Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [141]
Almost ten years have passed, and throughout that time Valentina has lived in Moscow with her bedridden 80-year-old sister in the utility room of School No. 1142.
“Of course the conditions are a nightmare,” says Headmaster Iosif Protas. “Valentina at first worked as the school caretaker, but then we were ordered to employ private security firms. We couldn’t just throw them out on to the street. My conscience wouldn’t allow that. The old ladies have been taken in by their nephew now. He is off travelling somewhere and his apartment will be free for a time. They have left us, but their accommodation problem is no nearer a solution. The authorities won’t allocate them anything. I don’t understand how they can behave like that.”
They can behave like that very easily. The legal situation of elderly Russian refugees from Chechnya is as follows: under the law they are “internally displaced persons.” That status is awarded for only five years and some of the old ladies gained it. They fought to get it from the Migration Service, which in the last decade has been reorganised several times. Refugees with that status at least had the right to move unhindered around Moscow and to receive free medical care. Others were less fortunate: the migration officials firmly refused it to these guiltless victims.
When the five years came to an end, those with the status found themselves no better off than those without. In the eyes of the Migration Service they had no rights whatsoever. So, five years is as long as the state is prepared to take any responsibility for fulfilling its obligations towards citizens who have lost everything through the state’s own actions. For five years the state is obliged to look after internally displaced persons, to provide accommodation, a welfare payment and health insurance. This supposedly gives them time to build a new life, to start afresh after they have irretrievably lost what they had.
Our state has simply cheated the “internally displaced persons” from Chechnya. It has strung them along for five years and provided them with nothing. The Migration Service announced that its assistance was time-limited and when that expired it would divest itself of all responsibility for them.
Who would dispute that the five-year rule is reasonable for young and middle-aged people who can be expected to find work and look after themselves? But what about those in their seventies and eighties? The disabled? How are they supposed to make a fresh start?
You may wonder why this report is confined only to Russian refugees from Grozny rather than including everybody who was forced to leave the zone of this never-ending “anti-terrorist operation” engulfing their beloved city.
It is because Chechen families, even if they themselves are living in poverty, will never fail to support their relatives. Such is the way they behave, and you simply will not find an 81-year-old Chechen lady scrubbing floors on 16 storeys. But Russian old ladies do. What is to be done? How is this situation to be resolved, quickly and effectively? The old ladies cannot wait.
In “Our Home” there are 53 families. These are the very poorest of all the homeless, people with no prospects. It is senseless to hope that resources from Russia’s super-abundant “proficit” budget are going to come their way. The officials would rather die than do without their kickbacks.
They must pin their hopes on the world of “socially aware business,” in favor of which [pro-Putin oligarch] Vladimir Potanin recently spoke so feelingly on television. The President bears personal responsibility for what is happening in Chechnya and for all its consequences, so let the Presidential Commission on