28
MAY
- 10
JUN
2009
Moscow Pride Claims PR Win
Violent suppression of gathering fails to dampen activist triumph
2
/
Human Rights
BY DOUG IRELAND
F
or the fourth year ina row, an attempt to have a Moscow Gay Pride March was vio-lently broken up by policeon Saturday, May 16, and40 LGBT activists werearrested. Still, Pride orga-nizers claimed a propagan-da victory.”Our goal was tohave the maximum vis-ibility with the minimumdamage to activists,” Nico-lai Alexeyv, the 33-year-old lawyer who has beenthe lead organizer of theseMoscow Pride events sincetheir inception, told Gay City News by telephonefrom Moscow. “By carefulplanning, we cheated thepolice, obtained a hugeamount of publicity for LGBT rights in Russia,avoided the homophobicthugs who were staging a counter-demonstration,and did so with no seriousinjury to anyone.” The Pride March had been banned by Moscow’shomophobic authoritarianMayor Yuri Luzhkov, whohas called such marches“Satanic” and recently dubbed gays “weapons of mass destruction.” Luzh-kov’s press spokesman,Serge Tsoi, told Russia’sNovosti press agency just prior to the Pride March,“The Moscow govern-ment is declaring that there never has been andnever will be a gay paradein Moscow,” adding that such events are “aimedat destroying not only themoral foundations of our country but deliberately provoking disorder threat-ening the lives and security of Moscovites and gueststo the capital.”Novosti also reportedthat “the Russian Ortho-dox Church and variousfar-right groups vowed tohalt any attempts to holda march in support of gay rights in Russia.” A police plan to sabo-tage the Pride March by staging a preventive arrest of lead organizer Alexeyev was foiled when the coura-geous young lawyer slept in different locations every night for the week preced-ing the event and con-tinually changed the cellphones he was using.Similarly, Alexeyev andthe other Pride organizershad originally announcedthe location of the dem-onstration as Moscow’sNovopushkinsky Skver (New Pushkin Square), but changed the actual loca-tion at the last minute to Vorobyovy Gory, a scenicgarden near Moscow StateUniversity that is a popu-lar site for wedding photo-graphs. To further mislead thepolice, Alexeyev told Gay City News, “I stayed sepa-rate from the main groupand arrived in a limou-sine with others disguisedas a wedding party, andshowed up with a comradetrans activist from Belar-us who was in a weddingdress. When the many journalists and TV crews we’d alerted spotted meand crowded around me,this diverted the attentionof the police, and allowedour buses carrying themain body of demonstra-tors to disembark andunfurl their banners.” Alexeyev was thrown to theground by five burly policeofficers, then he and his“bride” were carried into a police van. There were a total of some 80 demonstrators, Alexeyev said, “includingsome from cities all over Russia, like Yekaterinburg,Rostov, Krasnodarsk, Vol-godarsk, Minsk, Ryazan,and Sochi.” Among them were a handful of older vet-erans of the undergroundRussian gay rights move-ment of the 1980s, includ-ing a member of Russia’s Academy of Sciences anda nuclear physicist. Billedthis year as “Slavic Pride,”the demonstrators includ-ed a contingent of 15 LGBT activists from the neigh- boring ex-Soviet republicof Belarus. The demonstration was conducted in waves.First, the Belarus con-tingent arrived chanting“Homophobia is a dis-grace! “ After half of them were arrested and draggedaway by the police, anoth-er contingent unfurled a 25-foot banner reading“Gay Equality, No Com-promise!”Dozens of the dreaded,thuggish OMON riot police who had appeared on thescene chased the LGBT contingents through thegardens, dragging some of the demonstrators unnec-essarily through prickly hedges, and violently arrested half of them,including two Westerners who’d come to Moscow insolidarity with the Russianactivists.Britain’s best-knowngay activist, Peter Tatch-ell, head of the militant gay rights agit-prop groupOutRage!, was thrown tothe ground, and later saidhe’d been handled with“unnecessary violence, my arm was twisted behindmy back and my wrist wastwisted until it hurt.” At the 2006 Moscow Pride, Tatchell was violent-ly attacked and beaten onhis head by homophobicthugs acting in collusion with the police; he still issuffering the after-effectsof that beating, including bouts of vision problemsand short-term memory loss — which made Tatch-ell’s willingness to risk another beating in Moscow all the more courageous. Tatchell was arrested anddetained, but releasedafter a British Embassy official showed up at thepolice station. Also arrested was an American gay activist, Andy Thayer of Chicago’sGay Liberation Network. Alexeyev told thisreporter that “police beat the demonstrators unnec-essarily and used dispro-portionate violence. Fortu-nately, this time there wereno serious injuries.” At the police station, Alexeyv said, he and theactivists from Belarus were detained seperately from the other demonstra-tors, most of whom werereleased the same day after paying a fine, while Alex-eyev and the half-dozenBelarus activists were kept in jail overnight in what thePride organizer describedas “simply dreadful condi-tions. We were very cold, asthe jail cell’s window was broken, and we were not given blankets. Nor could we sleep, because there were only hard benches tosit on. Then, the police put a number of very drunk homeless people into our already-cramped cells, who urinated in our water bottle and made the deten-tion even more unbear-able.” Alexeyev related that he was interrogated for ninestraight hours without a letup. “There was no vio-lence used, but insteadan enormous amount of psychological pressure,”he said. “The police usedevery homophobic insult imaginable, saying that we were pedophiles, zoophiles,child molesters, and usingevery single vicious slangepithet for gay in the Rus-sian language.”In addition, Alexeyev told Gay City News, “My lawyer was not allowedto see me when he cameto the police station, andthey illegally confiscatedmy cell phone. They triedto get me to name thenames of my collaborators,and they downloaded andcopied every name andaddress in my cell phone’s
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Protesters arrested as Moscow’s OMON riot police sweep through the garden demonstration site.
MOSCOW
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