Translated material
People of category "b"
Refugees around the world celebrated their “professional” holiday
World Refugee Day was first celebrated six years ago, on June 20, 2001. Previously, the date was related exclusively to African refugees, but in the year of the 50th anniversary of the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, the General Assembly, with the consent of the Organization of African Unity, expanded the scope of this specific holiday to the whole world.UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres celebrated the day of his wards along with another convoy returning to their places of permanent residence in South Sudan. According to him, despite positive developments in a number of regions of the globe, the number of refugees has been steadily growing over the past 12 months. The UN Global Trends 2006 report estimates the number at about 10 million - those who have fled their countries to escape persecution or death. In addition to them, there are about 13 million more people displaced within their countries. Millions of these people depend on UN humanitarian assistance, and their numbers are only likely to grow. “In the future, more and more people will be looking for better economic opportunities or a better life, to escape environmental pollution, natural disasters or all of these factors combined,” Mr. Guterres said. “And we are concerned that this is happening against the backdrop of a lack of international capacity and determination to respond to these processes.”
Refugee Day was celebrated not only in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, but also in Moscow and Grozny, although there are relatively few refugees in the strict legal sense of the word in Russia . According to the Federal Migration Service of Russia, as of April 1, 2007, 382 people had refugee status, of which only 116 arrived in the country from the CIS countries. The leader of the near abroad in the number of refugees to Russia is Georgia, from which Ossetians were leaving back in the early 90s, during the period of maximum aggravation of the Georgian-Ossetian ethnic confrontation. Among non-CIS countries, Afghanistan leads in the number of refugees; Russia is still faced with the consequences of forceful Soviet intervention in the politics of this country in 1979-1989. In addition to 382 refugees, the FMS took into account another 1,053 people who were granted temporary asylum under Article 12 of the federal law on refugees. A total of 43 people in this category are our former compatriots in the USSR.
The Russian office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees told Vremya Novostey that this organization has 2,600 so-called “mandate refugees” in Russia, that is, persons who, after interviews with whom it turned out that they fit the definition of a refugee given by the UN Convention 1951. “The Federal Migration Service decides whether to give them official status or not,” explained an office employee. “We are helping them because they are covered by our mandate.” Representatives of the UNHCR believe that the true number of refugees does not consist of UN and FMS statistics: “The FMS does not provide us with data on how many people they have “in the process,” that is, they have asked for status and are waiting for a decision. It is possible that some of those whom we took into account are also “in the procedure.”
In any case, it is obvious that these figures are just the tip of the iceberg. To supplement the UNHCR statistics, a refugee must personally answer a number of questions at a refugee reception center, and such points in Russia are only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which not all exiles from their countries can reach. Tajik women in bright robes begging in the spit-stained underground passages of railway stations near Moscow are most likely not taken into account by anyone. True, these people belong more likely to the category of migrants, of whom there are at least a million in Russia and who have their own “professional” day - December 18th. But ordinary consciousness, as a rule, does not distinguish a migrant from a refugee, or a refugee from a forced migrant who moves within the country without crossing its borders. Entire tent cities of such internally displaced persons were a characteristic feature of the landscape of some regions of the Russian part of the Caucasus five years ago.
Now the number of migrants in the region has decreased slightly. In Ingushetia, which at the beginning of the second Chechen war received a whole flurry of migrants, who turned out to be almost more than local residents, as of May 31 of this year there were 15,805 people who were forced to leave Chechnya. In Chechnya itself, according to the republican migration service, approximately 41 thousand people are forced to live outside their homes. The Migration Department of North Ossetia numbers about 14 thousand “forced migrants”. 77 people have refugee status, mainly from Georgia. Thus, the assertion that the Ingush households abandoned by them after the Ossetian-Ingush conflict of 1992 are occupied by refugees from Georgia is not statistically confirmed.
According to the interregional department of the Federal Migration Service of Russia, since 1994, a total of 24,399 ethnic Ingush who left the republic after the conflict have returned to North Ossetia. Incidental complications with the return, however, continue, although President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demanded that this problem be resolved by the end of 2006. Some Ingush insist on returning to exactly those houses that they left in 1992, but the North Ossetian authorities are not always able to satisfy these demands and offer new placements. Some human rights activists, who usually speak on the side of Ingush migrants, have recently called on them to return to where they are provided with housing in order to take care of their children and future. The most stubborn residents of temporary trailers, who have spent over 14 years there, refuse to leave them even when migration officials come for them with a crane. They themselves believe that they are fighting for the right to return home, resisting unjustified violence and preparing children for revenge on their offenders.
Sociologists note that people who have lived in refugee camps for decades develop certain characteristics of the psyche and social behavior that prevent them from successfully fitting into relatively normal conditions again.
IDPs were accused of nationalism in the Stavropol region
Unregulated migration provokes interethnic tension in the south of Russia, Deputy Presidential Envoy in the Southern Federal District Nikolai Fedoryak said on Thursday at a coordination meeting of the heads of law enforcement agencies of the district in Rostov-on-Don. “Recent events in the Stavropol Territory (two murders of students and the subsequent demonstration in Stavropol under nationalist slogans against the Caucasian peoples with a pogrom of cars. - - Ed. ) have shown that one of the main factors stimulating interethnic tension is unregulated migration,” - said Mr. Fedoryak.
According to the deputy plenipotentiary, in the Stavropol region, for every ten indigenous residents there are three or four migrants from the countries of Transcaucasia and Central Asia, and the republics of the North Caucasus. “Every fifth resident moved to the region within 15 years. As a result, in some areas the position of migrants in the economy has significantly strengthened. The outflow of the Slavic population has increased,” said the deputy envoy. According to him, this led to the fact that “the eastern regions practically came under the criminal control of immigrants from the Republic of Dagestan, which led to the growth of nationalist sentiments, especially among young people. " "Time of News"