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MOSCOW, July 29: The United Nations said on Monday it was indefinitely suspending its humanitarian operations in separatist Chechnya following the kidnapping there of a Russian aid worker employed by a local organisation.
A UN spokeswoman said Nina Davidovich, head of the non-governmental organisation Druzhba (Friendship), had been seized on July 23 in the breakaway province, where kidnapping for ransom has proved to be a lucrative business.
“We are stopping operations for two main reasons,” spokeswoman Victoria Zotikova told Reuters.
“The first is that our biggest concern is for the safety and security of our staff in the North Caucasus, and the second is that we are very concerned about Nina’s fate and we want to show solidarity with her, her family and her organisation.”
Druzhba works with the UN children’s fund UNICEF, running educational and social rehabilitation programmes for children affected by the conflict in Chechnya.
Russia’s FSB domestic intelligence service would not confirm Davidovich had been seized.
“The fact that she’s missing, much less that anyone has been kidnapped, has not been established...,” Alexander Potapov, deputy head of the FSB in Chechnya, told Interfax news agency.
Elsewhere in Chechnya, fighting raged on between Russian border guards and some 60 Chechen fighters who had tried to push their way into the republic from Georgia at the weekend.
Itar-Tass news agency quoted the border guards’ press service as saying troops had reinforced a blockade around insurgents in the Kerigo gorge. Interfax said on Sunday that nine rebels had been killed and two captured during fighting.
GUARDS KILLED: Border guards press secretary Sergei Ivanchenko said seven border guards had been killed and five injured. Casualties on either side are generally impossible to verify independently.
Chechnya won de facto independence from Russia after a 1994-1996 war, and kidnapping became rife in a region awash with arms, devastated by war and in the grip of feuding warlords.
President Vladimir Putin, then prime minister, used the lawlessness to justify the current military drive in 1999. Though Moscow says it controls Chechnya, its troops are constant targets. The past month has seen a new upsurge in fighting.
A spokeswoman for Druzhba told Reuters aid worker Davidovich had been seized between the villages of Dalinsk and Goragorsk, near the border with Ingushetia region.
“We have heard nothing yet, but we are waiting,” she said.
The UN’s Zotikova said all humanitarian programmes would be suspended indefinitely in Chechnya, and for two days in Ingushetia, where some 150,000 Chechen refugees are seeking shelter from the war.
“The only exception being that water distribution in (the Chechen capital) Grozny will continue,” she said. “This is indispensable for the survival of the local population.”
Last year, the United Nations and other aid agencies suspended Chechnya operations for more than a month after the kidnapping of Medecins Sans Frontieres relief worker Kenny Gluck in January. The American was released unharmed after 25 days.—Reuters
