Group of human rights defenders and officials visit refugee camps in Ingushetia and ChechnyaTimur Aliyev, North Caucasus – On December 27-28, a group of representatives of NGOs and state officials visited Ingushetia and Chechnya to inspect places where Chechen refugees stay.
The group was created on the initiative of the chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group Lyudmila Alexeyeva and its participants included chairwoman of the Russian presidential human rights committee Ella Pamfilova, Russian minister for Chechnya issues Stanislav Ilyasov, deputy head of the Russian Federal Migration Service Igor Yunash, human rights defenders and representatives of local authorities and migration services.
In Grozny, the group visited several temporary accommodation centers - those that are being made ready for returnees as well as those where people already live.
In Ingushetia, they visited the former refugee camp Iman in Aki-Yurt, which was liquidated in early December, the temporary accommodation center in the Psadakh village, for which many people from Iman left, and tent refugee camps Bart near Karabulak and Bella and Sputnik near Ordzhonikidzevskaya.
Pamfilova said that the repatriation goes normally, adding, however, that refugees complained mostly about the work of the official Chechen Committee for Refugees, whose staff used methods of intimidation against refugees.
According to the delegation’s member Svetlana Gannushkina of Russian human rights organisation Memorial, the staff for the return of refugees provided the commission with a fictitious list of 23 places in Ingushetia where refugees can move.
Alexeyeva said that the tour was the first stage of the group’s work when “it was necessary to show that due to the lack of alternative accommodation for refugees there really exists their forced return to Chechnya.”
In the second stage of the group's work, a report for Russian President Vladimir Putin will be worked out jointly with officials. „That will be the most complicated work,“ Alexeyeva noted. (T) |
