Chechen refugee camp Iman in Ingushetia fully dismantled
Timur Aliyev, North Caucasus - Chechen refugee tent Iman, located near the Ingush village of Aki-Yurt, has been fully dismantled. According to refugees, not a single tent remained in the camp on December 4.
The Ingush Migration Service announced that over a thousand refugees from the camp were accommodated in private houses. Head of the Federal Migration Service of the Interior Ministry of the Russian Federation for the Southern Federal District Alexandr Rostovtsev said in Ingushetia that the resettlement was carried out on a voluntary basis.
According to human rights organization Memorial, only part of the refugees from Iman had to rent houses in the private sector in the Malgobekski district of Ingushetia. „The bulk of them, that is the least well-off people, were transported by buses to their permanent residence in Chechnya,“ Eliza Musayeva, chairwoman of Memorial’s office in Nazran, says. „According to the driver who transported them, he dropped the last family near a house without windows in Urus-Martan. And now it is the beginning of winter,“ Musayeva says.
The Khatsigov family, who left the camp for Chechnya, returned to Ingushetia. “Here [in Ingushetia] we were told that in our homeland something temporary is being prepared for us, but there was nothing there,” says the head of the family, Ruslan.
In Musayeva’s opinion, other places where “temporary displaced” people live will be liquidated as well. “The closure of the ‘Iman’ tent village in Aki-Yurt became the first attempt of a – if not forcible then – forced return of refugees to Chechnya. The same will happen to other tent camps and then, apparently, also to other refugee settlements in Ingushetia,” writes a release of Memorial’s Ingush office.
Musayeva thinks that through the liquidation of refugee camps the Russian leadership is trying to remove the evidence that the situation in Chechnya is far from normal. “The Kremlin thinks that tent camps are Russia's disgrace, the visible part of the iceberg,” the human rights defender says. “If you remove them, there will be no war [they think],” Musayeva explains.
However, speaking on December 3 in the Ingush capital of Magas, Ingush President Murat Zyazikov and the special representative of the Russian President for human rights in the Chechen Republic Abdul-Khakim Sultygov denied allegations about the expelling of refugees to Chechnya.
“I’ll repeat once again for those who don’t understand it,” President Zyazikov said. “Refugees from Ingushetia will be resettled only on a voluntary basis.”
Abdul-Khakim Sultygov claims that if human rights were violated during the liquidation of camps, complaints would be filed with his office. “Thus far we haven’t received a single complaint,” Sultygov says.
According to the Ingush authorities, there are 68,000 refugees from Chechnya in the republic of Ingushetia to date, while according to the Danish Refugee Council they number 110,000. Of them 18,000 live in tent refugee camps, according to the official figures collected within the recent All-Russian census.
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