Despotism of authorities in refugee camp: details

On September 22 officials of the Ingush migration service with the assistance of OMON (militia platoon for special purposes) officers and officers of the Russian interior ministry's united group cut off the gas supply to the camp of displaced persons "Bela", which is situated in the village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya, Ingushetia's Sunzhensky district. 1,190 people, including 70 children born in 2003, live in this camp.

Ingush gas service workers arrived at the camp in the afternoon escorted by the OMON officers and the officers of the united group. Camp inhabitants, mainly women, were trying to hinder them in their work on the gas-main dismantling - women fell on the pipes, held on to a welding apparatus hose.

The OMON fighters began to disperse the people assembled hitting the most active of them with butts of their rifles. Two women were taken to the Sunzhensky district hospital with severe traumas as a result. Having been hit with a rifle butt, Zara Suleymanova got a shoulder trauma. She went to the camp's first-aid post for medical care.

Many women began to faint at the sight of what was happening, however that did not have any effect on the public agents and they drove people away from the workers, giving them an opportunity to keep on dismantling gas pipes.

Several lavatory constructions were dismantled in the camp the same day.

The gas pipe dismantling was completed at 17:10. The workers, OMON officers and officials of the Russian interior ministry left the camp, throwing people over without gas.

This case is not the first when such excesses with the assistance of public agents are taken place in this camp.

Officials of different levels have visited the camp "Bela" since the beginning of August 2003. They all tried to persuade the forced migrants that no one would be left in camps by September one way or another and offered them "to seek places for living on their own anywhere: in private sector, in garages, in sheep-folds, and anyhow: to mine earth-houses, cellars - only so as to get out of the camp." Displaced people maintain they heard these words from Akhmed Parchiyev, an official of the Ingush migration service.

On September 1, 2003 the migration service leadership announced that the camp "Bela" was disbanded, in spite of the fact that the resettlement of forced migrants had not come about. But the people kept on living and were not going to move anywhere.

On September 17 the electricity supply was cut off in the camp.