For Chechen Refugees, a Sad New Year

Spattered in mud that stunk with manure, dozens of exhausted Chechen women and scores of sniffling children huddled in the chill air Friday in this dirt-poor farming village.

They were too frightened to go inside. Just a mile away, at a bridge over the border between the quiet Russian republic of Dagestan and the breakaway enclave of Chechnya, helicopters and planes had been shelling for much of the sleepless night.

“The only humanitarian aid Russia sends us is bombs,” said Khadijat Aliyeva, a 29-year-old mother of four who fled the Chechen town of Shchedrin when Russian troops invaded Dec. 11.

Aliyeva’s plight is shared by more than 105,000 other refugees from the Chechnya conflict, according to official figures. Probably, there are far more. Most do not have to undergo the continued trauma of repeated shelling, but they share Aliyeva’s other problems--ailing children, poor diet, hellish crowding and complete dependence on the kindness of their hosts.

Russian officials, seeking to alleviate the suffering caused by their military offensive, say they have sent hundreds of tons of food to the North Caucasus region to help Chechen refugees.

But in the Dagestani town of Khasavyurt, temporary home to one of the biggest concentrations of Chechen refugees, local officials say Moscow has been no help at all.

“From the government of Russia we’ve gotten not one kopeck,” said Sultan Shakhralov, the Khasavyurt region administrator. City officials spent Friday packing thousands of sad little New Year’s treats for refugees--one orange, a bit of tea and cookies for each family.

Russia asked the U.N. refugee agency for help on Thursday, and U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali issued a statement from New York saying deliveries of limited quantities of relief supplies should begin soon.

But for now, most Chechen refugees appeared to be relying on the legendary Caucasian hospitality.

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“If we turn away guests, it’s an eternal disgrace,” said Buvasyar Temirov, mayor of Akbulatyurt.

A village of about 400 people who depend on cattle and sheep for their livelihood, Akbulatyurt is now awash in more than 1,000 refugees, mainly from Shchedrin in eastern Chechnya. Homes that normally house families of six or eight are crammed with 30 or 40 people, almost all of them women and children.

After nearly three weeks of crowding and a particularly bad night of shelling, most of the women were on the verge of tears Friday. Sometimes they were tears of despair, sometimes tears of anger.

“What have we done to Russia, to be treated like this?” asked Patimat Kimayeva, the natural leader among a group of a dozen women.

“Let (Russian President Boris N.) Yeltsin come fight with us in hand-to-hand combat--six of his will die for every one of ours,” she said. “But he shouldn’t do this to women and children. He just hates all of us Chechens.”

Aliyeva chimed in: “We came here to save our children, but we’d rather be fighting with our husbands.”

For now, however, the refugee women and children have their own battles to wage--for simple urvival and basic health in conditions tailor-made for disease.

Dagestan is already known as prime territory for cholera after a major epidemic over the summer that led Russian officials to quarantine the entire republic of 1.7 million people. Diphtheria and tuberculosis are also prevalent here, and vaccination rates remain extremely low.

At Khasavyurt’s central farmer’s market, where shoppers sank ankle-deep in filthy water as they passed stands hung with hunks of freshly slaughtered mutton, a prominent sign read: “Cholera! An extremely dangerous communicative disease.” It went on to describe cholera’s symptoms and beg residents with intestinal problems to go immediately to a clinic rather than trying to cure themselves.

Doctors in Khasavyurt said they have already turned up one case of cholera and more than 60 cases of mange among refugees, as well as a small but growing number of tuberculosis victims.

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They expect the situation to get worse, especially as homes get more crowded because of the flow of refugees escaping Russian attacks on the Chechen capital of Grozny.

“Even without refugees, cholera has not been conquered,” said Anvar Azamatov, chief doctor of the Khasavyurt region. “There is some danger it will return.”

Azamatov said health officials have been making the rounds of all the houses throughout the region to check on refugee health. They have found more than 250 ill people.

Many of the Chechen refugees refuse to give their names, he said, because they fear that Moscow plans to deport them in a replay of the mass exile inflicted on the Chechen people by dictator Josef Stalin in 1944.

Memory of that deportation--in which hundreds of thousands of Chechens are believed to have died--remains strong among today’s Chechens, and the resulting distrust of Moscow has hindered Russian efforts to organize the refugee flight from the war zone.

Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin designated reception centers for refugees in five nearby Russian cities, but few Chechens appeared to be taking advantage of them for fear that, despite Russian guarantees, they would never be allowed back home.

Khasavyurt officials said they could manage without Russian help, as they have so far, by gathering tons of flour, meat and sugar from other regions of Dagestan.

But they complained bitterly that Russian blocks on border crossings in the Caucasus region, purportedly to prevent arms reinforcements from reaching Chechnya, were keeping international aid from reaching the refugees.

Shakhralov, the Khasavyurt regional administrator, said three trailers of aid from the International Red Cross had been held up for two weeks on the Dagestani border with Azerbaijan, as well as a shipment of medicine from the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders. In addition, he said, 100 tons of food sent by Moscow had been waylaid by Cossacks and may never arrive.

Some Chechens were so bitter against Moscow that they would not take aid from Russia anyway, according to Vakhid Kasimov, deputy head of the Khasavyurt region.

“They say ‘Russia sends us bombs and then gives our children cookies,’ ” Kasimov said.

But in Akbulatyurt, where refugees have been eating little but bread and potatoes for nearly three weeks, women had different ways of expressing their defiance.

They taught their children phrases like the one proudly offered by 13-year-old Dzhibrail Yahutov as he stood among a pack of children on the muddy street: “Let Yeltsin have his vodka and Chechnya have its freedom.”

Patimat Shamilova, a Shchedrin woman who gave birth to a girl on Dec. 17, went even further. In honor of President Dzhokar M. Dudayev of Chechnya, she gave her new daughter the name Dzhokar.