Dzokhar-Khala/Agency Caucasus – Chechnya has become the center of attraction for people from certain nationalities both in Central Asia and in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics years after hundreds of thousands of Chechens had to leave their country to avoid the disastrous consequences of the past two wars.
The Russian-backed administration of Chechnya caught six people illegally entering the country on July 30. It had deported tens of illegal immigrants last year, however. The six people were caught at a checkpoint on the road of Caucasus in the Chechen province of Sunjen. Three of them are Ukrainian, two Azerbaijani and one Moldavian.
There are recently many Tajikis, among many other Central Asians, walking around in Dzokhar-Khala. Most of the foreigners are composed of women and children who go around begging. Beggary only functions as a facade to mask drug trafficking, according to Chechen sources.
"I guess it is not really for begging that an old, poverty-stricken man or woman takes his or her two, three and even more children from a Central Asian country all the way down to Chechnya. This is absolute nonsense!" Kavkazy-Uzel quoted a professor as saying. "They need to earn money, apart from many other things, to rent a flat so that they can live somewhere. Can they ever do this only by begging for money? Beggary is only a facade that masks their real ‘business’ of bringing drugs to Chechnya and circulate it across the country. Only sometimes can they be caught to give off the impression that the police is doing its job. I spoke to one Central Asian person. ‘Why did you come here?’ I asked him. ‘We went through two wars; the people can hardly earn their living and you want to earn from them,’ I said to him. He replied that Chechens paid beggars better. So far as I can tell, not all of the beggars are really poor. The person I spoke to, for instance, said that although he owned a nice home in Tajikistan, he had to beg abroad for money because he could not find a job in his country."
There Chinese people were caught and deplored in Dzokhar-Khala in January as part of a police operation called "The Illegal Immigrants." There were tens of those deplored last year. ÖZ/FT
