SPUTNIK CAMP, Ingushetia - Refugees who fled the bloody fighting in Chechnya say they are entering a new struggle with Russia: Moscow, eager to declare the war over, wants them to go home. But they are resisting, fearful of the Russian army and convinced that only worse suffering awaits them.
Though Moscow officials claim they are not forcing anyone to return, the Chechen refugees say bread distribution has been halted in their camps. Aid workers say authorities have threatened to cut off electricity and gas. And Russian soldiers have stepped up raids on the camps - saying they are looking for weapons.
"They say refugees should return before it is time for school" in September, says Saladin Ayubo, 52, a burly crane operator who visited Chechnya recently and decided it was far too dangerous for his family, even if the authorities try to force them to return.
"They can shoot me. But if they shoot me here, I will take one of them with me. There is nothing else I can do."
More than 150,000 Chechen refugees are living in Ingushetia, a Russian republic next to Chechnya. Perhaps 50,000 of them live in rough camps, and many of them have been there for three years.
World attention has drifted away from the conflict since Sept. 11, but fighting has continued in Chechnya, along with terrible deprivations for civilians there and here.
Ayubo has lived for more than three years with his mother, wife and four sons in an army tent in Sputnik Camp. The former chicken farm - crowded with rows of green army tents, cross-hatched by muddy roads - is a miserable place to live, he says.
But when he visited Grozny a few days ago, Ayubo found a city in ruins, a maze of checkpoints manned by hostile Russian troops and an 8 p.m. curfew that turns the streets into free-fire zones.
Russia has long sought the return of the refugees - whose numbers have risen as high as 200,000 since September 1999, after the start of the second Chechen war.
Military officials accuse the refugees of helping the rebels. And the existence of so many refugees belies the Kremlin's repeated assertions that it has finally defeated the Chechen separatists and is engaged only in "mopping up" operations now.
'No forced return'
Vladimir Yelagin, the Russian government's chief minister for Chechnya, said last week that most Chechen refugees are ready to go home voluntarily. "There will be no forced return from Ingushetia to Chechnya," he said.
A spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said the agency was pleased to hear such assurances.
"We oppose at this time any forcible return to Chechnya," said Kris Janowski, the spokesman. "We also oppose any indirect pressure on people to go, such as denying them aid or housing or identity documents."
He said the agency expected few Chechens would be willing to return voluntarily now, even though camp conditions are so bad.
"Indeed," he said, "there are still people who flee Chechnya." It is so dangerous there that the agency does not have monitors in the region.
"I think they won't just force people out," said Shakhman Akbulatov of the Russian human rights group Memorial. "It will be a sort of calculated pressure. They will create an unbearable psychological atmosphere."
Russian authorities say repatriation of refugees to Chechnya - like Ingushetia one of the republics of the Russian Federation - is a natural part of the return of normal life.
But to most refugees, the notion of leading a normal life in Chechnya is ridiculous.
Too great a risk
"If I go back to Chechnya today, the soldiers can take me away tonight," Roman Bibulatov says.
The 33-year-old truck driver lives with his family in a refugee camp on a former dairy farm. His home is a plywood cubicle inside the old cowshed.
Standing with his arms folded in the light of a naked bulb, Bibulatov said he would love to return to his village of Vedeno, which he left in October 1999. But he can't risk the lives of his family. Too many of his former neighbors are dead or missing. Out of 7,000 who lived there in 1999, perhaps 400 remain.
Being a non-combatant civilian is no protection from Russian troops, he says: "They are not really interested in whether you are a fighter or not."
Many Chechens are suspicious of the Kremlin's motives in insisting on their return.
"Every day, a few people disappear in Chechnya," says one Chechen living here. "I think they now want to chase refugees back to Chechnya, to finish them off there."
Financial incentives are being used in addition to pressure. Galina Bakayeva, a 51-year-old widow with seven children living in Sputnik Camp, could receive a one-time payment of $256 in cash and enough food and other supplies to last for three months if she leaves.
She could use the money: Her pension amounts to just $22 a month. Many workers here can earn less than $1 a day.
But she won't budge. Life is dangerous enough in Ingushetia, where two of her six sons have already been held, briefly, and beaten by security forces. Chechnya, she says, is far worse. "I cannot take them back," she says.
Atrocities on the rise
While the Kremlin insists that its troops are mopping up after a successful campaign against "terrorists" and "bandits," there are almost daily reports of rebel hit-and-run attacks on Russian troops. Each side has inflicted terrible casualties. Neither appears to be winning.
Human rights activists say the war has grown more brutal since Sept. 11. After President Vladimir V. Putin's historic offer of support for the United States, Western nations muted their criticism of what Russia claims is its own war against terror.
"The number of crimes by Russian forces is growing," says Akbulatov, of Memorial. "Earlier, the military tried to hide evidence of atrocities. Now, they demonstrate it."
Moscow also no longer faces domestic political roadblocks to removing the refugees. Former Ingushetia President Ruslan Aushev, who had spoken out against forced repatriation, resigned on New Year's Eve. Many Chechens believe he was forced out.
Murat Zyazikov, 45, a former general in the Federal Security Service - the successor agency to the KGB - was elected president of Ingushetia in April, with the Kremlin's strong support.
Natives targeted, too
As Ingushetia gets drawn further into the Chechen conflict, tensions here are rising. Three policemen were killed last week in a shootout after they cornered a man in a stolen car.
Police and army troops flooded the area, setting up roadblocks at major intersections, conducting searches of vehicles for weapons and fighters. In sweeps of refugee camps, authorities rounded up at least 30 Chechens. Several were beaten by police, family members say.
Refugees aren't the only people feeling the pressure. Russian troops maneuvering near the wooded hamlet of Arshti, a short distance from the Chechen border, caught a 13-year-old boy a month ago on his way to hoe potatoes.
When the boy, Rasul Makhauri, told them he had not seen any rebels, they hit him with their fists, kicked him and struck him in the chest with the butts of their rifles until he passed out. When he woke up, he says, they ordered him to run. "If we see you again," one said, "we will kill you."
Rumors swept through Sputnik Camp in late May that there would be soon be what the Russians call a "cleansing" operation - a roundup of suspected rebels. Many families sent their young men to stay elsewhere.
"All the mothers were scared, so all the youngsters left," says Saykhat Elmurzayeva, who sent off her 21-year-old son, Said.
He left for a nearby village with a group of friends. On the evening of May 24, the five young men, ages 15 to 23, decided it was safe to return and set out on a deserted road for the 30-minute walk. Soldiers captured Elmurzayeva's son and four friends, tied them up and took them to a Russian military camp. There they joined two Ingush men who were being held.
Detained and beaten
According to Memorial, Ingush police monitoring the radio heard the Russians tell a border post in Chechnya: "We are bringing pencils." (Pencil is slang for a detainee.)
"We have our own pencils, too many of them," the reply came.
So the captured men remained in Ingushetia. If they had been taken to Chechnya, says lawyer Mahomet Gaidarov, "everyone thinks they would have been shot somewhere."
According to Said Elmurzayev's medical report, he suffered a concussion and a spinal injury. Another detainee, Rizvan Navruzov, 22, suffered a concussion and kidney damage. One of the prisoners was raped by a Russian soldier, Memorial officials charge.
Ingushetian police heard about the detentions and went to the Russian camp to demand custody of the prisoners. But the Russians refused. A tense standoff followed, Gaidarov and Memorial officials say, with the Russians at one point holding a Kalashnikov rifle to the head of one of the Ingush detainees.
The Russians finally agreed to let the prisoners talk to the Ingush prosecutor and receive medical treatment, but not before they had extracted signed confessions from two of them. One of those who admitted possessing a variety of weapons was Rizvan Yamusov, just 15 years old. Despite this admission, he was later released by authorities. The others were still being held this weekend.
A painful dilemma
There seems to be little popular support here for sending the Chechens home. Neither does there seem to be much chance they will be permitted to stay.
Azamat Nakhgeyev, a liberal deputy in the Ingushetian parliament, notes that the Russian constitution guarantees the right of all Russian citizens to live where they like. But, quoting Putin, he added: "The law is one thing. Its application is another."
Tamousa Beryeva, 52, a blue-eyed woman in a black dress, lives with her sons in one Ingush camp. Speaking in Chechen, she says her stepmother and brother were both killed three years ago in her home village of Vedeno. Now, she is increasingly nervous that the war has followed her. When police swept through the camp last week, she says, "I thought maybe the war is already here."
She fingered the hair of her 6-year-old grandson, Akraman. "It's so painful," she says. "Everyone believes we are bandits. But we are just a simple people, an unlucky nation."