From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 6/27/2005 7:11 AM

Chechen Villagers Refuse to Go Home

Monday, June 27, 2005
By Nabi Abdullaev
Staff Writer
    

Sergei Rasulov / AP

Villagers who fled Borozdinovskaya lining up Saturday to receive sugar as food aid at a tent camp in Dagestan.

Residents of Borozdinovskaya, a village in eastern Chechnya raided by masked gunmen earlier this month, have refused to take up offers to return home, despite promises of a thorough investigation and material compensation by senior federal and Chechen officials.

More than 1,000 ethnic Dagestanis fled the village after they found charred human remains in a house burned out during the June 4 raid. One man died and 11 men were abducted in the raid. The men have not been seen since.

Chechen President Alu Alkhanov, on a visit to Borozdinovskaya on Sunday, promised to ensure the residents' safety if they returned. A day earlier, Chechen Interior Minister Ruslan Alkhanov, who is unrelated to Alu Alkhanov, said a squad of 19 policemen headed by an ethnic Dagestani would be set up in Borozdinovskaya.

The Chechen government has also offered cash compensation to residents whose houses were destroyed in the raid if they return home.

But on Sunday, Borozdinovskaya residents camped out in tents just over the border in Dagestan said they would not return until the fate of the missing men was known.

"Not a single person will return until the fate of these 11 people is established," Borozdinovskaya resident Sofia Ibragimova said, Interfax reported Sunday.

Villagers have accused members of the Vostok, or East, militia led by Sulim Yamadayev, a former rebel warlord who now serves in the federal military, of carrying out the raid and say they recognized some of his men among the attackers.

Yamadayev and his federal military commander have denied that any of Yamadayev's men took part in the raid.

Chechen officials have said they have no information about the fate of the 11 abducted men.

Yamadayev's brother Ruslan, a United Russia deputy in the State Duma from Chechnya, accused the Borozdinovskaya residents of harboring separatist rebels.

"This is quite a complicated village; many rebel leaders originated from there, and there always have been bases of Rappani Khalilov and Khattab there," he said, Kommersant reported Friday. "Many local residents who cooperated with the federal authorities were killed there."

Khalilov is a Dagestani-born warlord fighting in Chechnya, while Khattab, a Jordanian-born Chechen rebel leader, was killed by federal security agents in 2002.

Ruslan Yamadayev accused Chechen rebels of carrying out the Borozdinovskaya raid in an attempt to discredit the federal military and its Chechen units, like his brother's militia, in Chechnya. He said that rebel sympathizers serving in the military could have taken part in the raid.

In an interview with Izvestia published Friday, Ruslan Yamadayev also said that the Dagestani police had evidence identifying the 11 abducted men as rebel fighters.

Dagestani officials have never claimed that before.

Last Wednesday, the presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District, Dmitry Kozak, ordered military prosecutors to name the perpetrators of the raid within 10 days.

Investigators were questioning Borozdinovskaya residents in their tent camp over the weekend and have been conducting ballistic tests on weapons used by Vostok commandos, Russian media reported.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/06/27/014.html