arrested for violating the “regulations for the conduct of meetings.” Seven other LGBT activists were also arrested, along with four counter-demonstrators who assaulted the activists with tear gas and were fined for “hooliganism.”

Nevertheless, activists keep hope that the LGBT debate may be inching forward. When a small group of activists defied a court ban to hold a pride parade in May, the police protected them from violent counter protestors. And on Wednesday, an LGBT activist made history by becoming the first openly gay person to address a parliamentary committee.

Bogdan Globa, a member of the LGBT group Fulcrum, told a parliamentary hearing on visa liberalization with the EU, “Today’s main appeal to you is, when you vote for the bill introducing the mechanism of non-discrimination on the grounds of ‘sexual orientation,’ you have to understand that the implementation of the EU demand is not simply [to satisfy] a requirement of the European Commission, it [affects] lives of young guys like me. And this is our chance to live in our country a safe and happy life despite our sexual orientation.”

J. Lester Feder is a foreign correspondent for BuzzFeed and 2013 Alicia Patterson journalism fellow.