Chechens Fight for Compensation

Sixty-one years after the entire Chechen and Ingush population was deported to Central Asia by Stalin, almost a third of Chechens who apply for compensation are not receiving what they are entitled to because they do not have the right papers.

Said-Magomed Batalov, now 93, was one of almost half a million people exiled in cattle trucks on February 23, 1944. For three months, he has been visiting the regional interior ministry headquarters in the town of Argun every morning to ask if there has been an answer to his official request.

It is hard for the officials inside to explain to Batalov, who as well as his advanced age has poor hearing, that a review of his case could take several months or even years. And he is impatient at the explanations he is given.

“I am already old,” Batalov said. “Today or tomorrow I won’t be here anymore. I don’t understand why they can’t give me [the papers required for payments] without any extra bother. Isn’t it obvious that I was deported?”

Along with nearly 30 per cent of his fellow applicants in Chechnya, Batalov was refused compensation money because he could not officially prove that he had been deported – even though every single Chechen in Chechnya was deported in 1944.

The Chechens are in a worse position in this regard than four other peoples in the region punished by Stalin - the Ingush, the Balkars, the Karachais and the Kalmyks - all of whom received payouts in 1993-4.

A total of 387,000 Chechens and 91,000 Ingush - including men, women, children, soldiers at the front and party officials - were deported in 1944. Tens of thousands of them died of cold and disease. All traces of their culture were erased and the republic of Chechen-Ingushetia was abolished.

In 1957, Nikita Khrushchev reversed the decision and restored the rights of the punished peoples, allowing them to go home.

But it was only in April 1991 that a law rehabilitating the victims of political repression was passed. In 1994, the level of compensation was set as being worth 100 times the minimum wage in Russia.

The four other repressed North Caucasian peoples each received a modest sum per person. But the Chechen government of then-president Jokhar Dudayev, which was at the time in a state of self-declared independence from Russia, rejected the sum as being too low.

Later in 1997-8, when Chechnya was again de facto independent from Russia, Moscow offered substantially more, 800 US dollars for every Chechen, but the authorities in Grozny again rejected the offer as being insufficient for what the deportees had lost.

After that inflation and amendments to Russian federal legislation whittled down the sum still further. At the moment, Chechens are entitled to claim up to just 4,000 roubles (140 dollars) for property they lost excluding housing or up to 10,000 roubles for all their property including housing.

At the beginning of this year, Chechnya’s new pro-Moscow president Alu Alkhanov reopened the debate and in the draft document on a new treaty with the Kremlin proposed a new compensation sum worth 150,000 roubles.

“There is a general belief that 10,000 roubles as compensation for material loss suffered during the years of deportation is virtually nothing in comparison with the material losses which every deported family suffered,” Social Welfare Minister Bilkis Baidayeva said on Chechen television.

However, around a third of those putting in applications are being turned down because their date of birth is wrong in their passport, their name is misspelled or they do not have birth certificates at all. The most common reason is that people have lost all their documentation to a decade of war in Chechnya.

Formerly, the Chechen State Archive in Grozny had an enormous quantity of supporting information on Chechen families, their possessions and households, as well as 260,000 personal files on deportees.

“Inside them were separate documents on every member of the family, on changes in their lives (their reaching adulthood, marriage, death) and changes in the family,” recalled Magomed Muzayev, head of the archive for more than a decade. “And I remember huge crowds of people from neighbouring republics came to us. We managed to give almost all the Akkin Chechens [from Dagestan] confirmation documents.

“Unfortunately very few of our citizens applied to us. Because of the political events sweeping through the republic our people were in a kind of depression and they didn’t trust rumours about possible compensation for material loss. So only a few hundred people came to us.”

Since then, the archive was badly damaged by artillery and bombing in the 1994-6 war. Almost two centuries of Chechen history was burned and less than half of the 260,000 personal files survived. They are now being restored in the archive in the city of Samara, meaning that ordinary Chechens must apply to the information centre of the interior ministry for their confirmation documents.

Thousands of individual cases are now being contested in court. But those fighting for compensation without supporting documents generally need witnesses to confirm that they were indeed deported - and these are also becoming harder to find.

“Most of my neighbours either died a natural death or perished in the war or have left for somewhere else,” said Malika Didayeva, now in her seventies. “It’s no surprise that we are dying off. I am in complete despair, I don’t know where I can find witnesses.”

“I believe I am still being repressed,” complained another elderly Chechen, Said Abdul-Hamid Muslim from the village of Michurino outside Grozny. “I wasn’t a bandit of any kind. I am just a repressed person. We weren’t deported selectively, everyone was deported – on ethnic grounds.

“So why can’t they just restore our rights on the most obvious grounds – by nationality and date of birth? At the end of the day what is stopping a state which punished a whole people because of its own whim from lifting the blame for us after we have endured our punishment?”

Animat Abumuslimova is a correspondent for Groznensky Rabochy newspaper in Grozny.