GROZNY: Despite presidential elections, which it is hoped will bring peace and order to the warring Chechnya, refugees sheltering in the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia still fear they would face too many dangers at home.
There are some 71,000 refugees in Ingushetia, as registered by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC). Some 15,000 chose to trek home this year, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP). However many of those returned home reluctantly.
“They still kidnap people over here, but we were forced to go back for our children’s sake,” explained Khava Sulambek, whose family exchanged the tent they occupied in an Ingush shanty-town since the war’s onset in 1999 for a room in a Grozny apartment house for the displaced.
Her chief reason for their return, Khava said, was to make sure her six-year-old son Salman could go to school, instead of “being sick in a tent all winter long.”
But she found the war-torn Chechnya, with its daily toll of kidnappings and summary executions, hardly a safer place.
“We have not noticed any notable changes in the displaced people’s security concerns,” said Jonathan Campbell of the WFP in the Ingush capital of Nazran.
Authorities had earlier promised that the constitutional referendum in March and presidential elections, which swept Chechnya’s pro-Russian chief Akhmad Kadyrov to controversial victory on Oct 5, would mark a turn for the better.
However “the situation on the ground has not improved,” an international organization official said, and locals echo the sentiment.
“What change are you talking about? They kidnap, kill and steal like before,” a worker at a Grozny hospital scoffed.
Popular rumours attribute many of those crimes to Russian troops or armed groups under Kadyrov’s own control, while rebel guerrillas continue to target the federal army and pro-Russian administrators in daily attacks.
The desire to return mixes with fear in those who have eked out an existence in Ingush refugee camps for over four years since Russian troops stormed into Chechnya, launching a new outbreak of hostilities.
Azza Bytyeva and her two sons shelter on a dozen square metres, a quarter of a tent pitched in the Alina camp close to Ingushetia’s border with Chechnya.
Many refugees returned home under the Ingush authorities’ relentless pressure, but “this is mainly true of women and the elderly. It is much harder for men considered of combat age,” Campbell explained.—AFP