Dec 19, 2002 MOSCOW

A United Nations humanitarian official expressed concern Thursday that Russian authorities are continuing to pressure Chechen refugees to leave their tent camps in neighboring Ingushetia and return home.

"Officials continue to go through camps encouraging people to go home," said Toby Lanzer, head of the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Russia. "We continue to monitor and we continue to be concerned."

At the same time Lanzer said Russian officials, who had earlier set a target of late December for closing down the camps in Ingushetia, were no longer speaking of concrete deadlines and have engaged in "constructive" dialogue with U.N. officials.

Officials closed down one camp near the Ingush village of Aki-Yurt earlier this month and have pledged the close the remaining five camps in Ingushetia, which house an estimated 20,000 refugees from the Chechen conflict. The closures are part of a Kremlin effort to show that the war is winding down and that life in Chechnya is returning to normal.

Russian officials insist the process is voluntary, though human rights groups say the refugees are being forced to abandon the camps. "In the case of Aki-Yurt, we did think that people had been coerced," Lanzer said, adding that officials turned off gas supplies to the camp and made refugees leave on a day of subzero temperatures. "The movement of those people could not be considered voluntary."

Of the 1,700 refugees from the camp near Aki-Yurt, less than 40 percent have actually returned to Chechnya, Lanzer said. The majority have remained in Ingushetia and are now living with host families, in makeshift shelters, and in primitive adobe huts.

Many refugees say they have no desire to return to Chechnya, where Russian forces and rebels clash daily and Russian troops continue to carry out so-called "security sweeps," rounding up people suspected of rebel ties. Human rights groups say the sweeps are rife with abuses including illegal detentions, rapes and killings.

The Associated Press