CHECHNYA LINKS LIBRARY

Self-styled ID checks underway on the eve of elections in Chechnya

By Ramzan Akhmadov

CHECHNYA – On February 19 Russian soldiers and Chechen police checked the IDs of local residents in the Katayama suburb of Grozny and collected data from the documents. The residents believe that this is being done for the forthcoming presidential elections in Russia.

Police accompanied by soldiers cordoned off a number of districts near School No. 49, and then proceeded to make the rounds of local homes, demanding to see people’s IDs and copying the details on to a list.

"At first we thought it was another special operation, especially because the family of one of the guerrillas who was killed in Shatoysky district on February 15 lives on our street," says Katayama resident Vakha. "But they were asking to see the documents of all the adult members of our family. After they’d copied all the data, they left. They did the same thing at other people’s homes."

This is the second such incident in this area - Grozny's Staropromyslovsky district - recently. On February 6, police conducted a review of ID data among residents of Zagryazhsky, a few kilometres away from Katayama.

"On the afternoon of February 6 a police officer visited our courtyard, introduced himself as the local bobby and demanded to see the IDs of all people registered at this address," Markha, a Zagryazhsky resident, told Prague Watchdog’s correspondent. "I gave him my ID and told him that my husband was at work, and that there were no other adults in the house beside ourselves. He was also interested to know whether if we had any grown-up children, and after copying my ID details into his notebook, he left. When I asked him why this was necessary, he said he was carrying out an order from his superiors."

"About a week earlier we’d had another of these rather peculiar ID checks,” Markha says. "The neighbours told me about it. We weren’t at home that day as my husband and I had gone to the village for a relative's funeral. The neighbours said that some policemen and Russian soldiers arrived in the yard, demanding to see everyone’s IDs. They copied the data and left, but didn’t give us any explanation."

Local people believe that these "measures" are directly related to the upcoming March 2 presidential elections in Russia. "We’re well aware that there are all these ‘elections’ taking place in Russia now. Most people simply don’t take part in them. I mean, everyone knows that they’re just a pretence and have nothing in common with real elections," says a resident who wishes to remain anonymous.

"If people don’t turn up to vote at the polling stations, the officials ‘compensate’ for it by stuffing the ballots with false signatures. The lists of voters are usually taken from the offices of the district administration, or gathered by means of these ‘reviews’ of ID data being carried out on the eve of the elections by police and military commandants’ offices," he says.

(Translation by DM)

(T)

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