Human rights activists protest against closing refugees' camps in Chechnya

According to human rights activists, authorities of Chechnya have started to close regional Temporary Residence Centres (TRCs) of forced migrants who have no other roof over their head. It was Ramzan Kadyrov, Prime Minister of the Republic, who categorically demanded several days ago to liquidate the TRCs, the "Vremia Novostej" (Time of News) writes.

Svetlana Gannushkina, chairperson of the public organization "Civil Assistance," told that in Gudermes, the second city of Chechnya, several TRCs have already been dispersed. In her words, the people found themselves in fact in the street: "They are slowly crawling to the villages where they may have relatives." Gannushkina believes that the main contingent of Temporary Residence Centres is made of children (they make almost half of the population) and elderly persons. Many of them are Russians, for whom it is much more difficult to find shelter than for Chechens, who never leave away even the most distant relatives.

According to the "Civil Assistance," Chechnya has a total of 32 Temporary Residence Centres of forced migrants, of them 22 are in Grozny. These centres and the so-called places of compact residence (PCRs) (as a rule, they are economic premises adapted for temporary residence) house about 37,000 persons, 16,000 of them are children. According to of the government of Chechnya, a little over 33,000 persons live in TRCs. The overall number of forced resettlers in the territory of the region makes about 60,000 persons.

Human rights activists call militia operations in TRCs to be clean-ups ("zachistkas") and think that the authorities of Chechnya "are turning the issue upside down," when speaking about formation of unfavourable social environment in refugees' hostels. "Right in the same way, they liquidated tent camps of Chechen refugees in Ingushetia," Alexander Cherkasov, one of the leaders of the Human Rights Centre "Memorial," says. "These measures are dictated not by the care about people, but by the desire to bring the reality to some standards. For example, to the norm that there should be no refugees. Resettlers and migrants are indications of problems, lack of wellbeing. So long as TRCs exist, there are homeless people. But the problem remains, even if TRCs are liquidated. There are quite a lot of people in them. In the recent years, refugees from the mountains have appeared there - they get down to the valley - right to the hostels of Grozny and Gudermes."

Human rights activists hope that international community will pay attention to the situation with the Chechen temporary residence centres. And the clean-ups, initiated by Ramzan Kadyrov will be stopped in the same way as his recent attempt to scale down the work in Chechnya of the "Danish Council" in the context of publication in one of Denmark newspapers of scandalous caricatures on Mohammed Prophet. Internal migrants of Chechnya are, from the viewpoint of human rights activists, in a much more complicated situation that, for example, Ingush forced resettlers from the Prigorodny District of North Ossetia. "The Ossetian-Ingush conflict has at least its "administrative reflection" in both Republics, in this way or other interested to settle it," says Alexander Cherkasov. "While in Chechnya, there's only one subject of power, in fact controlled by nobody."

Human rights activists remind that when liquidating Chechen tent camps in Ingushetia, their residents were offered to change the tents for housing facilities located at particular addresses, where in fact there were ruins or houses occupied by other families. By the way, Svetlana Gannushkina supposes that the current checks of Temporary Residence Centres in Chechnya are held with the aim to liberate these hostels "as the only restored buildings," for example, to move there the Chechen refugees who are still remaining in the neighbouring Ingushetia. Under the official data, they are about 38,000 in number, yesterday was the final day of their regular re-registration. Most of them do not intend to return home. Should the federal migration authorities still undertake another resettling of these people to Chechnya, then, Russia, according to Gannushkina, will severely breach the undertaken liability to help these people to adapt themselves at the selected new residence.

We remind you that Ramzan Kadyrov, Prime Minister of Chechnya called the TRCs "a nest of crime, drugs and prostitution." He thinks that "of late years these people have become lazy and hate to work and labour. The women who live there, have forgotten what is housekeeping and house work, and wouldn't take a brush. They'd better live on humanitarian aid." The premier thinks that among TRC residents there are people whose houses have been ruined indeed, but there are people who live there for attaining their political targets. "I know that among TRC inhabitants there are many provokers, who make advances to the West or to the enemies of Russia and Chechnya," Kadyrov said. "We need to detect everyone who plays against Russia and Chechen Republic and helps Wahhabis. Further, the competent bodies will handle them."

The competent bodies have already started to handle the temporary residence centres. The MIA of Chechnya has confirmed that from the middle of last week, that is, immediately after Kadyrov's statement, they started inspecting resettlers' hostels. Violations were revealed immediately in the course of inspections; according to employees of the MIA of Chechnya, in some of the TRCs, as of the moment of inspection, there were no more than a third of registered inhabitants. They believe at the MIA that people live at home or somewhere else, and come to temporary residence centres to get their humanitarian aid only. Besides, during inspections, militiamen detained several persons who were in search, and revealed multiple violations on the part of the administration, the NEWSru.com reports.