Repatriation to Grozny is Moscow's bid to showcase 'normalization' of Chechnya

By MARK MACKINNON

With a report from Agence France-Presse

Friday, December 6, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A19

MOSCOW -- First, the police came with threats to cut off the refugees' supplies. Then the electricity went out and the water pipes ran dry, just as a winter cold front was descending onto the camp.

By the time authorities arrived to formally close the Iman refugee camp and drive thousands of Chechens back into a war zone, the residents knew they had no hope.

This week, all along the border between Russia and the Russian republic of Ingushetia, as many as 20,000 Chechen refugees face the same fate as the people of Iman, who were driven from their camp on Tuesday.

As part of its plan to showcase the "normalization" of Chechnya, the Kremlin has decreed that by the end of December, the people made refugees by the conflict must return to their homeland, though it is at war.

In the middle of a cold snap in which night temperatures fall well below zero, the government shut off water and electricity to several camps, telling the refugees to head back toward the shattered Chechen capital of Grozny, dozens of kilometres away, where gunfire can be heard almost every night.

Refugees who did not take the hint and leave Iman of their own volition were seen being loaded into trucks that headed into Chechnya.

"If people refuse to leave, their tents, which were recently replaced, are destroyed," refugee Rosa Gaytukayeva said. "They're telling us we can either return to Grozny, where there are no homes, or we can go stay at private homes in Ingushetia, where we would have to pay rent."

The Kremlin, which months ago claimed that the military phase of the Chechnya campaign was over, said the refugees are returning voluntarily. But at the same time it said the camps must be closed by the end of the year.

"The process of return is under way in accordance with the will of the people to return to the places of their former residence," Alexander Rostovtsev, regional head of the Interior Ministry's migration service, said in Ingushetia. His office said it has received tens of thousands of written requests from refugees asking to be returned to Chechnya.

However, most international observers said the refugees had little option but to co-operate, and some human-rights groups went so far as to compare the action to Stalin's mass deportations of several ethnic groups, including Chechens, in the 1940s.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, joined the criticism, saying it is "not the moment" for refugees to be returned to Chechnya. He said he would do whatever he could to get the Russian government to reconsider.

The Kremlin's insistence on closing the camps appears to be part of a propaganda offensive designed to mollify Western concerns about the Chechen conflict. Last week, a Russian general told a visiting group of foreign reporters that the situation in Grozny is normal, moments before an explosion in the centre of the city rattled his office windows.

According to Russian news-media reports, at least eight federal soldiers were killed in the previous 48 hours. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who rejects the idea of negotiating with the rebel leadership, hopes to hold a constitutional referendum in the breakaway republic in March that would ostensibly mark an end to the fighting.

However, Chechen rebel envoy Akhmed Zakayev, recently released by the government of Denmark after it dismissed a Russian request to extradite him on terrorism charges, said Mr. Putin eventually will have to go to the bargaining table.

"I am positive that negotiations are inevitable. I will do my best to achieve peace," he says in an interview published yesterday in the Russian newspaper Kommersant.