Chechen authorities outlaw amateur singers

Only performers approved by a special commission can play live concerts and upload videos with songs on the Internet, the Chechen Minister of Culture has announced.

In the evening on July 15, the "Grozny" TV Channel showed an 11-minute special story entitled "Chechnya to cope with 'creativity' of pseudo-artists". In the TV story, Khozh-Baudi Daaev, Minister of Culture of the Chechen Republic, showed videos of amateurs who posted their songs on the Internet. "One would think what's wrong about that? They sing, and let they sing. However, the problem is that the people who listen to them always refer those performers to the Chechen Ministry of Culture," the author of the TV story explained.

The Chechen Minister of Culture himself explained that songs should be "allowed to go to the people" only with the permission of a special commission. "On the instructions of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, special commissions are created to check musical components of songs and words for their compliance. The commissions are to make a special decision. Only after a song is approved by a special commission, it has the right 'to go to the people'," said Khozh-Baudi Daaev on the air of the "Grozny" TV Channel. The author of the TV story has noted that songs are to be checked for compliance with the Chechen mentality.

The struggle of the Chechen authorities with amateur performers was criticized by Chechen blogger Tumso Abdurakhmanov. "Those young artists were banned from performing their songs not for reasons of concern for the Chechen traditions. They imposed the ban to eliminate competition," said Tumso Abdurakhmanov in the video "Chechnya fights with undesirable artists", also published on YouTube on July 15.

This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on July 16, 2019 at 04:12 pm MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.