MOSCOW, Jan 17: The UN High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers on Thursday urged Russia to cut back its military and police presence in Chechnya in order to boost confidence among Chechen refugees throughout the region.

“A reduction in the number of troops and an easing of the police control regime in Chechnya would enable Chechen refugees to return from Ingushetia,” the envoy said, quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency.

Lubbers, who held talks with Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov and other senior officials, visited Ingushetia on Wednesday and spoke with some of the 150,000 Chechen refugees living in tent camps there.

Refugees told him they would not return to their homeland until human rights abuses by Russian forces came to an end.

The Russian minister charged with rebuilding the shattered southern republic, Vladimir Yelagin, admitted that “problems with safety” were a main cause for refugees preferring to stay away.

The reluctance of refugees in Ingushetia to return to their homes “remains the biggest problem”, he said at a meeting with Lubbers, cited by ITAR-TASS.

Russia currently has about 40,000 military and interior ministry forces in the republic, where it launched a crackdown in Oct 1999.

The forces are frequently accused by human rights groups of abuses against the civilian population who stayed behind after hundreds of thousands of Chechens fled the fighting and bombardments in the early stages of the conflict.

Visiting Moscow for the first time since he succeeded Japan’s Sadako Ogata at the head of the UN refugee body last year, the former Dutch prime minister is expected to meet Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov before his departure on Friday.

His talks with Gryzlov focused on helping Chechen refugees and the tens of thousands of internally displaced persons to return to their homes within the republic, an interior ministry spokesman said, quoted by ITAR-TASS.

The Russian authorities have been encouraging refugees in Ingushetia to return to their homeland to give the impression the situation there is now normal.

There has been little response among the refugees, however, and Ingush authorities have pledged that no displaced Chechens will be repatriated against their will.—AFP