The government of Kremlin-backed Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, who has said women should "know their place," has set up an official council to advocate for women's concerns. The initial appointees were seven men and one woman: Kadyrov's daughter, Deputy Prime Minister Aishat Kadyrova.
Chechen human rights activists say it's not a step toward greater gender equality in the North Caucasus region, long accused of trampling on the rights of women and minorities including the LGBT community. Instead, they assert, it's only for show.
The council was formed on October 1 to implement Russia's 2023-2030 National Strategy of Actions in Women's Interest, which, according to the state news agency TASS, aims to bolster women's health and social welfare and expand their role in the country's "socioeconomic development" and public affairs.
With little or no publicity, how the Chechen council plans to go about meeting that mission is unclear.
Rights activists charge that the status of women has only worsened since Russian President Vladimir Putin named Kadyrov Chechnya's leader in 2007.
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Defying criticism from the international community, Kadyrov has proposed legalizing polygamy, condoned the verbal and physical abuse of women by their husbands, allowed the kidnapping of an official's daughter from a domestic violence shelter, imposed a mandatory dress code on women, received what activists say are forced apologies by women who flagged problems in society, and presided over brutal intolerance of lesbian and bisexual women.
"There are thousands of such cases in the 20 years of Kadyrov's rule," veteran Chechen human rights activist Zainap Gashayeva, who now lives in Europe, said of attempts to suppress women's freedom of speech. "[Government] leaders also took part in this, and now, all of a sudden, they've decided to help them?"
None of the senior government officials who make up the council has ever diverged publicly from the policies of Kadyrov, who became first deputy prime minister of Chchnya following his father's assassination in 2004.
Kadyrov's son-in-law Adam Alkhanov, Chechnya's newly appointed health minister and the husband of another daughter, was named to head the group. Two other members -- Physical Fitness, Sports, and Youth Policy Minister Isa Ibragimov and Education Minister Khozh-Baudi Daaev -- are also distant Kadyrov relatives.
In March 2022, Ibragimov threatened to detain Chechen women who host livestreams or use social media at night. In a Chechen-language video, now deleted from Instagram, he warned, "I promise you a big, big surprise."
Daaev, for his part, has kept an eye on fashion and weddings.
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He earlier authorized government representatives to attend public weddings and ensure that they featured no nontraditional forms of dress or "unsuitable movements in dance."
Labor Minister Usman Bashirov and his deputy, Tamerlan Ibakov; National Policy, Foreign Relations, Information, and Press Minister Akhmed Dudayev; and Health Minister Suleiman Lorsanov complete the council roster.
Dudayev accused human rights workers of kidnapping Khalimat Taramovaya, a Chechen resident brought by force back from neighboring Dagestan, where she had fled to escape alleged beatings by her husband.
Aishat Kadyrova, 24, Chechnya's recently appointed deputy prime minister for social issues, likely will monitor the council's work, Gashayeva and fellow self-exiled activist and opposition politician Ruslan Kutayev said.
This year, to mark the official Chechen Woman's Day, state media on September 16 paraphrased Kadyrova as describing Chechen women as "the kindest, most sensitive, and caring in the world" but without mentioning the challenges they face or the planned council to defend their interests.
One of those challenges, according to some Chechens, is the imprisonment of women for their political views or those of their male relatives -- formerly a taboo, given widespread traditional views that women are under male protection.
SEE ALSO: Case Of Koran Burning In Russia Called A 'Cynical Provocation.' But By Whom?"Fifteen or 20 years ago, it would have been impossible to conceive of a judicial process in which people from the Caucasus would take part and imprison a woman for her political views," commented Zara Murtazaliyeva, who spent seven years in prison after being convicted of plotting to attack a Moscow shopping center in 2004. No attack took place, and some human rights activists charge that evidence against her was fabricated.
No exact numbers of women political prisoners in Chechnya are available, but Murtazaliyeva claims there are far more than are publicly known.
On October 5, the European Parliament condemned Chechnya for one such case. Zarema Musayeva is the mother of human rights defender Abubakar Yangulbayev and the opposition members Ibrahim and Baisangur Yangulbayev, whom Kadyrov has accused of terrorism and threatened to "eliminate." In January 2022, she was seized in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod by Chechen police and security officers and placed in custody in Chechnya. She was convicted in July 2023 of violence against an official and fraud, and has received a five-year sentence.
Aleksandr Cherkasov, a senior member of the banned Memorial Human Rights Defense Center, describes the prosecution of critics' female relatives as "hostage-taking" -- a step taken to pressure male targets.
The council is unlikely to address such matters, critics said. Gashayeva charged that members have no interest in the real problems and issues facing Chechen women.
"They want to show, in a European format, how great everything is going for them with women's rights," she commented. "Women's rights against threats and violence in the family, for instance, are unlikely to rise to the surface because of our mentality" that such behavior is a family matter.
Like other experts, however, Cherkasov cautioned against the stereotype in Russia that women from the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus are passive victims of abuse.
During Chechnya's separatist wars with Russian troops in the 1990s and early 2000s, human rights work depended primarily on women, who could address rallies without Russian troops considering them potential fighters, he noted.
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But Chechnya no longer contains any human rights organizations, commented an activist from the former Sintem center, a nonprofit that counseled abused women and children. Some closed after Russia's 2020 "foreign agents" law, while others shut down under threat of criminal prosecution or violence against them or, by extension, their families, she said.
"For the most part, women themselves worked on women's rights in Chechnya, and, so as not to cause trouble for themselves and their relatives, all organizations that had at least some human rights component were shut down," explained the activist, who declined to be named for reasons of personal security.
Only individual activists remain, she added.
In such an environment, Chechen women may well need a group to protect them from arbitrary officials, commented Kutayev. But an organization "that the authorities created cannot defend them from the authorities' arbitrariness," he added. "That's the paradox of all this."