Chechen Property Payment Fiasco

Friday, 19 September, 2003

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Asya Bulatova

Thousands of Chechens who stood to gain from a compensation scheme for war-damaged housing have been left bitterly disappointed after discovering that they are not on the list of beneficiaries.

The Russian government allocated 14.5 billion rubles (475,000 US dollars) for the estimated 39,000 Chechens who lost property in the fighting of 1994-6 and 1999 to the present, but major flaws in the scheme mean that only a fraction of those entitled to cash handouts are likely to receive it.

The pro-Moscow Chechen government ordered an inventory of destroyed housing stock three years ago, but work on putting together lists of potential recipients of funds only began in March and bureaucrats had until August to complete the project.

Problems arose because of the short amount of time allocated for the process; too few officials assigned to the task; mistakes in inputting information; serious faults with the data banks recording war-damaged property; and alleged corruption.

Some analysts have suggested that the inventory was rushed because the pro-Moscow Chechen leader, Ahmad Kadyrov, wanted to issue payouts as a sweetener to voters as he fights for their support in the October 5 presidential elections.

The chairman of the Chechen government committee for compensation, Abubakir Baibatyrov, admitted that nearly half the local authority information on destroyed property handed to government turned out to be false. Some municipal administration officials claim that the lists they provided were complete and accurate, suggesting that errors were made subsequently.

"We submitted full lists to the committee. It's hard to say who cut them and why," said Ramzan Bersanov, a senior official in the Leninsky district of Grozny, one of the mostly badly damaged parts of the city.

The fiasco has left tens of thousands of Chechens who lost property in the war bitterly disappointed, according to human rights activists.

"My house on Buachidze Street was razed to the ground in 1995, during the first campaign. But for some reason my name is not listed among those entitled to compensation, although I applied to the district administration together with others back in spring," said Grozny resident Abyaul-Khalim Agamerzaev. "What's even more surprising is that houses [that remain intact] on the same street are on the list. How come the committee didn't notice my totally destroyed house?"

Sometimes completely destroyed apartment buildings were overlooked by the committee, such as a ten-storey block on Lenin Street in Grozny that had 230 apartments. Just twelve residents found they were eligible for compensation. One of those who missed out, Svetlana Kadieva, went to her district office several days in a row in the vain hope that she would find her name amongst those earmarked for financial assistance.

In the chaos of the inventory process, some locals whose homes were very much intact found that they are due to receive a cash handout. "My house was partially damaged by air strikes. But then we managed to do the [repair] work ourselves and haven't applied," said a Grozny journalist, who discovered that he was due to benefit from the scheme.

There have also been cases of fraud, with people entitled to funds making sure they get them by paying off officials involved in the compensation process. Some residents interviewed said they had "agreements with the right people" to guarantee payment. There were other cases of locals being offered money to register their partially damaged homes as irreparable.

Far more cases of corruption were reported after the first Chechen war when Moscow similarly offered to reimburse people for their damaged properties. Then, many found that the only way of getting what they were due was by resorting to bribery.

Chechen officials are aware that there have been problems with the inventory process and seem keen to put things right. "People shouldn't worry. Those whose names were entered in error will be removed from the list [of beneficiaries] and replaced with those who did in fact lose their homes. New applications are now being received in the districts - we'll consider all complaints," said Baibatyrov.

Indeed, there are already signs of progress on this front. For instance, the head of Grozny's Leninsky district showed IWPR a letter from the local police listing 97 addresses that were wrongly earmarked for compensation.

Asya Bulatova is a freelance journalist working in Chechnya.