Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Plight of Displaced Chechens in Ingushetia
Nearly three years ago, the Russian authorities began a campaign to repatriate around 150,000 displaced Chechens living in Ingushetia – a republic neighbouring war torn Chechnya. Today, approximately 34,000 people remain in Ingushetia, having resisted all attempts to be pushed home. For some there is simply nothing and nobody left to go home to. For others it is just too dangerous and they refuse to return to the chaos under any circumstances.
The international medical aid organisation Médecins San Frontières (MSF) continues to give support to those who are left behind, providing both basic medical care and psychological counselling. Mark Walsh, who works as Information Officer for MSF, visited the region earlier this year and witnessed the desperate plight of forgotten people living without hope.
Springtime is slowly clawing its way into the Caucasus as our team drives in convoy across the republic of North Ossetia towards Ingushetia. The long straight avenues lined with birch and elm trees are dotted with small smouldering bonfires every 500 metres or so as schoolchildren sweep and gather the previous autumn's leaves and stack them along the side of the road. After we cross into Ingushetia we will see young conscript soldiers sweeping the sides of the roads for mines. With winter now over, some people are beginning their sixth year in exile and there is still no end in sight to the conflict which forced them to seek refuge here. In 2002 this refuge became an embarrassment for those who sought to sell the idea of a 'normalisation process' of Chechnya to the foreign community and the Russian public, so the Kremlin decided to close the camps and push as many displaced people as possible back into Chechnya. Sprawling refugee camps symbolized war and their absence would give the impression that the war was over. In April 2002 there were over 150,000 displaced people in Ingushetia. Now there are only 34,000.
'When they come in the middle of the night with their masks and guns and pull us out of the bed where we are sleeping with our husbands, I only tremble, thanks to you guys. I guess I've learnt to cope better'
As we drive, we gaze out the window at the surrounding landscape. The earth looks like a raw wound from which the white bandage of winter has just been removed. In the distance, the majesty of rolling hills starting to get green belies the inhospitality of this region. Shootouts are a daily occurrence and bombings, ‘clean-up operations' and disappearances are routine. The first settlement we visit lies in the remote area of Karabulak, miles from the nearest town. Small, 20 metre square wooden shelters stand in rows in the shadow of a former oil factory which now produces vodka. When we arrive, a group of women approaches us to ask who we are. Men and teenage boys stay out of view until it is clear that we don't present a threat. Males from 14 to 60 are regularly targeted in the 'clean-up' operations. The wife of the settlement's caretaker invites us into her small shelter for tea. Pictures cut from glossy magazines plaster the walls showing a life of glamour and luxury a far cry from their existence in this hut. The roof proved harder to paper over and a tapestry of damp and mould hangs above our heads. As she carefully lays the table, Fatima begins talking about her twenty one year old son, Hamzat, who is slightly mentally handicapped and is unable to fend for himself. Normally he would have been institutionalized at birth but the conditions in such institutions are so abominable that she couldn't bear the thought of him being there. 'I know that I haven't got much to offer him here but it is better that he runs around here in the dust and the dirt and we are able to protect him than for him to be locked up,' she tells us.
While our hostess pours us tea and insists we eat pancakes, her son is trying to lift one of our Ladas in order to impress our drivers. After much effort he manages to lift one wheel of the car off the ground. The drivers applaud. 'Strong as an ox,' his mother comments while looking out the door, 'but also as simple'.
A few months ago, a team of MSF psycho-social counsellors began working here and Fatima decided to seek counselling. She says that as a result she has calmed down and she is able to breathe easier. Before she used to get angry at everything. Now for the first time she laughs and says demurely, 'when they come in the middle of the night with their masks and guns and pull us out of the bed where we are sleeping with our husbands, I only tremble, thanks to you guys. I guess I've learnt to cope better.' Fatima's general health is not in good shape. Recently when returning from her daily eight kilometre trek to a dairy farm, where she supplements her meagre pension by milking sixteen cows, she collapsed unconscious on some railway tracks. Her invalid son went out searching for her and fortunately found her before the arrival of a train.
At two or three in the morning, the helicopters begin their sorties and the silence is intermittently broken by the distant sound of missile and gunfire.
We are joined by Fatima's neighbour, another participant in the psycho-social programme. She moved here a couple of years ago from Komsomolskaya in Chechnya after her husband was killed by masked gunmen in their front yard. Both her young children witnessed their father being killed and both are now receiving counselling. One of them, his hair bright red and his face a mass of freckles plays outside. He recently began to open up and discuss his experience. His brother, however, is still too traumatized to talk to anybody since his father's murder and stays at home the whole time. So far there has been no reaction to the counselling. We see him shyly peering from behind the curtains of his house.
As we travel on along the narrow roads we are regularly overtaken by cars with dark tinted windows and no number plates speeding at over a hundred kilometres an hour. They hurtle along forcing everybody to veer onto the hard shoulder for fear of a head on collision. Passing through checkpoints with impunity, such untraceable vehicles increase the atmosphere of fear which permeates this region. It becomes easier to understand how people disappear and are ghosted across borders with such ease.
Another settlement is situated in an abandoned industrial complex. We are shown around by Aslan, who left Grozny in 1999. His house was destroyed and nothing is left but the foundations. He applied for compensation but received nothing and doesn't believe that he will receive it. Occasionally he gets some casual work but it is nearly impossible to find full time employment. He and his family survive almost entirely on humanitarian aid. The father of fourteen children, he has two rooms and a kitchen. He has been through two wars but he claims the second conflict differed from the first in that it was complete chaos and absolute violence. It became impossible to differentiate who was fighting whom. 'Now people disappear without a trace and there is no way of finding out who is behind the abductions,' he tells us. ‘The authorities say there is no war and people can go home and receive compensation. But once you go home there is no compensation and the questions begin, with identity checks in the middle of the night and passports being confiscated.' The last time he visited Grozny to investigate the possibility of receiving compensation he was stopped with his teenage son at a checkpoint and arrested. Without knowing why, they were kept in a detention centre for 13 days, beaten and humiliated before being released without an explanation. As word spreads that there are foreign visitors, women start knocking on the door of Aslan's hut and immediately begin reciting a litany of complaints. They talk over each other as their despair overcomes them and tears begin to flow. A middle aged woman called Zara asks us pointedly whether we belong to another fact finding commission that is going to take a look around and then go away and do nothing for them.
To make ends meet, most are left to make a choice between joining the pro-Kremlin police, becoming a criminal or joining the rebels. There is little room for a middle ground.
Zara has been living there for six years and suffers, like many refugees, from high blood pressure. She tugs her dress at the shoulder to display an ulcer, one of many which cover her body. Occasionally she returns home to Chechnya for a funeral but she finds it impossible to sleep. At two or three in the morning, the helicopters begin their sorties and the silence is intermittently broken by the distant sound of missile and gunfire. 'I end up crawling under the bed scared witless and murmuring to myself that I'm lucky to have an overcrowded hovel in Ingushetia. At least there I am able to sleep,' she confides. The woman beside her takes her turn and asks us for help in locating her brother who went missing on a trip to Astrakhan in November. He was working for the police in Grozny and went to Astrakhan for a medical consultation. He never came back. I asked the woman why her brother joined the police when it was surely one of the most dangerous occupations in Chechnya. She replied that a whole generation has grown up knowing only violence. They know how to shoot a gun better than anything else. To make ends meet, most are left to make a choice between joining the pro-Kremlin police, becoming a criminal or joining the rebels. There is little room for a middle ground. She wonders what people in the west think of this conflict as it appears to her that they have been forgotten. Two weeks later the EU and the US refuse to introduce a resolution criticizing Russia over Chechnya at the 61 st session of the UN Commission on Human Rights.
It soon becomes clear that everyone is sick and everyone needs something. One woman needs an operation for a sick child, another needs a new cooker and beds for her children. The men ask about the possibilities of employment with our organization. They begin pulling out C.V.s. Engineers, school teachers, librarians, all dreaming of the chance of even a day's labour. Highly qualified men begging for employment.
We drive on to a settlement in Tanzila. We are immediately overwhelmed by the putrid smell of animal flesh. A large open space is strewn with the hides of dead cattle and horses and pools of blood fill the muddy potholes that pockmark the ground. To the right is a dark shed where five or six men are moving the hides with pitchforks, covering them in salt and then tossing them onto a pile. This is the first stage of a tanning process. The finished leather will be fashioned into garments somewhere else to finally adorn the window's of Moscow's boutiques. Swarms of flies fill the air. It turns out that all the men are being paid 200 roubles a day (about four pounds) for eight hours of this work. Later we meet one of them – Bizultan - as he is coming home and he invites us into his eighteen square metre dwelling where he lives with his wife and four children . It turns out that he is a doctor from Grozny. Originally he worked as an anaesthetist during the first war but the hospital he worked in was blown up. He then worked as a medic in an ambulance until he found work in another hospital but that was blown up too. Not long after the second war started he was stopped at a checkpoint and accused of being wanted for murder. He professed his innocence and was told by the smiling soldier that the only way he could prove it was by paying a 500 rouble bribe. 'I'll never forget that smile. Fortunately I had the money and I paid it. But for me this was the breaking point as I could have ended up in prison accused of murder because I didn't have 500 roubles on me that day. It was then I decided to move my family here'. When he began looking for work in Ingushetia as a doctor the best offer he got was in a hospital offering 800 roubles (about 16 pounds) a month. He turned it down.
'As you can understand, it makes no sense for me to work for that sum of money when I can make 200 roubles a day here. It's not everyday as there is a queuing system but a couple of times a week is better than nothing. Unfortunately, there are too many people and there is too little work'.
One of the few highlights of our trip is a visit to a local kindergarten in Sleptsovskaya where Chechen children dance and sing for us. Chechen culture and identity is very important to the parents and teachers and I learn that most of the boys list dancing as more important to them than football. As the teachers beat out a rhythm on the tables and shake tambourines, the young girls and boys perform the Lezginka while we clap in time to the music. One parent comments: 'Our children are the future. We have no future. Every fifty years they come and try and kill us. Hopefully our children will not have to endure what we have. Unfortunately, I think they will have to go abroad for that to happen' I talk to one of the nurses working for MSF about the main illnesses afflicting people in the settlements. She recounts a litany of maladies: respiratory and cardio-vascular diseases, anaemia, gastro-intestinal diseases. But she adds: 'Recently it is the absolute sense of despair and hopelessness which is proving hardest to treat.' (*) In order to protect their identities, people's names have been changed
Mark Walsh is Information Officer for Médecins San Frontières (MSF).
top
of the page