War of the Unknowns

A seven-day war between two tiny Russian republics is still causing casualties - 13 years later.

MAISKII CAMP, North Ossetia - For Layla Kotieva, the war between North Ossetia and Ingushetia — both republics of Russia, located in the Caucasus region — began in a potato patch.

The Kotieva family

It was late October of 1992. Layla, her husband Alexander and thousands of other ethnic Ingush lived on land now part of North Ossetia.

"We lived in Terek village in Ossetia. My husband's family had lived there their entire lives with his parents," says Layla, who is Ingush. "We had three houses made of bricks and lots of land. We were picking potatoes when we heard the shooting."

She says at first it was just small arms fire, but then the tanks and artillery started. She and the others in her neighborhood had no idea what was going on. Panic broke out.

"Someone said it was the Ossetians that were shooting at us and that we should go to Ingushetia for a while until it stopped," she says. "We thought we'd only be gone for a few hours at the most. We didn't take anything — not even proper shoes. We were in our house slippers."

Little did they know, it was the start of a displacement they are still enduring. 

Tension had been high for years between the members of the two post-Soviet republics.

Much of it stemmed initially from a land dispute between them following Stalin's mass deportation order of 1944. Nearly 400,000 — mostly Muslim — nationals, including the Ingush, were seen as potential German allies and forced into exile during World War II.

When the Ingush returned from exile 13 years later, they found some of their homes and land now occupied by Ossetians.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the old animosities went from a simmer to a boil. Violence broke out between the two ethnic groups in late summer of 1992 as Ingush nationalists became more militant and Ossetians began to harass the Ingush living in North Ossetia.

When Ingush militants marched to take over the Prigorodny District in North Ossetia on October 30 that year it was war.

While Ingush and Ossetian militias clashed, Ingush living in North Ossetia, like Layla and her family, were forced from their homes.

The Russians sent 1,500 interior forces to the region as peacekeepers. While they reportedly stopped some of the atrocities, they sided with the Ossetians openly — to the point of fighting with them against the Ingush.

Layla says that is when they tried to flee. She and the 30 other families who lived in her neighborhood soon discovered the roads were blocked by Russian tanks. To get to Ingushetia they had to trek over the mountains. It was cold and muddy.

"It was the worst part of the experience," she says. "It took three days with no food or water. We slept on the cold ground with no blankets." When the group reached the first Ingush village, she recalls, two little girls from the neighborhood had already died.

"One [died] from the cold. The other, just two and a half, was swept away by the river current when her mother slipped as we were making our crossing," Layla says.

When the war ended on November 6, 1992, seven days after it began, nearly 600 people were dead and 1,000 were injured. An estimated 70,000 people became internally displaced people (IDPs) — including Layla and her family.

They lived with relatives or in their own apartments in Ingushetia for seven years before running out of money and moving to the Maiskii refugee camp. It's on the border between the republics but technically is in North Ossetia.

Layla Kotieva and her children

Today Layla, Alexander and their four boys, aged three and half to eight, live crammed into a one-room, corrugated tin shack built with supplies from the Danish Refugee Council.

Alexander, suffering from recurring migraines after a car accident, is able to work only sporadically in construction. He makes about 500 rubles a month, a little more than $16.

They get another 70 rubles a month in assistance from the Russian government. A kilo of meat here cost 100 rubles alone; a loaf of bread costs 10 rubles.

"I never would have believed I would have to live like this," says Layla. "To live in these conditions is just impossible."

Inside their shack are two single beds and two bunks crammed into a space of no more than 200 square feet (65 square meters).

A small dining table is pushed against one of the beds near the entrance. It's covered with plates from breakfast. The closet is a wire strung across a corner of the room, separated with a sheet. While we talk, the youngest boy, Magamid, lies on one of the beds lethargically. The oldest, Maksharia, studies from an English textbook.

Like characters in a Dostoyevksy novel, the Kotievas survive mostly on tea, bread and potatoes.

"We get meat about once every three months," Layla says.

This winter, when temperatures dropped to 30 below Celsius, she says they lost power for three days.

"There were icicles forming on the furniture inside," she says. "We had to bundle up in all of our clothes, and the gas pressure became so low that it was very difficult to cook anything. It would take an hour to boil water for tea. If we started to make soup in the morning, it might be hot enough to eat by nightfall."

Because there is no running water, the family has to use aluminum pails to collect water from a nearby well in the camp.

But Layla says this winter the well froze, and she had to make a two-hour round trip in the bitter cold to get water from Maiskii village.

Today it's sunny and warming temperatures have turned the frozen ground around the camp into sticky black mud. One of Layla's sons, Ahmed, kicks a deflated basketball around the dirt path in front of their shack with some other boys from the neighborhood.

The Maiskii IDP camp

Despite their bleak surroundings, they smile and squeal with laughter when the ball hits a mud puddle, splashing the brackish water over each other's pants and rubber boots.

Along with the Kotievas, 248 other families live in the same conditions, with little hope for improvement any time soon.

Galla Bridier, a program coordinator for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Ingushetia, says her organization recently conducted a needs assessment of the Maiskii camp. They found the IDPs there living in substandard conditions and in need of just about everything.

"But the situation is so politically sensitive at his point," says Bridier. "It's hard to provide any real direct assistance to these people. All we can do right now is help with basic sanitation, like garbage collection."

Most people in this camp feel like they're living in limbo — living in between republics, and forgotten by the international community.

Although the Russian government has pressured the Ossetians to allow the Inugsh to return to their towns and villages that they were initially forced to flee, many here say they don't feel safe returning. They talk of some harassment by Ossetian officials and of Ingush men disappearing from the camp.

Ahmed and Yahi Chahkiev

But 64-year-old Ahmed Chahkiev says he is already rebuilding in his home village. He and his wife Yahi, who is partially blind, have lived in the Maiskii camp for 13 years. He wants to return home before he dies. He says he would already be there if he hadn't run out of money.

"I don't feel completely safe going back," he says. "But we have no choice. I don't want to stay in Maiskii anymore."

But for Layla and Alexander Kotieva and their sons, the options are not so simple.

"Our house in Tarek was completely destroyed," says Alexander. "And we don't have the money to move, unless we get some help from the outside."

The Kotievas, like thousands of others, are victims of a seven-day war — the consequences of which may last a lifetime.

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