Chechen Refugees Wary of Relocation Promises

A year after fleeing Chechnya to get away from marauding men with guns, Khava Saltamatova now fears different men -- those who come to her tent in a refugee camp with promises of help.

“They come from door-to-door and say, ‘We already have trucks to take you back whenever you’re ready,’ ” Saltamatova said. “They say there are new apartments waiting for us in Chechnya.”

And the men say something else that sounds both generous and ominous -- “There will be assistance for 2,000 of us.” About 4,000 people live in her camp, and the implication is that those who wait too long will be left with nothing.

Promises that sound like threats are the latest phase in Russia’s efforts to get refugees in the Russian republic of Ingushetia to go home, even as fighting in Chechnya continues.

More than 100,000 refugees are estimated to be in Ingushetia -- the equivalent of about 25% of the republic’s native population -- and their massive presence and sprawling tent camps are a visible reminder of Russia’s failure to end the Chechen war.

Some camps have become almost full-service communities, with new school buildings, spartan but clean medical clinics and social programs, including vacations for students and a foreign tour for a folk dance troupe.

In the months after the war began in 1999, Russia attempted to force refugees back, including towing railroad cars loaded with sleeping refugees toward Chechnya, which lies on the other side of a ripple of low hills from here. Last year, officials closed one camp, and refugees said soldiers fired volleys outside another.

Apparently stung by criticism, Russia has backed off from such methods and has promised that no one will be forced to return to Chechnya, refugees and human rights officials say. But Russian and Ingush authorities have not disavowed a statement last year that the camps will be closed, and the Kremlin is clearly eager to have as many as possible return by March 23.

That’s the date for a constitutional referendum portrayed as a major step toward restoring order and undermining the Chechen rebels who draw blood daily from Russian forces.

“Now, the government is being more sophisticated, more professional,” said Aslanbek Dakhkilgov of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Ingushetia, who monitors camp conditions.

Some men making the promises that refugees worry about make their pitch sound like a job recruiter urging someone up the career ladder.

“We tell them that job placement is guaranteed,” said Vakha Naliyev of the Ingush Migration Service, who works in a camp just up the road from Sputnik. “There are no kind of threats.... We propose that they return.”

Isa Saralayev of the Chechen Migration Council, an arm of the Kremlin-backed Chechnya administration, appeals to a sense of civic duty, saying a mass return of refugees could influence Chechnya’s future for the good.

The men who urge Chechens to go back also warn about the possible cutting off of natural gas lines that warm the tents. In one camp, the lines feed a communal kitchen where women and children gather to chat and bake bread and sweet rolls that they proudly thrust at visitors.

The refugees hear those warnings as threats, but Saralayev says it’s just a precaution in case owners of the land fail to deliver the gas.

Ingush President Murat Zyazikov says gas, electricity and water have never been cut off. But refugees say some camps have suffered sporadic outages.

Eliane Duthoit, U.N. humanitarian affairs coordinator in Ingushetia, notes that both Russia and the United Nations agree that refugees should not be forced back, “but what we need is a common understanding of what those words mean.”

Also, refugees living at a derelict dairy just outside Ingushetia’s main city of Nazran say authorities have refused to register many of them, making them ineligible for small welfare payments and raising fears that they could be driven away from their so-called “spontaneous settlement.”

Zyazikov says about 64,000 Chechen refugees are in his republic. U.N. agencies put the figure at about 103,000.

The refugees doubt the promises they hear from their mysterious visitors.

Rosa Murtazaleyeva, a dairy farm resident, said she had heard from relatives that refugees who had returned were getting food aid only every few months rather than regularly as promised.

Nor do they feel assured of a place to live. Usam Basayev, a worker for the human rights group Memorial in Ingushetia, said refugees had been told of families in Grozny that were ready to take them in, but when Memorial’s Chechen workers checked with these families, “nobody knew anything about it.”

Although about 500 people a month are returning to Chechnya, according to U.N. figures, most refugees appear determined to stay put, fearing broken promises and violence.

“At least in Ingushetia, no one is trying to exterminate me,” refugee Saithassan Astamirov said.

Ali Mutsuyev spoke passionately of wanting to see his homeland restored, but when asked if he would return to participate in the referendum, he snorted bitterly and swept his arm around his cramped room at the dairy farm.

“We’ve already participated,” he said. “We’re here.”