Pressure on Refugees

Refugees survive on humanitarian aid from international organizations

Pro-Russia administration presses refugees to return

Agence France Presse via NewsEdge Corporation

MOSCOW, May 29 (AFP)

The pro-Moscow administration in war-torn Chechnya said Tuesday that it wanted to repatriate all the 150,000 refugees living in neighbouring Ingushetia by the end of next month voluntarily or not.

But Ingush President Ruslan Aushev said the threat to cut off government aid to any refugees who stayed behind after June 30 would have no effect while federal troops battling separatist rebels continued to abuse human rights in Chechnya.

"People will not return to Chechnya until they are given basic security guarantees and protection of their constitutional rights," Aushev told AFP.

"After every 'mopping-up' operation in Chechnya by federal forces, the number of refugees from Chechnya into Ingushetia rises sharply," he said.

Earlier, the top spokeswoman for the Chechen government, Alla Vlazneva, said that the displaced people would not be forced to leave for Chechnya, but would no longer have refugee status if they did not heed these instructions.

"Of course we will not use any force. But those who do not move by the end of June will no longer get any aid in July, as they will no longer be considered as temporarily displaced people," she told the daily Kommersant newspaper.

Aushev, however, said that for the past two months thousands of refugees living in tent cities in his tiny southern Russian republic had not received hot meals.

"They are surviving exclusively thanks to humanitarian aid they are getting from international organizations such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Doctors Without Borders and others," he added.

More than 150,000 Chechen refugees are currently estimated to be living in Ingushetia, having fled the fighting in the breakaway republic after Russian troops intervened massively on October 1, 1999.

Most of them live with relatives, but around 10 percent live in camps, according to United Nations observers.

Russia is keen to show that a semblance of normality is returning to Chechnya, where its troops are bogged down in a brutal guerrilla war, and wants to begin repatriating those displaced by the conflict.