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Obstacles to Humanitarian Aid in the Northern Caucasus (1)

Oscar Braun, special to Prague Watchdog

Not only a continuing guerrilla war, drawn-out in an intricate chaos, but also crime, omnipresent bribery and corruption and mostly mindless violence – this is the picture of North-Caucasian Chechnya in the agonies of the second devastating war of the past decade. Tired of the dragging conflict, the Russian military command apparently loses control of the situation. It reacts with an intense irritation, urging keener vigilance from the army and a resolute conclusion to the “anti-terrorist operation.” The work of relief aid agencies, doing their best to help the war victims in the region, is extremely difficult as they are forced to overcome many a puzzling obstacle.

A mere attempt by an international humanitarian organization to enter officially the territory of the Russian Federation brings about unbearable bureaucratic procedures. The registration of such an organization (a sine qua non for the issuing of humanitarian entry visas for its representatives) takes many months. Relief agencies that want to react quickly to any disaster or humanitarian crisis in Russia either have to be well-based in the country (e.g. renowned organizations such as Médecins Sans Frontiéres or Médecins du Monde), or have influential and able friends. The last and easiest option, although illegal, is to evade awkward Russian laws and start working on one’s own accord. Thanks to Russia’s legal jungle, this does not seem to be such a risky business. Taking into account the steady growth of Russian bureaucracy, it is the only way for ”newcomers” to launch their humanitarian activities quickly. If the opposite is the case and you don’t want to run the risk, you might end up in a two-year red-tape hassle of being sent from one authority to another with only one outcome: by the time you receive all the necessary permits and documents, your help in a particular region is no longer needed.

Small humanitarian agencies in particular take the risk and choose the ”illegal” way of starting their work in Russia. This means entering Russia on an ordinary business or tourist visa and establishing a base in a particular region for the launch of its programs. Only then comes the time for a step-by-step legalization of activities. Some fifty percent of the thirty humanitarian organizations, currently operating in the Northern Caucasus, are still mired in the seemingly never-ending registration process. Registration often requires distressful dealing with vigilant and anxious Russian officials born into red-tape. The usual registration procedure mostly starts with hours of studying indigestible Russian laws. In the end you may be lucky enough to find out that you are obliged to deliver to the Registration Department of Russian Justice Ministry a bunch of documents concerning your organization, its structure, statutes, bank accounts and letters of recommendation. Even if you make no mistakes, it is not yet time for you to celebrate. At this moment, you are at the start. You are welcomed by a friendly clerk only to enter a lengthy process of painstaking verification by the Russian state authorities and secret services of your credibility and ability to do your job in the Russian Federation.

Any humanitarian efforts in the Northern Caucasus automatically mark all foreigners as spies who use relief missions to disguise their espionage intentions. The spirit of the Soviet times, when any foreigner coming to the East raised suspicion, has not yet been rooted out in the new-born Russia. Having a constant subconscious view that your work conceals espionage machinations, Moscow as well as Caucasian bureaucrats are not only highly suspicious of your motives, but also miss no occasion to remind you of them. This is a fact you cannot change and it is much better to leave it as it is right from the start. Russian ”civil servants” (let alone secret policemen whose influence on their civilian colleagues has not changed much since Soviet times) cannot be satisfied even by the long-term transparently humanitarian activities of your agency. You are a foreigner, so you must be a spy. Case closed!

In better cases, after months of hesitation and verification, the officials get into the mood of doing you a favor and you are granted your registration. This may happen thanks to the activities of the Russian Ministry for Emergencies (MCS), whose task it is to provide ”evidence” on your recent activities. The MCS is quite highly esteemed among the humanitarian community.

If you’re unlucky, your documentation disappears in the Russian bureaucratic juggernaut without explanation for why your registration procedure is hindered or why and by whom your application has been rejected. But even then, do not panic. In the legal chaos that is Russia it is still possible to muddle through even without registration. It is however a bit riskier.

Problems obviously increase when entering the Northern Caucasus. On one hand, its people have been well-known for their hospitality and traditional friendliness toward foreigners. On the other hand, decades of Soviet communism and ten years of war and violence have left their mark on the region. Some of the side effects are a common mistrust towards hard earned money as well as a disproportion between work done and the expected reward. In other words, the Northern Caucasus has always been rich in raw materials of high quality (oil and natural gas). The chemical industry, developed in the region, brought huge sums of money to hard-working people as well as to pushy speculators. However, the vast majority of the population remained quite poor, often unemployed and suffering in the Soviet and later the Russian economic anarchy where wages and pensions as well as social benefits were not paid. And if the payments occasionally came, the only beneficiaries were those shoving others around who had the necessary contacts.

The last decade of the 20th century, full of violence, robbery, plunder and the tragedy of two devastating wars against Russia, deepened this social gap. People got used to the fact that there is almost no work in the region (Ingushetia and Chechnya have faced a long-term unemployment rate of more than 80 per cent), and even if, by pure accident, they came across some work, they believed money will be paid not to those deserving it but to those who cheated, robbed, speculated and falsified documents. To put it in a nutshell, people lost their trust in a fair reward for their work. As a result, everybody tries to get as much as they can, whatever the cost. However, this does not mean in the slightest that all Chechen and Ingush people are crooks and floaters. There are so many fair, good natured and hard-working people in the Northern Caucasus. But the chaos and destabilized economy results in a total lack of opportunities to make a decent living and thus a lot of people turn their attention to one of the major potential financial resources – to the foreigners who, not familiar with the area, are often an easy prey for dishonest intentions.

The unofficial main base of humanitarian organizations in the region is the capital of Ingushetia, Nazran, situated some 35 km west of the Chechen border. Apart from the tens of thousands of Chechen refugees scattered around the whole territory of Ingushetia (approx. 150 000), in the residential area Targim lives a small community of international humanitarians, carefully fostered by a number of local employees. All foreigners, having arrived in the Northern Caucasus for the first time, are moneybags that should be treated with openness, extreme kindness and omnipresent smiles. The main objective for a number of locals, however, is to profit from their presence in as short a time as possible.

A classic example of this phenomenon is a situation, where an inexperienced humanitarian is taken care of by a large local family who provides the basic services. And family ties are a key aspect of solving any problems. The humanitarian is happy, as quite soon accommodation problems are solved, cars and various equipment provided, relief aid projects are starting and seem to move on thanks to the willingness of the locals. But the illusion is blurred when it comes to pay day. Your driver asks for 1,000 rubles (cca. 35 USD) a day without hesitation. Together with various bonuses this can add up to as much as 1,000 USD a month. Similar salaries are usually paid by rich foreign journalists who only make short trips looking for a quick and often cost-what-it-may lift. However, there is a tacit agreement among local drivers that similar sky high prices (often ten times higher than the norm) are asked from any foreigner looking for their services.

A lack of experience and a loss of control of your ”assistants” may result in your driver making over 800 dollars a month, your bodyguard the same, and also your other helpmates claiming unrealistic salaries. Moreover, among your employees there are almost exclusively members of one family. In practice this means that should you need someone for a certain task or job, your local assistants will recommend only another member of their clan as the most exceptional and the only professional in the particular area. The pitiful fact is that although the streets are teeming with people of good skills and abilities, you can make no use of them because they are not members of the family clan you cooperate with. There have been, for example, several instances of humanitarian workers staying at the Assa hotel in Nazran, controlled by one family, spending huge amounts of money on their own security as well as on exorbitant rewards for their employees. Stories of two humanitarian organizations whose coordinators and consequently whose operations were fully controlled by an Ingush family clan, that decided the needs and priorities, are rather notorious among the humanitarian community in the area.

To give some precise information: a reliable driver in Ingushetia earns 150 – 200 dollars a month. A bodyguard’s salary is slightly higher and if he occasionally works also as a driver, a monthly salary of 300 – 400 dollars is reasonable. A Russian state school teacher receives no more than 2,000 rubles, or 70 dollars, but when working for a humanitarian agency, their usual salary is 2,500 – 3,000 rubles, about 90-100 dollars a month. Last but not least, to rent an office and accommodation in a safe place with a reliable telephone connection, which Nazran’s residential area Targim can offer, will require between 400 (a small house) and 900 USD (a two-floor residence). To pay 1200 USD a month, which has also been the case of some organizations, equals swallowing the hook dangled by the locals. The prices may obviously vary according to changing offers and demands. However, big changes are quite rare. To pay over the odds means wasting your or someone else’s funds, which should be primarily targeted at the victims of the humanitarian catastrophe. The urge to profit from the presence of foreigners, or from their ignorance of local circumstances, is, however, a world-wide issue and their initially limited knowledge will obviously increase with time and experience.

The Northern Caucasus (Chechnya and Dagestan in particular) are notorious for kidnappings of foreigners and huge ransoms. In the past five years Chechnya had one of the highest concentrations of kidnappings and murders of foreigners for whom their relatives, employers or governments paid exorbitant amounts of money, often without reward.

The real kidnapping boom came after the end of the first Russian – Chechen war in 1996 when the atmosphere of the destabilized, de facto independent Chechnya, suffering from large-scale corruption and unemployment even invited such crimes. According to international press agencies during the past ten years about 700 foreigners have been kidnapped in the region either for a short time or several months, with a few dozen of them losing their lives. Hundreds of thousands required for the release of kidnapped humanitarians, the brutal murder of four members of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Starye Atagi, Chechnya, in 1997, and the kidnap of three British and one New-Zealand telecommunications engineer whose heads were later found near the main road from Grozny to Ingushetia – all these tragedies shocked the international community as well as the humanitarian agencies so much that Chechnya is still considered a black hole where dozens of humanitarians disappear without trace.

Constant vigilance is most certainly needed. As a humanitarian coming to the region (already in Ingushetia or Dagestan), you should have at least one armed bodyguard who accompanies you almost everywhere you go. Moreover, armed protection of your agency’s office is as necessary as an information embargo on your journeys, the financial ties of your organization and plans for the coming days and weeks. Nevertheless, there is a limit to everything. Nowadays the danger of being kidnapped, particularly in Ingushetia, is not very serious. There is a higher probability of losing one’s life in a car accident, because the bad roads are crowded with low-quality cars and the local ”golden youth”, with their reckless driving style, pose a real threat. Similarly, drawing too much attention to your wealth as well as open negligence of basic security rules may cause problems. The kidnap of a humanitarian representative is much more difficult to organize and thus quite improbable. Potential perpetrators of such a crime have to observe their victim for several months and need to make a number of good contacts bribing local officials who would be willing to disrupt a future investigation. This is more likely to happen in destabilized Chechnya (where increased security is an absolute must), but not in rather small and easy-to-make-out Ingushetia. The last, and since 1999 rather extraordinary, kidnapping of an international humanitarian – the head of mission of MSF-Holland, American Kenneth Gluck – in January 2001 took place in an unstable triangle between the Chechen capital Grozny, the village of Starye Atagi and the regional center Urus-Martan. This could hardly happen in Ingushetia.

Overprotection of expatriate humanitarians, often encircled by a crowd of bodyguards preventing them from leaving their residence in Nazran, may easily lead to their isolation. They lose their overview of the real situation in the area and contacts with the civilian population, which might in many respects be a big mistake. The example of a former head coordinator of one of the main aid distributors in Chechnya, who was due to security measures first allowed to travel to Chechnya one year after her/his arrival to the area for only a few hours is understandable from the human point of view, but raises a lot of questions. How can this person be capable of assessing the situation and the needs of the people, to whom the organization is supposed to deliver humanitarian aid?

Not only may the over isolated international humanitarians lose control of what help is needed and where, they also too easily become puppets in the hands of their local employees, who then, in a way, may act as the actual coordinators of the humanitarian activities of a particular organization. Among the international staff, enclosed in a shield of security measures, tensions arise rather easily, which is often a neglected, although rather important factor of demanding humanitarian work in crisis areas. In the face of the relatively gray atmosphere of the Ingush capital Nazran, a total loss of privacy while spending hundreds and thousands of hours in a narrow space with the same people can be a major obstacle to a well-functioning coordination center, which the internationals should provide.

The number of security problems and obstacles, created by the specific Russian and Caucasian reality, however, is far from being surmountable. This is very well proven by the activities of the humanitarian organizations who manage to keep their operations running in Chechnya and to provide basic foods and other materials to tens of thousands people. On the other hand, it is evident that the humanitarian aid currently provided is not at all sufficient to ensure stability in the region. The attitudes of Russian ministries, offices and individual officials especially do not provide satisfactory evidence of their genuine willingness to concentrate on a speedy settlement to the humanitarian catastrophe in Chechnya.

Oscar Braun is an independent journalist and former humanitarian worker, he has been traveling to the Northern Caucasus since the beginning of the second Chechen war in 1999. He also worked as an employee of two humanitarian organizations in the Northern Caucasus. This article is based on the author’s personal experience and the testimonies of employees of humanitarian organizations active in Ingushetia and Chechnya, employees of UN agencies and reports from those organizations.

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