WAR CASUALTIES ARE NEGLECTED

In an article for the Caucasus Reporting Service of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (www.iwpr.net), Timur Aliev wrote that Chechens crippled by military action cannot always be sure of getting help from the Kadyrov administration unless they pay bribes. Rabu Azdayeva, head of Chechnya’s Society of Invalids, told him that many of the handicapped have to pay just to get their names added to the official list of those eligible for subsidies. Such registration can cost up to 3,000 rubles (US$100) per person. That is more than a month’s wages even for the average Chechen who is not disabled.

Thus, the official register of handicapped people is far from complete. It now includes some 33,000 people, of whom 7,500 are children. Last year’s budget for the Kadyrov administration included only 34 million rubles for programs to help these people–the equivalent of about US$30 per person. Azdayeva said that last year Kadyrov’s officials promised her organization a grant of 400,000 rubles (about US$13,000), but the funds never arrived. According to one independent estimate, there are now some 2,500 people living in Chechnya who have been injured by explosions of mines and dud artillery shells but who have never received proper medical treatment.

LOSSES FOR RUSSIAN FORCES CONTINUE

Rebel guerrillas killed two federal servicemen in the ambush of a Russian military convoy on July 9, an official of the Kadyrov administration told the Associated Press. During that same twenty-four-hour period the rebels killed three pro-Moscow policemen in Grozny; three Russian troops in an unspecified location died when their vehicle was hit by a grenade.

The rebels ambushed another Russian convoy in southern Chechnya’s Shatoi region on July 12, disabling the lead truck with a mine and then attacking the rest of the column with assault rifles and grenade launchers. A Kadyrov administration official said that nine federal troops were killed. Two gunmen of Kadyrov’s own security force were shot dead on the same day in Shatoi itself. A federal serviceman was shot dead at the central market in Grozny.