What You Should Know about the Chechen Vloggers Being Hunted Down in Exile
By: Luke Teague
Oklahoma City — On February 27, an intruder broke into Chechen dissident Tumso Abdurakhmanov’s apartment in Poland and attempted to murder him. Abdurakhmanov subdued the assailant with the hammer the man brought for the attack and posted a livestream of himself interrogating the badly beaten attacker in his apartment. In the video, the man appears to say that his mother is being held hostage by the people who sent him, as translated by Caucasus-focused journalist Neil Hauer.
The crime that someone felt warranted Abdurakhmanov’s death? Anti-Chechen regime vlogging. Abdurakhmanov fled Chechnya in 2015 following persecution from the local administration. A prolific YouTuber whose videos attract hundreds of thousands of views, he has been perceived as a target for reprisal since fleeing Chechnya. In 2019, the head of the Chechen Parliament Magomed Daudov declared a blood feud with Abdurakhmanov and promised to have him killed.
Other Chechens living abroad have not been as lucky as Abdurakhmanov was last week. Last August, a former Chechen rebel was shot and killed by an assailant in Berlin, and earlier this month, another Chechen blogger was stabbed to death in his hotel room in Lille, France. Over the last 20 years, dozens of Chechen dissidents living in exile have been murdered in gruesome ways, and many, like Abdurakhmanov, live in their new countries without revealing their addresses and habits.
Tens of thousands of Chechens, mostly asylum-seekers, live in Europe today. Many fled Chechnya following the devastating Chechen Wars from 1997-2000. These wars were the result of Chechnya attempting to secede from the Russian Federation, and were conducted brutally by the authorities in Moscow, killing or displacing hundreds of thousands of Chechen civilians. Many Chechens living abroad are former separatist fighters and their families, living abroad to escape retribution from the current Chechen authorities, but some, like Abdurakhmanov, are journalists and activists who have fled the region within the last few years.
The Chechen region is currently governed by Ramzan Kadyrov. Kadyrov’s father, Akhmad, was a former separatist fighter who later aligned with the Russian government in return for being appointed President of Chechnya. Akhmad was killed in a bombing in 2004, and Ramzan assumed the role of Chechen President in 2007, at the age of 30.
It has been under Ramzan that the campaign of assassinations of Chechens abroad has largely taken place. His administration has been notorious for its brutality. In 2006, Human Rights Watch published a paper documenting the allegations of mass torture, disappearances, and assassinations directed by Kadyrov, and declared them to be on the scale of crimes against humanity. In 2017, the scope of the brutality made international news as Chechen militants linked to Kadyrov began a massive anti-gay purge in the territory, arresting and torturing hundreds of gay men.
Even non-Chechens are targets of Kadyrov, and have been the victims of high-profile murders. In 2006, after surviving an earlier assassination attempt, journalist and human rights advocate Anna Politkovskaya was shot to death in the elevator shaft of her apartment building. The men convicted of the murder were three Chechens connected to Kadyrov’s administration, but no official investigation occurred to find out who ordered the killing. In 2015, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down in central Moscow as he was walking across a bridge. The men later convicted for the murder were both Chechens with ties to Kadyrov, though once again, no investigation occurred into those ties.
The Chechen government does all of this with complete impunity from the central government in Moscow. Kadyrov is unofficially given free reign to conduct extrajudicial killings and brutal repressions in exchange for keeping Chechnya under control and loyal to Moscow. After Nemtsov’s death, Russian opposition figure Ilya Yashin stated that “Kadyrov stands above Russian law. Any attempt to remove him could start a new Chechen War… which is why he [Vladimir Putin] can’t solve the Kadyrov problem”.
As long as authorities in Chechnya remain unchallenged by the Kremlin, murders within Russia, like Boris Nemtsov’s, and successful and attempted assassinations overseas, like Tumso Abdurakhmanov’s, won’t end, and Chechens at home and abroad will continue living in fear of violence.