Apaev: forced migrants are returned from Ingushetia to Chechnya by deceit

The process of bringing the forced migrants from Chechnya, who are temporarily living in the territory of Ingushetia, back to their homeland is carried out with violation of human rights. People are returned by deceit, blackmail and threats. This is the opinion of Aslambek Apaev, expert of the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) for Northern Caucasus and the head of the Committee in defence of forced migrants' rights.

According to human rights defender Apaev, because of numerous complaints and appeals of Chechen residents who are temporarily living in Ingushetia, last week he undertook an inspection trip to the places of compact residence of forced migrants and got convinced that people are returned home in the "voluntary-compulsory" manner.

"People complained, first of all, of bureaucracy's arbitrariness, since the officials, instead of solving forced migrants' problems, illegally remove whole families from registration at the Migration Service, threaten with every possible punishment and demand their immediate return back to the Chechen Republic," Mr Apaev said.

On April 6, the tenants of the compact residence centre (CRC) named "Mekhstroy" in Sunzha District of Ingushetia addressed the representative office of the Human Rights Centre (HRC) "Memorial" in the city of Nazran with a written application, where they complain of being illegally excluded from the database of the Department of the Federal Migration Service (FMS) for Ingushetia.

"I was in the CRC 'Mekhstroy' located in Sleptsovskaya village. The residents of this camp were excluded from the FMS registry by faking applications. According to the people, starting from February employees of the FMS for Chechnya and Ingushetia were regularly coming to the CRC demanding that the people apply for being excluded from the registry (the so-called 'Form 7'), and go back home," said the MHG expert.

He has added that people would be happy to return, but they just have nowhere to go, since their houses were ruined in the warfare, and nobody has paid any compensation to them.

"These 'negotiations' between forced migrants and officials continued till April. On April 2, the owner of the 'Mekhstroy' (landowner Ahmed Archakov, - note of the "Caucasian Knot") announced to the forced migrants (that is, to 52 families or about 150 persons, - note of the "Caucasian Knot") that all of them had been excluded from the registry of the FMS for Ingushetia and should either move out of the premises in two days or pay the rental fee of 1000 roubles," said Apaev. "Meanwhile, none of the forced migrants ever submitted an application on removing him or her from the FMS registry."

The forced migrant who live in "Mekhstroy" addressed the managers of the FMS for Ingushetia for explanations.

"The inhabitants of this CRC themselves told me that in the course of inquiry it became clear that the applications on behalf of forced migrants asking to withdraw them from the registry were written by one hand, while signatures were forged," said Mr Apaev.