Chechen Refugees Appeal Exile Ruling

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday November 14, 2002 11:54 by 12r12

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Chechen Refugees Appeal Exile Ruling
Wed Nov 13, 4:18 PM ET
By JIM HEINTZ, Associated Press Writer

MOSCOW (AP) - In a gesture of desperation and anger, hundreds of Chechen war refugees are asking to move to Kazakhstan, where they lived for more than a decade after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin deported them from their homeland.

The appeal carries heavy symbolic weight. The deportation to Kazakhstan in 1944 is part of the bitter history that fuels Chechen separatists and one of Chechens' strongest grievances against Russia.

The refugees say life in camps in Ingushetia, which borders Chechnya (news - web sites), is intolerable. They do not trust the Kremlin's contention that order is being restored to the war-shattered republic.

"However bitter the memory is of the Stalinist deportation, when a third of our people died, we must state to you, respected president, that our current situation is even more difficult," refugees wrote to Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, according to the radio station Ekho Moskvy.

"I will go to Kazakhstan, rather than back to Grozny," the Chechen capital, an elderly refugee told the NTV television channel.

A spokesman for Nazarbayev, Erlan Baizhanov, said the government had not seen the letter.

Akhmad Muradov, director of a Chechen culture center in Almaty, Kazakhstan's major city, said Chechens already are fleeing to the country. Most are women and children, he said.

"Here they don't have residence permits, the right to work or to have a place to live," he said. "We help whom we can ... and the refugees are becoming ever more numerous."

"They have no place to put themselves, because their husband has been killed and their house destroyed," he said.

Russia's top human rights official, Oleg Mironov, said the refugees would be spiting themselves by going to Kazakhstan.

"Russia is in a condition to help refugees from Chechnya and they hardly need to appeal to Kazakhstan, all the more because the economic situation there is not better," he said on Ekho Moskvy. "Russia is big and it can accept its own citizens in many places."

Chechen refugees believe Russia wants them to go back to Grozny because the return of civilians would bolster Kremlin claims that the republic is under control. Refugees in one camp recently said that soldiers had told them the camp's tents would be torn down by Dec. 20.

Though there is a widespread Chechen diaspora stretching from St. Petersburg to Siberia, Chechens often face discrimination and outright hatred from Russians. Human rights groups say media often fan mistrust of Chechens.

The Chechens were deported in 1944 after Stalin alleged that they were collaborating with the Nazis, who had briefly occupied the North Caucasus region. They returned after Stalin died in 1953.

Historians consider Stalin's accusations an excuse to crush a restless ethnic group that had resisted Russian rule for centuries.

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