Fred Weir in Sleptsovsk
The Financial Times

Zara Bashayeva is a fresh victim of a war the Kremlin has repeatedly declared to be over.

In early January, Ms Bashayeva gathered up her three children and left the family home in Serzhen Yurt, eastern Chechnya, for the relative safety of a muddy and squalid refugee camp just inside the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia.

"Life has become impossible in Chechnya. There is no food, no jobs, no electricity or gas, no schools, no doctors. But all that might be bearable if not for the constant zachistki," she said, referring to the methodical Russian security sweeps aimed at uncovering arms caches and rebel fighters concealed in civilian areas.

Most of all, Ms Bashayeva said she feared for her two sons, aged 13 and 11. "The Russian troops come and seize the men," she said. "Sometimes the men come back, sometimes their relatives pay for their release, sometimes they are never heard from again. At least in a refugee camp, my sons will not be taken."

Although the world appears to have largely forgotten Russia's brutal campaign to subdue secessionist Chechnya, the plight of the tiny republic's uprooted population is growing increasingly dire.

The neighbouring republic of Ingushetia is host to some 200,000 Chechen refugees - half again its own population - and aid workers say the numbers fleeing Chechnya have increased in recent months.

Tens of thousands are enduring their third winter in overcrowded, ill- provisioned tent camps in open fields, just a couple of hours' drive from their ruined homes and villages. Uncounted thousands more are crammed into filthy, rat-infested barns, warehouses and deserted factory buildings, where they are stalked by disease and malnutrition. After 28 months of war, Russia claims the Chechen separatist rebels are all but destroyed, and that normality is returning to the devastated republic.

But international aid workers and Chechen refugees tell a very different tale, of deepening violence and growing insecurity in many parts of the war-torn republic.

Tamara Khaduyeva, a Chechen psychologist who works with war-traumatised children, said there was no mystery about the refugees' reluctance to return. "In my work I travel through Chechnya every week. The atmosphere there is extreme," she said.

"Everyone is in constant terror of the zachistki, which just seem to be an excuse for Russian soldiers to beat and rob and abduct people," she said.

After almost three years, an air of permanence is settling upon Ingushetia's grim refugee camps. Unicef has constructed six wooden schools, and staffed them with Chechen teachers, while other Russian government, UN and private agencies have regularised supplies of water, food, clothing and electricity.

"The situation for these displaced people is not life-threatening, as maybe it is for refugees in Afghanistan," Viktoria Zotikova, a UN information officer, said. "But the danger is that these people will just give up hope. They are living so close to their homes, but they feel like they can never go back."

There are other troubling undercurrents here.

A whole generation of young Chechens is growing up in the camps with no experiences other than the brutality of war and the alienation of exile.

"Of course there is anger and hatred toward the Russians just below the surface here," Ms Khaduyeva said. "How could it be otherwise? People have seen their homes burned, their relatives killed, their sons taken away.

"These camps are a breeding ground for future nightmares."

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