MINELRES: IWPR Caucasus Reproting Service No.216: Ingush refugees find way home blocked

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WELCOME TO IWPR'S CAUCASUS REPORTING SERVICE, No. 216, January 30, 2004.


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INGUSH REFUGEES FIND WAY HOME BLOCKED

A dispute is still raging over how many Ingush refugees deserve the
right of return to North Ossetia.

By Albina Olisayeva in Vladikavkaz and Madina Khadzieva in Nazran

Eleven years after the small but bloody conflict that divided Ingush and
North Ossetians in the North Caucasus, many Ingush who fled the fighting
have still not returned to their former homes.

A final resolution to the conflict is being hampered by a dispute
between the two sides over the actual number of Ingush who fled, and by
the classification of some villages on the North Ossetian side as
"closed" to returning refugees.

Since 1993, the Dzaurov family, who used to live in the Oktyabrskoye
village in North Ossetia, has lived in two old trailers at a so-called 
"oil-rig site" just across the border near the Ingush town of Karabulak.
The landscape is a wasteland of half-ruined buildings, some of which
serve as makeshift housing for refugees from Chechnya and North Ossetia.

It is an extended family. Grandmother Fadiman is 96-years-old, then
there are the elderly parents, seven grown-up daughters and four sons,
two daughters-in-law, and five grandchildren.

Movlatkhan Dzaurova, 62, mother of the family, has a slight speech
defect after a stroke she suffered when she visited her home village in
1997 for the first time since the conflict and found that only parts of
the foundation remained of her two-storey house.

The Dzaurovs are officially registered as citizens of the Prigorodny
region in the neighbouring Russian republic of North Ossetia. The
trouble is that Oktryabrskoe, like six other villages, is closed to
returning Ingush refugees.

The issue of closed villages caused the head of Ingushetia's refugees
and internally displaced persons committee Kazbek Sultygov this week to
threaten that he would stop attending the weekly meetings called by
Russia's special representative to the dispute, complaining that Ingush
were not being allowed to return there.

Sultygov said that the heads of the closed villages do not want the
Ingush to go back  because they say that "the moral and psychological
climate is not ripe for Ossetians and Ingush to live together because
the Ossetians living in these villages don't want their Ingush
neighbours to return".

The 1992 conflict lasted only five days, but hundreds of people were
killed and thousands taken hostage.

Tens of thousands of Ingush fled North Ossetia and several thousand
Ossetians also left the Prigorodny region, where the fighting took
place.

The Prigorodny region, formerly part of Ingushetia, was allocated to
North Ossetia in 1944 after Stalin deported the Chechens and Ingush to
Central Asia. Many Ingush resettled there after their return from exile
in the Fifties but did not get proper documents.

The three sides in the dispute - the Ossetians, the Ingush and the
Russian federal authorities - all have different estimates for the
number of Ingush who fled. Many are now back in the region but thousands
more are still in Ingushetia or elsewhere in Russia.

Ossetians have different views on the potential return of their former
neighbours. 

Ossetian political analyst Soslan Khadikov told IWPR, "Article 11 of the
constitution of Ingushetia still calls for the return of the disputed
territories of Prigorodny region and Vladikavkaz to Ingushetia.

"So we are entitled to ask: whom are we returning to North Ossetia? Are
they citizens of our republic or people who will turn against us
tomorrow?"

Others are more positive. Rita Khautova, a first-year student at
Vladikavkaz University, said, "To be honest when the conflict happened I
wasn't even ten years old, because I have only a vague memory of it. But
recently I was at a meeting with Ingush young people and we got on
well."

Venera Gatsalova, head of North Ossetia's department for forced migrants
maintains that only 3,500 North Ossetian citizens (of Ingush
nationality) are currently living in Ingushetia.

She calculates that figure by saying that there used to be 32,567 Ingush
in North Ossetia, that 27,000 fled the fighting "and we have helped
21,477 of them to return, so it turns out that we need to help 5,500
more". But at least 2,000, she claimed, had left for other parts of
Russia.

However, Kazbek Sultygov puts the number of Ingush non-returnees at
19,000. He explains the discrepancy by saying that thousands of the
ethnic group lived in Prigorodny region without proper registration
documents - and without these, they cannot prove they once lived there,
and therefore cannot return.

This charge in turn is rejected by North Ossetia's census department
which said that the numbers come from the 1989 census and that "no one
asks for registration documents in the census".

Vitaly Smirnov, head of the refugees department of Russia's specials
representative, said they had re-registered forced migrants in
Ingushetia in order to prolong their status. "As a result we obtained
the following data: In Ingushetia, there are 11,088 persons left,
registered as forced migrants from North Ossetia, and another 505 are in
North Ossetiam," he concluded.

Smirnov said the figures could be higher if some other Ingush won court
cases that proved they used to live in North Ossetia.

Hussein Bogatyrev comes from a section of the village of Chermen which
is closed to returnees. He now lives with his wife and six children in a
refugee camp in the nearby Maisky village in Prigorodny, after a period
of living in Ingushetia. 

Hussein was wounded in a bomb explosion at the security services
building in Ingushetia four months ago, and is now partially blind.
"Tomorrow I am going to Moscow for my next operation and hope very much
that I will be able to see," he said. "I don't see any prospects of us
being officially allowed home in the near future." 

The aid programmes for the forced migrants are continuing. But the
political issue of reconciliation and return is still bogged down by the
dispute over who does or does not have the right to come back to what
they say were their former homes.

Albina Olisaeva is a reporter with Slovo newspaper in Vladikavkaz.
Madina Khadzieva works for the press service of the interior ministry in
Ingushetia.

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CAUCASUS REPORTING SERVICE No. 216