Chechen Women Face Increasing Pressure to Adopt Islamic Dress

In June, I wrote about the increasing practice in Chechnya of firing paintballs at women who hadn't fully covered their hair with headscarves. Police officers were responsible for at least several of the attacks; they would drive by on motorcycles, shoot the "offending" woman, and film the incident on cell phones to increase her public humiliation.

Recently, the pressure on Chechen women has increased. During the first days of Ramadan, groups of men in traditional Islamic dress claiming to represent the Islamic High Council of Chechnya accosted women in the capital of Grozny. They would approach women deemed to be dressed inappropriately (a relative term which could refer to anything from a bare forearm to a skirt not far enough below the knees to revealed hair), shove fliers describing appropriate Islamic dress in their hands, and publicly humiliate them by shouting, touching their bare skin, and yanking on their clothes.

All of this behavior is condoned by Chechnya's president, Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen rebel turned Kremlin loyalist who has made a neat little bargain with Moscow to keep rebel activity in line in exchange for complacency in Chechnya's increasing shift towards extreme Islamist policy. In 2007, Kadryov stated that all women employed by the government must cover their heads at work. The measure was not made into a law -- a step perhaps too controversial for Mr. Kadyrov to risk at that point -- but might as well have been. When Natalya Estemirova, a a Chechen human rights activist, announced on a Russian TV station that Chechen women were being forced to wear scarves she was summoned by Mr. Kadyrov and violently cursed at; later, she was murdered.

Kadyrov, meanwhile, has responded to the paintball incidents by declaring that he approves of such action and that any girl who "behaved so inappropriately" as to encourage this humiliation should just "disappear from the face of the Earth." In a July 3rd, 2010 interview, Kadyrov stated that he would happily "award a commendation" to men who took part in the public humiliation and accosting of women, as the groups of men had done during Ramadan.

For its part, the Kremlin does nothing, giving Kadyrov "total carte blanche" to violate Chechen law according to Tanya Lokshina, a Human Rights Watch researcher in Moscow. So Chechen women find themselves increasingly subject to public humiliation and threats to their safety, not to mention their jobs and educations if they fail to comply with the unofficial dress code. These attacks on Chechen women's rights are frightening and illegal, and point at a dangerous future for Chechnya.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons