Briefs

–INGUSHETIAN AUTHORITIES FORCING OUT CHECHEN REFUGEES

A July 5 report on the Caucasian Knot website provided further evidence that the federal and Ingushetian authorities are successfully exploiting last month’s guerilla raid as a justification for intensifying pressures on Chechen refugees to return home from Ingushetia. Reportedly the accommodation center in Altievo is now almost completely deserted, and “not more than 50 out of the 150 families that lived in the temporary accommodation point on the dairy farm in Nasyr-Kort [a suburb of Nazran] are still living there.”

–IRISH FOUNDATION AIDS INJURED CHECHEN GIRL

The Frontline Foundation of the Republic of Ireland, in cooperation with the Society for Russian-Chechen Friendship, has arranged for an 8-year-old Chechen girl to be fitted with prosthetics by specialists in Dublin. The girl, Aset Makhamaeva, arrived in Ireland with a relative on July 5.

Aset, whose home is in the village of Alpatovo in far northern Chechnya, lost one of her eyes and both of her hands to a booby trap on December 13. She found an object on the street that she thought was a cigarette lighter and took it home. When her mother said she had run out of matches to light the family stove, Aset took the object out of her pocket and pressed the button. It immediately exploded.

–ONLY MASKHADOV AND PUTIN CAN END IT

“…There are opinions on the Chechen side about the impossibility of talks with Putin. If we omit names and titles, all these statements copy the manner and the style of Russia’s propaganda: “No Talks!” At the same time the idea is not rejected. But who shall the talks be conducted with? Rybkin and Berezovsky? Pleasant or not, Putin, if he really wants to stop the war, has only one person for talks – Maskhadov. And Maskhadov has only Putin. In such a situation emotions only impede talks, and help those for whom the war has become an ideal means of solving personal problems.” –A. Baisultanov, The Chechen Times, July 8