Briefs

–SOME INGUSHETIA RAIDERS HAD GRU DOCUMENTS

According to the brother of an FSB officer slain in the late-June raid on Ingushetia, at least some of the guerrilla raiders were equipped with identification documents from the GRU, the federal military-intelligence agency, Polit.ru reported on July 2. (This will not come as a surprise to those familiar with the extent of corruption in all of Russia’s security services.) When asked at checkpoints why such a large number of them were on road, they answered that they were being redeployed from Chechnya to Vladikavkaz in North Ossetia.

–CHECHEN HOSPITALS STILL TREAT MANY GUNSHOT VICTIMS

Testing official claims of “normalization” within Chechnya, Radio Netherlands correspondent Geert Groot Koerkamp recently visited Grozny’s Hospital Number 9. The radio journalist’s June 30 broadcast quoted a surgeon at that hospital as saying: “All the negative things that happen in the republic are clearly visible here. We’re seeing no decline in the number of patients with gunshot wounds. The figure’s stuck at a certain level, around 60 cases a month. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes less. But, with that number of gun-related injures, it’s not that quiet here.”

–REPATRIATED CHECHENS REMAIN UNCOMPENSATED

Milrad Fatullaev reported in Nezavisimaya gazeta on June 21 that according to a schoolteacher who worked in the secondary school at the last refugee camp in Ingushetia—forcibly closed by the authorities in early June—none of the camp’s former residents have received compensation for the destruction of their homes in Chechnya. About 5,000 of the refugees who used to live in the now-defunct Satsita camp have returned to Chechnya. Fatullaev noted that most of these were originally from Grozny or from the towns of Bamut and Sernovodsk in western Chechnya, the residential neighborhoods of which suffered some of the two wars’ heaviest physical destruction.

Fatullaev also reported that the other North Caucasian republics also still have many refugees from Chechnya—about 20,000 each.