Mass arrests of gays began in Baku at the request of citizens

Фото: Depositphotos

“I haven’t lived a normal life here yet, I have nothing except a sick mother,” says one of the victims of the raid, a man named Rufat. He refused to give his real name to the press - for obvious reasons.

С with the BBC he communicates on the phone. He is crying and very scared. “I also have the right to life,” he says.

“On September 22, there was a knock on the door,” recalls Rufat. “We didn’t open it because we knew that one of our friends had already been detained. There were two of us in the apartment. I looked through the peephole and saw a lot of police officers and another friend of mine in handcuffs.”

According to Rufat, when he opened the door, the police immediately handcuffed them, and when asked to explain the reason for the raid, they replied that they “were not obliged to report to him.”

All the detainees, as Rufat says, were taken to the police station and taken to different rooms for interrogation: “They interrogated what kind of activity you were doing. I honestly told them that I am an artist.”

Four days in the basement

In the police station, the three detainees were lowered into the basement and were again taken to different cells, where Rufat was held for several days, at some point demanding that he point to his other gay friends.

“They brought one of my friends, whom I sometimes saw, and I pretended that I didn’t know him,” he says.

All this time, according to Rufat, his mother did not know where he was and thought he was missing. The young man was allowed to call home just before he was released.

According to him, one of his friends was released immediately, on the first day, but he himself was detained for four days, and another one of his friends still sits in that basement. Rufat says that he was beaten by the police, and besides, he was aware of several more such detentions.

"Don't dress like gays"

“It all started not now, but 10 days ago, in the evening, when several dozen people, homosexuals and transsexuals, were detained within two or three hours,” says LGBT activist Farid.

“They caught them in the places where they usually gather and meet - some were simply brutally beaten and released, others were taken to the police station,” he continues.

Also, the police visited the nightclubs, where they caught gays involved in prostitution.

“But we tried not to go into the clubs themselves, we caught them outside,” says Farid.

According to him, this happened in the Nasimi, Binagadi and Sabail districts of the Azerbaijani capital.

As Farid says, the police demanded a bribe from the detainees for their release, and also set a condition that gays should not appear in the city center and in crowded places. In addition, they demanded that they not dress “in such a way that their sexual orientation is clear.”

Фото: Depositphotos

Orientation as “disrespect for others”

The head of the press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Azerbaijan, Colonel Ehsan Zahidov, denied the charges of bribery and said that the reason for the raid was the numerous complaints of city residents.

“Some media and some people make it seem like the police are persecuting sexual minorities. In reality this is not the case,” he says.

“Those who do this secretly, secretly, whose personal life does not cause protest from anyone, the police have nothing to do with them,” says Zahidov. “Those whose behavior is demonstrative become a reason for irritation of others, a reason for complaints, and the police fight with them.”

According to Zakhidov, the reason for the raid was similar complaints and “disrespect for others” on the part of LGBT people. He also rejected claims of torture and said many of those detained posed a “threat to the health of others.”

According to him, the police sent some representatives of the LGBT community to the Republican AIDS Center, where five were diagnosed with HIV and syphilis, and another was diagnosed with only HIV.

Neither the Azerbaijan AIDS Center, nor the country's health ministry commented on this information.

Not a routine raid

“We learned about what happened from the media and at first decided that this was a routine raid against LGBT people, like there had been before, but then gays began writing to us in a closed group on Facebook, saying that they or their friends were detained by the police in the city,” — says a representative of a human rights organization Minority Azerbaijan Gulnara Mehdiyeva.

“It was clear that all kinds of people were being detained - both transgender and gay people, even those who were not involved in sex work, but worked in regular jobs,” she continues.

According to Mehdiyeva, from the complaints it becomes clear that people were detained around midnight, taken to police stations and fined there.

Mehtiyeva argues that this is the first case of harassment of representatives of the LGBT community of Azerbaijan of this scale.

“There have been cases in the past where transgender people who engage in sex work have had problems with the police, but this is the first time such a raid has been carried out,” she says.

According to a public organization report ILGA-Europe [The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Association, which monitors the rights of these minorities], Azerbaijan ranks the last 49-th place among European countries in the ranking of protection of sexual minorities.

According to the organization, Azerbaijan is seriously lacking shelters for victims of violence by LGBT people, and negative rhetoric about them is widespread in the society; crimes are committed against these people, they are not protected by the law, and even in the family they often don’t have to rely on support.

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