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eng.kavkaz.memo.ru Caucasian Knot 16/6/2004 Human Rights Center Memorial to receive Nansen Refugee Award A press conference devoted to the 2004 Nansen Refugee Award will be held at the Independent Press Center on June 17. The report "About the State of Residents of Chechnya in the Russian Federation. June 2003 - May 2004" will be presented by the Migration and Law Network of the Human Rights Center Memorial at the end of the conference. The Nansen Refugee Award is presented annually to an individual or organization known for considerable achievements for the welfare of refugees. The Russian NGO Human Rights Center Memorial, which helped tens of thousands of refuges and internally displaced persons in the Russian Federation will receive this year's award. The award will be presented in Barcelona on June 20 to Svetlana Gannushkina, a board member of the Human Rights Center Memorial, head of the Migration and Law Network and a member of the Russian President's Human Rights Commission. Ella Pamfilova, chairwoman of the Russian President's Human Rights Commission; Oleg Orlov, board chairman of the Human Rights Center Memorial; Svetlana Gannushkina, a board member of the Human Rights Center Memorial, head of the Migration and Law Program and a member of the Russian President's Human Rights Commission; and Vera Soboleva, a spokesperson for the UNHCR office in Russia are expected to be participants in the press conference. Source: Memorial Human Rights Center (Moscow, Russia) eng.kavkaz.memo.ru Caucasian Knot 16/6/2004 Civilian population suffer from hostilities in Chechnya Human rights organizations, namely the Memorial Human Rights Center, the Council of Non-governmental Organizations, and the Chechen National Rescue Committee regional public movement, have conducted a statistical investigation of developments that took place in the spring of 2004 and revealed numerous violations on the part of the Russian military and officers of the Chechen president's security service towards civilians in the Chechen republic. 129 civilians suffered in hostilities on the territory of the Chechen republic in March. The number of civilians abducted, wounded or killed in April reached 186. 227 people suffered as a result of violations committed by Russian military men and Kadyrov's people in May. Source: Public organization "Chechen National Rescue Committee" Friday, June 18, 2004. Page 4. Dutch Will Sue MSF for Ransom Combined Reports ROSTOV-ON-DON -- Prosecutors investigating the abduction of Dutch aid worker Arjan Erkel in Dagestan have said that they will question people who were involved in his release, as the Dutch government confirmed it would sue to reclaim a ransom it paid for him. Investigators will soon question those who handled the release of Erkel, who was set free in April after 20 months in captivity, Vladimir Borisov, a duty officer at the Prosecutor General's Office in the North Caucasus, said Wednesday. The release of Erkel, who headed the North Caucasus operations of Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors without Borders, has sparked an angry exchange of accusations between the relief agency and the Dutch government, which confirmed Wednesday that it plans to sue to reclaim what it said was a loan of 750,000 euros ($900,000) to pay his ransom. The dispute led to widespread published reports that a ransom had been paid to the hostage takers -- 1 million euros ($1.2 million) in total. "We decided to take legal measures to get our money back," a Dutch Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said. She declined to provide further details, saying ministry lawyers were still deciding further action. The Dutch government said it had lent MSF the money on the basis of a verbal agreement that the agency would repay it as soon as it could. MSF denied this, and said it had not been involved in the talks for Erkel's release. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning aid agency said that the Netherlands claimed the credit for the operation, but started to threaten the group with cuts in government funding of aid projects when it refused to repay the money. The Dutch government publicly asked for the cash last month -- admitting for the first time that it had paid a ransom and triggering a bitter row with MSF, one of the most active foreign organizations in the North Caucasus. Critics said acknowledgment of the payment could heighten the risk of kidnapping for other relief workers. The Veterans of Foreign Intelligence, a group of former Russian intelligence officers that was involved in brokering Erkel's release, has said that no ransom was paid. (Reuters, AP) CHECHNYA WEEKLY Volume 5 Issue 24 (Jun 16, 2004) By Lawrence Uzzell Ingushetia: last camp closed, but many refugees reamain On June 10 the last remaining tents of the last remaining Chechen refugee camp in Ingushetia were dismantled in a modest ceremony. According to a June 11 article by Ivan Sukhov for Vremya Novostei, the authorities decided not to make a grand spectacle of the occasion. Some 576 former residents of the "Satsita" camp returned to Chechnya, while another 90 decided to seek other living quarters within Ingushetia. Even though the authorities have thus succeed in liquidating one of the most visible reminders that the war in Chechnya is far from over, many refugees still remain in Ingushetia. According to figures that Sukhov obtained from migration officials, some 18,610 Chechens are living in some 148 compact settlements such as warehouses or factories rented by Russia's Federal Migration Service. Another 18,357 are living in the private sector. Contradicting the authorities, Chechen human rights advocates claim that about 1,000 refugees are still living in tents scattered about Ingushetia in various small concentrations. "These tents are not so striking as the camps in the open field, and this is the likely reason why the authorities don't take them into consideration," said a leader of the Council of Chechen Non-government Organizations. Ramzan Kadyrov embraces collective punishment Ramzan Kadyrov is now threatening publicly to apply to all separatist guerrillas what previously he has denied doing: retaliating against their relatives. Once again showing his lack of political finesse, he said last week that he would even appeal to the State Duma to authorize his security forces to take such steps. Whether or not such a law is passed, Kadyrov seems likely to use such tactics anyway—as he already has done to compel the defection of Aslan Maskhadov's defense minister, Magomed Khambiev. As Natalya Serova noted on the Politcom.ru website on June 10, the Red Army used roughly similar methods to put down Muslim uprisings in Central Asia in the 1920s. Villages suspected of giving shelter to guerrillas were totally destroyed as an example to other villages. The young Kadyrov linked his sensational threats against guerrillas' relatives to a unilateral offer to amnesty any rebel fighter who surrendered within three days. As of the expiration of that offer on June 10, only one guerrilla had accepted it, reported Luiza Andieva and Vladimir Barinov on the Gzt.ru website. The combined amnesty/ultimatum, which apparently came as a surprise to other high-ranking officials in Chechnya's pro-Moscow administration, came at a June 7 meeting of Ramzan Kadyrov with the field commanders of the administration's security services—which in effect function as the Kadyrov family's private army. As quoted by Gzt.ru, Ramzan publicly said to the separatist guerrillas: "I am giving you three days. Think hard. Any resistance is useless. For a long time now the people have rejected what you are doing. But now you can still show that you are not totally cut off from our nation. Anyone who is not stained with blood will be amnestied. I know that many of you have decided to do this but that you are afraid of something. You don't need to be afraid of anything. If you are innocent, you are innocent. Do this not for the sake of anyone else, but for the sake of yourselves and of your own relatives. If you do not surrender within three days, I will personally take the harshest measures." On June 9, with just one day remaining in that three-day period, Ramzan reiterated the message: "[I]f rebels do not surrender by the end of the period, then we will discuss things with their relatives," he said. "If the relatives are helping the bandits, then they are bandits themselves." But the deputy head of the pro-Moscow administration's procuracy, Aleksandr Nikitin, seemed to contradict Ramzan's amnesty offer by pointing out to Gzt.ru that "the most recent amnesty was announced before the republic's presidential election last autumn, and its period has expired." "Today we are working strictly by law," Nikitin said. Also casting doubt on the amnesty offer was Rudnik Dudaev, secretary of the pro-Moscow administration's Security Council. He told Gzt.ru that one should not expect it to bring a mass surrender of rebels, and also suggested tactfully—or perhaps not so tactfully— that one should "consider Ramzan's age [he is 27 years old] and his emotional temperament." Yet another skeptic was an unnamed official of the federal military headquarters for the North Caucasus, who told the website that gestures such as Ramzan's "are not going to have any significant effect on the general situation." According to Gzt.ru, "federal authorities let it be understood that relatives of guerrillas in the highlands are not answerable for their actions—that is not authorized by any Russian law." Visradi Albasov, deputy chief of staff of the pro-Moscow administration's security services, told Gzt.ru that just one separatist rebel, whom he called "a high-ranking figure close to Maskhadov," surrendered during the period offered by Ramzan. "Death squads" active following Kadyrov's assassination Last week the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting published an on-the-spot report by a Chechen journalist who prudently chose to remain anonymous, establishing more clearly than ever that the federal authorities have been on a bloody "witch hunt" since the May 9 assassination of Akhmad Kadyrov. The new wave of repression has even affected northern Chechnya, previously considered to be relatively peaceful. In the northern village of Kalaus, reported IWPR, masked gunmen broke into a house on May 31, killing one occupant and kidnapping two others. As in the many similar cases in south-Chechen towns, the attackers' use of army jeeps many hours after curfew left little doubt about their identity. According to the IWPR article, "Chechens say they have seen a noticeable upsurge in violence since the May 9 assassination….In particular, they say that the Russian federal forces—and deadly units of masked men they call `death squads'—have become active once again." The article quoted a Grozny resident: ""The Russian security services have used the killing of Kadyrov as an excuse to step up the terror against us….Whatever Russian and local officials say, things have become much worse here since May 9—it's a veritable witch hunt. Russian security services are conducting 'clean-up operations' in Grozny and further south almost daily. Whatever you said about Kadyrov, he succeeded in reining in Russian violence. Now that he's gone they are out of control. Every day you hear about murders and people being taken away. A distant relative of mine works for the local branch of the Russian Federal Security Service. He is a lieutenant colonel, and holds a pretty high post. He told me that the Russian military and security agents have stopped listening to him since Kadyrov's death. Chechens serving in Chechnya's security agencies have been downgraded to a secondary role. The Russians are fully in charge." Shakhman Akbulatov of the Memorial human-rights center told IWPR that so far his organization knows of "19 deaths in Chechnya in May alone— six civilians, three armed guerrillas, two government officials, and one security officer." He stressed that those figures were "tentative and incomplete," and added that "during the same period, 25 Chechens were kidnapped." "The families of three paid a ransom, but the other 22 are still missing," Akbulatov said. CHECHENS AWAIT Compensation fro Stalin's deportation One point on which both unionist and secessionist Chechens are agreed is that the federal government should pay financial compensation to their countrymen who were victims of persecution under Stalin. The pro-Moscow administration's State Council has issued a statement complaining that among all the ethnic groups in the North Caucasus forcibly deported to Central Asia and Siberia during World War II, only the Chechens have not received financial reparations during the post-Soviet era. In 1993 and 1994, the neighboring ethnic groups in the region that suffered deportation—the Karachayevs, Kalmyks, Ingush, and Balkars— were granted compensation of 8,000 rubles for each person who had been deported, or who was born during the deportation period which ended in the mid-1950s after Stalin's death. The authorities estimate that by those criteria, some 54,000 current residents of Chechnya would be eligible for compensation. In addition to the ethnic Chechens now living within Chechnya itself, there is also a large Chechen diaspora elsewhere in the Russian Federation. Thus the figure of 54,000 is probably a significant underestimate—but of course the State Council in Grozny is primarily interested in its political constituency within the Chechen republic. Another difficulty is that the 1993-94 payments were authorized at a time when anti-Soviet sentiment was at a peak in Russia, in contrast to the current national mood of nostalgia for the Soviet superpower. On top of that, of course, the two Chechen wars and associated acts of terrorism, both real and alleged, have put ethnic Chechens in a class by themselves as targets of Russian ethnic bigotry. It is difficult to imagine today's Russian political elite, which is increasingly nationalistic and increasingly reluctant to face the moral reality of Soviet totalitarianism, providing any significant compensation for Chechens. Even if such payments could somehow be authorized, there would remain the practical question of getting them to their legitimate recipients via Moscow's and Grozny's infamously corrupt bureaucracies. The current experience of compensation payments for Chechen homes destroyed by military action is far from encouraging: Only a few families have actually received payments, and among those few, stories of extorted kickbacks to bureaucrats are rampant. Nevertheless, the State Council in Grozny declared that "our fellow citizens who were driven out of their historic motherland can expect from the authorities in the second half of this year some tangible results in compensation for their suffering." Once again, the pro- Moscow authorities may be raising expectations which are bound to be shattered in practice. BRIEFS CHECHNYA WEEKLY Volume 5 Issue 24 (Jun 16, 2004) By Lawrence Uzzell http://www.ingushetiya.ru/news/3686.html (quick tr. by N.S.) Two abducted [persons] were taken from a GRU's unit and placed in the Sunzha ROVD. Ingushetiya.Ru, 18.06.2004 00:52 On 17 June Ingushetian policemen completed a daring act at last. About 8 PM on the Kavkaz highway, the Ingush policemen blocked several automobiles with special-permits and special passes, which were driving in the direction of Chechnya. It was explained during checking of documents that those vehicles belonged to a special unit of GRU of the Defense Ministry of Russia. In a cab of one of the cars were discovered two detained local residents, chained by handcuffs, whom they've taken in Nazran and were moving them into Chechnya. In spite of shown opposition from the side of GRU agents, the policemen have taken those who were kidnapped and brought them into the Sunzha ROVD. GRU agents then went to Chechnya. It is possible to consider that those policemen have saved life to two inhabitants of the republic. So far not one person, who captured by this structure has come back alive.