What a crowd at the entrance of the Chechen government office wants.
Compensation for ruined housing and lost property is being paid out in Chechnya. But the line for payments is still thousands of people long.
Compensation is never more than 300 000 rubles (about $10,000) for the complete destruction of a house. 50,000 is paid for the loss of other property. The process has been halted many times because of multiple violations. One of the officials responsible for paying the indemnities has been charged with fraud and the present head of the compensation commission was once detained for taking bribes.
Between 2003 and 2007 16.4 billion rubles in compensation were paid out in Chechnya. About 60 million was given back to the budget by law-enforcement agencies as they had been received illegally. This year 2.8 billion rubles are expected to be paid out.
Local experts say compensation started to be paid in 2003 and was successful thanks to a simplified scheme. But in 2004 the federal authorities altered the scheme and ordered the creation of a group for the drawing up of a list of destroyed housing. In 2005, the group reported on its work and stopped its activities. But it turned out that hundreds of citizens of the republic had not been placed on the waiting list for compensation.
Now such people can be met at the entrance of the office of the governmental commission on compensation. But federal accusations of sluggishness towards Chechen authorities are not fair. The Chechen government presented the lists of the citizens who had the right to compensation to the Ministry of Regional Development in time. But by creating a technical group, the federal authorities "put the brakes on the process," local experts say.
"We ordered the heads of districts to help the work of compensation commissions and the inhabitants of settlements to prepare their documents" Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said at the end of the last year.
Chechens aggrieved during the war hope for additional help. According to some information, a project is being developed in Moscow. One of possibilities is creating housing certificates.
Timur Utsayev, Grozny. Exclusively for VK
