Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and Poland’s foreign minister traded barbs after Kadyrov, who has been linked to human rights abuses in Chechnya, accused Poland of violating the rights of Chechen refugees.
Kadyrov said he has “regularly heard that Chechen refugees in Poland are living in miserable conditions” and a group of Chechens must have been desperate for trying to take a protest about Polish conditions to Strasbourg before being stopped at Poland’s border earlier in the week.
“We do not force anybody to return … but if these people come back, their rights will be much better protected,” Kadyrov said in a statement published last week on his government’s web site.
Kadyrov has regularly been accused of grave human rights violations, including kidnapping and murder — charges that he denies.
Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski reacted Friday by questioning Kadyrov’s logic. “If there was democracy in Chechnya, I suppose that there would not be as many Chechen refugees as there are, including in Poland,” he said in remarks e-mailed by his ministry to The Moscow Times.
The protest began when asylum seekers boarded a train on Tuesday and said they wanted to protest at the Strasbourg, France-based European Court of Human Rights about their treatment in Poland and the slow process of getting political asylum. But the group of about 170 people, comprised of natives of Chechnya, Ingushetia and Georgia, got no further than the German border because they lacked tickets and proper documentation, Polish and German media reported.
The refugees were brought to Debak, a camp near Warsaw, the United Nations refugee agency said Friday.
One of the organizers, 30-year-old Ingush refugee Zhanetta Baisurkayeva, said the protest was motivated by a wave of violence against asylum seekers from the Caucasus since the fall.
“It started with numerous beatings of our people by young people. Then they started to assault refugee stations. … Strasbourg was the last attempt to call for attention and for real help,” she said in an interview published on the Waynakh.com web site.
Baisurkayeva added that she feared extradition to Russia as punishment for her involvement.
Polish ombudsman Janusz Kochanowski promised that living conditions at the Radom camp would be checked, the Thenews.pl web site reported Sunday.
The United Nations refugee agency disputed the notion that conditions in Polish camps justified the protest.
Melita Sunjic, a spokeswoman for the agency’s office in Budapest, Hungary, which covers Poland, said that according to her monitoring reports, conditions have greatly improved recently.
“The situation is no worse for Chechens than for anybody else,” Sunjic told The Moscow Times.
She said the real motive behind the protest might be that Polish authorities are now much less likely to grant asylum than earlier. Until last year, she said, Chechens had the best chance to obtain refugee status in the EU by applying in Poland. “Now the chances have fallen to 50 percent,” she said.
Sunjic also said many refugees seemed to be led by the false hope that the visa-free Schengen zone allows them to live wherever they want in Europe. “Schengen is just for travelers. Refugees cannot live outside the country that granted them status,” she said.
Poland has been a prime destination for refugees from Russia since the country was fully integrated into the Schengen zone in 2007. But numbers have fallen recently, and about 5,200 Russian citizens have applied for asylum so far this year, Sunjic said. Polish authorities also reported an unprecedented flood of Georgian asylum seekers this summer, with more than 3,000 Georgians applying from May to August.
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