#6
The Scotsman
December 12, 2002
Chechens fear returning home to death
TOM PARFITT
SLEPTSOVSK, INGUSHETIA

KHEDA Umayev huddles closer to the hissing gas stove and says: "If we go back to Chechnya now we are as good as dead."

Outside her icicle-fringed tent there is snow on the ground and the temperature is ten degrees below zero.

Mrs Umayev is one of 20,000 Chechens facing an uncertain future as winter closes in on refugee camps bordering their war-ravaged homeland.

In a move condemned by humanitarian organisations, Russia has stepped up its operation to resettle the refugees forcibly. They have lived in tent cities in neighbouring Ingushetia since the Kremlin sent troops into Chechnya in 1999, its second post-Soviet attempt to crush a drive for independence.

Camp inhabitants said yesterday they have been told they must leave by 20 December or face eviction by force.

Many potential returnees say their lives will be in danger if they are sent back to Chechnya, where there are daily clashes between rebels and Russian soldiers.

"My teenage sons never touched a gun in their lives but I know they will be beaten and kidnapped by federal troops," said Mrs Umayev, 38. "The best I could hope for would be to buy back their corpses from Russian soldiers."

Officials have for months insisted they wanted the refugees to return to Chechnya but their efforts moved into overdrive after Chechen guerrillas seized a packed Moscow theatre in October.

A total of 129 hostages died when Russian special forces stormed the theatre after three days to end the siege.

Russia's federal migration service says the camps in Ingushetia are used as a recruiting ground for rebels fighting the Russian army inside Chechnya. But EU and UN officials have blasted plans to get rid of all tent cities by the end of the month, saying the move would spark a humanitarian disaster.

"I will do all I can to have this decision suspended," Sergio Viera de Mello, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said last week. "It is not the moment to evacuate displaced people or force then to return to Chechnya."

Camp evictions began last Tuesday when a tent city near the Ingush village of Aki Yurt was dismantled.

About 500 inhabitants of the tent camp set out for Chechnya while hundreds of others fled to nearby barns and disused factories, according to human rights group Memorial.

"These places are absolutely unfit for human habitation," said the organisation's head in Ingushetia, Eliza Musayeva.

Refugees at Sputnik camp told The Scotsman they had been warned to pack their bags and leave by 20 December.

"Men came and said that if we leave now we can go in peace," said an elderly woman who was too afraid to give her name. "If not, they said our tents will be torn to pieces and soldiers will push us out by force. How can they do this to women and children in the middle of winter?"

At the gates to the camp - a sprawling mass of tents housing 7,000 people near the town of Sleptsovsk - interior ministry troops gathered but did not stop cars or pedestrians.

Camp residents said the military checkpoint was set up immediately after the hostage crisis in Moscow in October.

"Before that we never saw a soldier here in three years," said Musa Ibradimov, a Muslim priest who leads prayers at Sputnik's makeshift mosque.

Representatives of Chechnya's pro-Moscow administration have established bases in four camps and are mingling with residents, suggesting a brutal eviction will ensue if the refugees do not leave "voluntarily", he said.

"At the moment you will not see handcuffs or a bulldozer but the psychological pressure is huge," said Svetlana Gannushkina, a member of the Kremlin's own commission on human rights who is monitoring the situation.

Mrs Gannushkina said the push to close the camps reflects President Vladimir Putin's wish to demonstrate the situation in Chechnya has been "normalised".

"Clearly, that is a lie," she said.

The authorities have promised to set up temporary housing facilities in Chechnya, known by their Russian acronym PVR, and to pay refugees compensation once they are moved, but Mrs Gannushkina said the provisions were inadequate.

"These PVRs are already overcrowded and the money being offered is pitiful," she said.

Stanislav Ilyasov, a minister for Chechnya, said last week that each returnee will receive a state subsidy of 20 roubles a day (40 pence).

But refugee families told The Scotsman their worst fear was being killed or kidnapped by Russian forces during the army's regular "cleansing operations", known as zachistki.

Tamara, a 26-year-old from Grozny at Bart camp, said: "It's so frightening. My brothers are 17 and 21 and they would surely disappear. And I know the soldiers rape girls or take them away to their bases."

Russian forces pulled out of Chechnya in 1996 after a disastrous two-year war against the rebels but returned in 1999 following a guerrilla incursion into the neighbouring Dagestan region and a series of bombings blamed on the rebels.

Chechnya is closed to foreign correspondents but human rights groups say the army beats, kills and rapes civilians in sweeps designed to flush out guerrillas fighters.

"And this is the place they want to send us back to," said Mr Ibradimov, the Muslim leader at Sputnik. Some refugees would refuse to leave the camp despite the threats, he predicted.

"Even if they cut off our electricity and destroy our tents we will dig holes in the ground and live in them like our grandparents did in Kazakstan," he said, in a reference to Stalin's forced resettlement of Chechens to Central Asia in 1944.

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