Chechens Find Conflict They Fled Has Followed

It was a quiet June afternoon when the military trucks roared into the abandoned dairy farm, slamming to a halt in a cloud of dust. Twenty men in black masks fanned out into the yard, firing assault rifles in the air and quickly grabbing 19-year-old Adam Tambiev, a refugee from the warring republic of Chechnya, who was repairing his shoes outside.

Then Rustam Lichaev, a 25-year-old Chechen, had the misfortune to drive up. He had barely shut off the car engine when several of the men pulled him from behind the wheel and stuffed him into the truck too.

“If you had returned home to Chechnya earlier, this thing wouldn’t be happening to you now,” one of the men yelled to the assembled refugees before driving away. “You think you can sit it out here. Do you think we will not reach you here? You’re making a big mistake.”

Both men were eventually released. Ruslan Lichaev picked up his brother, unharmed, three days later in Grozny, the Chechen capital, and drove him back the 25 miles to what he had always thought was safety in Ingushetia, which had been a single republic with Chechnya during the Soviet era.

Now, he realizes, the masked man who took his brother was right.

“For the first time, we have a lot of people disappearing without a trace, even here in Ingushetia,” he said. “Obviously, they just want us to go back home, and it looks like we will have to.”

A year ago, the Russian government heeded an international outcry and abandoned its plans to close the half a dozen refugee camps that have sheltered up to 308,000 Chechens who fled the latest fighting, which broke out in 1999. Two wars over the Muslim-dominated republic of Chechnya’s attempts to separate from Russia have claimed at least 100,000 lives over the past decade.

Now, a much more subtle campaign -- three parts incentive, one part intimidation -- is pushing thousands of Chechens back home, a crucial component in the Kremlin’s attempt to establish an aura of normality before state-sponsored elections scheduled for the fall.

Nearly every day recently, busloads of refugees -- technically, “displaced persons,” since both Chechnya and Ingushetia are within the Russian Federation -- pulled out of camps and headed toward Grozny. Some trailed the buses in trucks carrying their household goods.

Since the conflict began, an average of 1,000 Chechens a month have returned home, both from the camps and from other accommodations in Ingushetia, according to U.N. officials. But in July the rate more than doubled, with more than 2,300 heading back across the border. Russian officials’ estimate is much higher.

Most appear to be lured by the Russian government’s recent promise of temporary housing and more than $11,600 compensation for their destroyed houses and household goods if they return home now, while the money is available.

But increasingly, Chechens who have sought refuge in this quiet region of cow pastures and potato fields, closer to Iraq than to Moscow, say the war has begun to spill across the border -- prompting a growing number of Chechens to question the point of staying.

During June, about a dozen Chechen men in Ingushetia were seized by masked, uniformed men in military vehicles in incidents strikingly similar to the one at the Nesterovskaya dairy farm. Refugees have reported beatings by masked intruders in military gear.

On June 10, an Ingush woman and her two sons were fired on by what they believed to be the Russian military while weeding their potato field about four miles from the Chechen border. One of the sons was killed, and the woman was partially paralyzed with bullet wounds to the head and spine.

Nor has the violence been all one-sided. At least 11 Russian soldiers have been killed in ambushes in Ingushetia since the beginning of August.

“People are starting to say the situation is the same. People get kidnapped, people get killed -- what is the difference?” said Usam Baysaev, an activist with the Russian human rights organization Memorial. “And the answer is, there isn’t any. So people say, ‘We might as well go back to our homeland.’ ”

Humanitarian organizations such as Memorial say the government is no longer trying to force refugees to leave but is exercising other means of persuasion: announcing that refugee camps will close in October and warning there might not be alternative housing before winter, and arbitrarily removing the names of families from the lists of those approved for food and medical supplies.

“The return of the refugees to Chechnya is an important component of this entire image of a political settlement in Chechnya that the Russians are trying to create,” Baysaev said. “There’s only one thing that spoils this rosy picture of a political settlement: the fact that there are tens of thousands of refugees who are still afraid to go home.”

Ingush President Murat Zyazikov, a former KGB general, has had to deal with an influx of refugees that overnight nearly doubled the half-million population of the tiny republic. Ingushetia, whose biggest industry is farming, now has the highest unemployment rate in Russia and daunting problems with traffic, housing and medical care.

Yet Zyazikov said in an interview that he is determined no Chechens will leave except those ready and willing to go.

“The most important thing is, the return is purely voluntary,” he said. “The government has not set any deadlines for the return of the refugees, no matter what is being said by anyone.”

At the Bella and Bart camps in Nazran, at least 800 Chechens left for home during the last week of July out of more than 6,000. Many cited the availability of new housing in Grozny, the offer of compensation and a general sense that security in Chechnya has improved.

“We saw other people leaving and decided it was time for us to go as well. We’re sick and tired of living on someone else’s land,” said Roza Tatrieva, 63, as she boarded a bus for Grozny.

But Tamusya Astamirova, 50, said people feel some pressure. “No one is telling you, ‘You must leave.’ But they behave in such a way that they make it clear: It is better to drop everything and leave now.”

On June 12, 18-year-old Kharon Yasaev came home from school to the makeshift home he shares with his aunt and other Chechens in an abandoned furniture factory in Nazran. He asked his aunt to fix him some lunch and went out to fill the water buckets for the household.

“I was frying fish, and the next thing I heard were the shouts outside and noises of people in the street. I haven’t seen him since,” said his aunt, Anna Bataeva. “When I went outside, there were masked military men who shut the gates, and people were shouting and crying and some of them were lying down on the ground from fear.”

Yasaev, she was told later, dropped his buckets and hurried away, but the men grabbed him, put him in their vehicle, and eventually took him and nine other men when they left.

The next day, Bataeva went to the police station, but no one knew anything of the incident. She got the same answer when she went to the Federal Security Service, the Russian equivalent of the FBI.

Finally, days later, Yasaev’s name appeared on a list of men in custody in connection with a crime investigation. Bataeva assured officials that her nephew had no connection to any crime; that if he had dropped his bucket and walked away, it was because he was scared.

“He’s just a schoolboy,” she said. “I know he wouldn’t have time for any bad things. He studies all the time. Of course I asked them why. But they don’t answer questions like this. They say either, ‘On the list,’ or ‘Not on the list.’ And they take no further questions.”

Yasaev was finally released after nine weeks in detention.

“What kind of safety can you talk about for any of us after what we have seen?” said a neighbor, Zalikha Gaysumova. “Safety is out of the question. We’re scared to death. We’re afraid this kind of thing could be repeated at any time. And what they tell us is, ‘Go back home, it’s safe to go back home.’ ”

Zarema Khamkhoeva and her 27-year-old Chechen husband, Buvaisar Khadisov, were renting a guest house in Nazran when masked military men broke down the courtyard gate and pounded their way into the house early on June 7.

They pushed Khamkhoeva to the floor, she said, and her 5-month-old daughter went flying, striking her head on a bed rail. Luckily, she was not seriously hurt. Khadisov they dragged out to the courtyard and began beating him in the kidneys. Then they took him away.

A day later, with the intervention of an influential friend, he was released in Grozny. “But he was in very bad shape,” said his father, Vakhid Khadisov. “They had beaten him severely.”

The village of Galashki, only about four miles from the Chechen border, was the scene of a skirmish between Chechen rebels and Russian troops last year, and army units are based nearby. That’s why Tamara Zabieva, 65, wasn’t surprised when Russian military helicopters swooped over the potato field where she and her sons were working June 10.

Zabieva, a native of Ingushetia, had no particular reason for concern. But as she and her sons got in the car and headed back to the village, a volley of gunfire hit it, shattering the windows. Umar, at the wheel, swerved and plowed into a tree.

When Zabieva regained consciousness, her sons were dragging her out of the car.

“I said, ‘It hurts, my entire body hurts,’ ” she said. “I said, ‘Put me down on the ground.’ And Umar, who is dead now, he started crying. He said, ‘Please bear it, please just bear it and hold on.’ And then I lost consciousness.”

Umar stayed with his mother while Ali went for help. But when he returned, Zabieva was lying on the ground and Umar was gone. His body was discovered the next day in a shallow grave in a nearby wood. It appeared he had been killed by a sniper rifle.

Zabieva, who was partially paralyzed from gunshot wounds to the head and spine, said she is sure the Russian army was responsible: “Who else could it be? The helicopters were making many circles around us, they were looking at us, studying us.”

Zyazikov, the president of Ingushetia, said he was unaware of any cases in which arrests were carried out by masked men without warrants.

“There had been a number of cases like that in the past, and I categorically banned the use of camouflage uniforms by the military and the police. Whatever agency does this should have official permission to carry out operations like this, and it should be done according to law,” he said.

He shrugs, as if to suggest that trouble can’t always be avoided when a small, peaceful republic sits next to a caldron like Chechnya.

“I do agree, there are some forces who would like to expand the conflict zone,” Zyazikov said. “But the war in Chechnya will never spill over onto the territory of Ingushetia. I’ve told all people that those who are eager to fight are welcome to go to the place where this is happening. We’ve got enough problems to deal with.”