INGUSH REFUGEE AGREEMENT SIGNED.

On May 29, at a meeting held in Grozny (Djohar), the pro-Moscow head of the Chechen administration, Akhmad Kadyrov, and the newly elected president of Ingushetia, retired FSB General Murat Zyazikov, signed an agreement affirming that “all Chechen refugees should be brought back home from Ingushetia before the end of September [2002].” Present at the signing were Viktor Kazantsev, plenipotentiary Russian presidential representative in the Southern Federal District, Valentin Sobolev, deputy secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, and the Russian minister for the affairs of Chechnya, Vladimir Elagin. Most Chechen internally displaced persons currently living in Ingushetia, the newspaper Kommersant noted, “have no housing in Chechnya, that having been destroyed by the war. They are going to be settled in temporary residence centers (TRC) now under construction in the republic. But, according to a Chechen administration spokesman, the TRC’s will be able to accommodate only between 6,000 and 7,000 people, and it is unlikely that all returnees will be provided with at least temporary dwellings before September. Thus, they may again find themselves in tent camps, this time in Chechnya, where international humanitarian and human rights organizations have only a limited access” (Kommersant, May 30).