On July 12, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees issued a statement in which it questioned the recent closing by Russia of two camps for IDPs located in Znamenskoe in northern Chechnya. "When Severny and Yuzhny... were closed last week," the UNHCR... MORE

On July 16, the website of the pro-Moscow Chechen administration announced that "the draft of a new constitution for the Chechen Republic will be presented to a [popular] referendum in November of 2002" (Kavkaz.strana.ru, July 16). On July 17, however, a deputy prime minister of... MORE

Writing in the July 18 issue of Polit.ru, the well-known polling specialist Yury Levada reported that, according to a recent poll, "only 27 percent of [Russian] respondents to one or another degree trust the information appearing in the Russian mass media concerning Chechnya, while 66... MORE

Writing in the July 16 issue of the weekly Novoe Vremya, Emil Pain, a former advisor on nationality affairs to President Yeltsin, subjected Russia's present course in Chechnya to withering criticism. "A state," Pain began, "that regularly employs its own army in zones of ethnic... MORE

The official Russian government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported on July 26 that, at a press conference held in Moscow, the first deputy head of the Federal Migration Service of the Russian Ministry of the Interior, Igor Yunush, announced that "camps for temporary [Chechen] migrants on... MORE

On July 26, the Nobel-prize-winning humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans Frontieres) issued a warning concerning what seems to be an impending human rights catastrophe in Chechnya. "Moscow has announced," Erwin van't Land of MSF wrote, "that the estimated 200,000 displaced [Chechen IDPs currently... MORE

On July 20, the newspaper Trud published an upbeat account of the return to Grozny (Djohar) of a column of buses containing Chechen IDPs being transferred from the "Bella" IDP camp in Ingushetia. The returning forced migrants were to be housed in a dormitory in... MORE

The July 22 issue of the twice-weekly newspaper Novaya Gazeta featured an article by award-winning war correspondent Anna Politkovskaya devoted to the plight of Chechen IDPs residing in Ingushetia. On this occasion, Politkovskaya was interested in the opinions of the middle-aged and elderly men living... MORE

Russia Accused of 'Thinning Out' Chechen Youths" read a headline in the July 25 issue of the Times of London. An international human rights group, The Times reported, has accused Russian soldiers in Chechnya of targeting Chechen "men of productive age" for execution in an... MORE