Members of Germany’s Chechen community say they’ve received a video featuring a masked man threatening to “correct” those who stray from Chechen traditions. The video is circulating on WhatsApp, an instant messenger network that’s enormously popular among the Chechen diaspora.
“Here in Europe, some Chechen women and Chechen men who look like women are doing terrible things,” says the man in the video, citing interracial marriages. According to the website Meduza, the video belongs to a Berlin-based group with as many as 100 members, who oppose smoking, alcohol consumption, and visits to dance clubs and public pools, among other decadent Western doings.
The group is reportedly led by Chechens who were once close to Dzhokhar Dudayev, the first president of the short-lived breakaway Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. In the past two weeks, men in this group have beaten up at least two Chechen women in Germany, Meduza says.
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