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Roma families may leave Ingushetia

By Umalt Chadayev

Early on September 11 unknown gunmen shot three members of the ethnic Roma Lyulyakov family - a father and his two adult sons - who lived in a house on Komsomolskaya Street in the village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya, which is located in Ingushetia’s Sunzhensky district.

The increasingly frequent murders of Russian-speaking residents of Ingushetia are seriously alarming the republic’s citizens. Aslambek Apayev, an expert on the North Caucasus who works with the Moscow Helsinki Group, told PW’s correspondent that Roma families may leave Ingushetia altogether.

"Yesterday the brother of Vasily Lyulyakov (the murdered head of the family), Pyotr Ivanovich, came to see me. He asked me to help him organize the funeral of his brother and nephews, who were murdered on September 11. During our talk, he described some of the details of the tragedy, and also said that the Roma who live in Ordzhonikidzevskaya (about 20 families, who include both local people and those who have arrived here recently) are likely to leave Ingushetia. People are very frightened," Mr Apayev said.

"According to Pyotr Ivanovich, three men in camouflage uniform and masks broke into his brother’s house late at night. They had pistols with silencers. They shot Vasily Ivanovich and his two sons - 19-year-old Yan and 26-year-old Pyotr. There were several women in the house at the time, and I think there were 13 children. The killers didn’t touch them,” the human rights activist says.

"The murder of the Lyulyakovs, as well as the shooting of members of the Draganchuk family, and of the Zubarovs, father and son, in Karabulak, the massacre of the Terekhin family in Ordzhonikidzevskaya, the increasingly frequent attacks on soldiers and policemen, and the gun and grenade attacks on military installations and the like, are causing profound alarm to all the residents of Ingushetia, whether they have roots here or not. People have no confidence in the future, and everyone is afraid that the same things could happen in Ingushetia as happened in Chechnya a few years ago," he says. “In my view, the situation in Ingushetia is being deliberately inflamed, and I don’t think it’s only serving the interests of the guerrillas. There are other, more powerful forces at work, which probably want to blow up the whole of the North Caucasus and have a second Caucasus war here."

Meanwhile, law enforcement officials say that since the beginning of the summer there have been around 40 acts of sabotage and terrorism in Ingushetia. And now attacks of this kind are becoming an everyday occurrence.

In the past twenty-four hours alone two more crimes have been reported in the republic. On September 11, the body of a police officer was found dead at his home in the village of Kantyshevo in Nazranovsky district, and early on September 12 unknown attackers fired hand-held grenade launchers at a cinema building.

(A,D)