Many Chechens are still living in tent camps and refuse to go home, despite Russian government assurances everyghing is safe

REUTERS , Rassvet Tent Camp, Russia Thursday, Feb 12, 2004

PHOTO: Reuters : Chechen women walk along a path amongst tents in a refugee camp near the Ingushi town of Karabulak, near the border with Chechnya in Russia. Thousands of Chechens still live under canvas, four years after Vladimir Putin, then Russian prime minister, sent troops to smash the separatist government in the rebel region.

Masked men burst into the house of Iman Bagalova's daughter shortly after she moved back to Chechnya from a refugee camp.

"They taped up her mouth, they taped up her husband's hands. Then they stole everything, the television, the clothes, her jewellery. They even stole her shampoo," Bagalova said, brushing away tears of rage as she launched into her story.

"I have a 15-year-old son. How can I take him back to that?"

Bagalova lives in Rassvet camp, a muddy factory yard housing 165 tents near the border of Chechnya. She is one of thousands of Chechens still living under canvas four years after Vladimir Putin, then prime minister, sent troops to smash the region's separatist government.

President Putin -- who faces re- election next month -- refuses to negotiate with separatists, who kill troops on a near-daily basis, and insists the region is returning to normal. Authorities, keen to close down the tent camps, have been pressing refugees to go home for more than a year.

Washington expressed its concern last month in a sign of growing world attention to a conflict now more than nine years old. Refugees fear the camps are only being closed because they are clear symbols that there is no let-up in the violence.

"They are giving us a deadline to leave the camps by March. Why? Because on March 14 Putin has his election and he wants to show the world everything is fine down here," said Malika, 45, as she dismantled her tent in the Bart camp, nestled beneath the snow- covered Caucasus mountains.

Humiliated by armed rebels in a 1994 to 1996 war, Russia gave the region de facto independence. But after three years of chaos, Moscow sent the troops back in, vowing to crush separatism for good.

Some 70,000 Chechen refugees live in Ingushetia, a region on Chechnya's western border, and one in 10 lives in faded green tents like Malika.

Bart is no more than a sparse group of tents and huts in a rubbish- strewn field alongside the main road to Chechnya. It is due to close in the next few days.

"They are not actually forcing us to leave Ingushetia," said Malika. "But the Emergencies Ministry and the Chechen Administration say that if we don't do what they want, they won't give us what we need."

Authorities insist refugees, who rely on the government and aid groups for all essentials, may stay in Ingushetia once they leave the camps. But aid workers say little is being done to provide promised alternative housing.

"They are doing things in such a way that they can say there is a viable alternative, but on the ground they will do whatever they can to make sure shelter is not provided," said one aid worker, who asked not to be identified.

Many refugees say they will move to join Chechens living in abandoned buildings -- mainly old factories or collective farms dotted around Ingushetia -- when the tent camps are closed.

But rights groups say refugees outside the tent camps are vulnerable to official pressure to return to Chechnya.

"You can cut the gas or power by telling the owners, who are local people, to pay a huge bill," said Timur Akiyev from rights group Memorial, which has conducted extensive research into accusations of rights abuses by Russian troops in Chechnya.

"Refugees cannot stay in a factory without gas or power, they would freeze to death."

When refugees go back to Chechnya -- where groups like the Memorial cannot work freely -- they are very hard to monitor.

"If there are no more tents, rights groups and journalists will lose interest," said Ruslan Badalev, head of the Chechen Committee of National Salvation, a refugee support group.

"And then there isn't a Chechen problem any more -- the government can say whatever it likes."

Returning refugees receive 350,000 roubles (US$12,250) in compensation for lost property, said Malika Umayeva, deputy administrator of Bart camp, who fled Chechnya shortly after the army poured back into the region in 1999.

The sum is huge for people who have relied on aid from the UN and other humanitarian organizations for four years. But even for officials like her, it is not enough.

"I myself would be too scared to go home. I stayed in Chechnya during the first war between 1994 and 1996, I have already seen too much death," she said.

Ex-Chechen president Yandarbiyev killed

Friday, February 13th, 2004

DOHA, Qatar (AP) - Former Chechen President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, wanted in Russia for terrorist ties and linked to al-Qaida, died Friday after an explosion ripped apart his car in the Qatari capital, the Interior Ministry said.

Yandarbiyev, also a poet and children's author, was killed in the blast, which also injured his 13-year-old son, an official at the ministry told the Qatar News Agency.

A doctor at Hamad General Hospital said Yandarbiyev died en route, and his son was in critical condition.

They were the only two people brought to the hospital, the doctor said. Earlier, another official at the hospital had said earlier that two bodyguards were dead on arrival.

The Interior Ministry was investigating the incident, the news agency said. The Russian Embassy had no immediate comment.

Russia has been seeking the extradition of Yandarbiyev, who has been living in Qatar for more than three years. He was considered a key link in the Chechen rebels' finance network, channeling funds from abroad.

His death came one week after a bomb exploded in Moscow's subway, killing at least 41 people and injuring more than 100 others in a suicide attack that President Vladimir Putin blamed on Chechen separatist rebels.

Boris Labusov, a spokesman for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, a top KGB successor, said his agency had no involvement in Yandarbiyev's death, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.

Arab satellite channels Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya reported that two people were killed in the explosion.

Al-Jazeera said the explosion occurred after Yandarbiyev had prayed at a mosque in the upscale residential area of al-Dafnah, a northern suburb of Doha. He got into his private car, and the explosion went off at a road intersection 300 yards away.

The station showed a badly mangled and burned SUV, with only its white fender still recognizable. Security forces and a sniffer dog worked the area as a body, wrapped in white sheet, was loaded into a waiting ambulance.

Born in 1952, Yandarbiyev became vice president of the Russian republic of Chechnya under separatist president Dzhokhar Dudayev, and served as acting president of de facto independent Chechnya in 1996-97. He headed the rebel delegation to talks with then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin and then Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin in 1996.

Yandarbiyev opened a Chechen embassy in Kabul and a consulate in Kandahar during the reign of the hard-line Taliban militia.

The United Nations last year put Yandarbiyev on a list of people with alleged links to the al-Qaida terrorist network. The U.S. government also put Yandarbiyev on a list of international terrorists subject to U.S. financial sanctions.

Russian forces withdrew from Chechnya in 1996 after a disastrous 20-month war with rebels, leaving the republic largely lawless and running its own affairs. Troops swept in again in 1999 after Chechnya-based militants launched raids into a neighboring region and after some 300 people were killed in apartment building explosions that Russian officials blamed on Chechen separatists.

Yandarbiyev was a nationalist poet and children's book author, and he became one of the most prominent proponents of radical Islam among the rebels. He came in third in de facto independent Chechnya's 1997 presidential elections, behind moderate Aslan Maskhadov and fiery rebel Shamil Basayev.