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Erstellt am: 24. 10. 2009 - 00:03 Uhr

My Reality: Chechnya

Chechens in Austria – did they escape the conflict? FM4 Reality Check (12-13) takes a closer look.

Herwig Schinnerl

Why has a mountainous republic with an approximate size of Styria and a bit more than one million inhabitants situated at the southern front of the Russian Federation in the Northern part of the Caucasus Mountains so fascinated me for several years now? And not only me but as well many other scientists, journalists, human rights activists and social workers?

Maybe because the republic of Chechnya is a place where two major armed conflicts including vast human rights violations took place in the nineties. Maybe because the security situation still is quite unsafe and the situation of the whole Northern Caucasus remains explosive and unforeseeable. Maybe also because around 100.000 Chechens live as refugees in Western Europe, approximately 20 000 of them in Austria. As I am a social anthropologist my interest is mainly focussed on the Chechen people, the society, the customary law called “adat” and the impact of the conflict and the human rights violations on society.

Being There

That interest led to the topic of my master thesis which I wrote about NGOs and international organizations working in Chechnya. For that I had the chance to do fieldwork consisting of three months in Russia in 2006, around five weeks of which I spent in the North Caucasus, mainly in Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia and Ingushetia. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to move to Chechnya as the security situation still was too dangerous. But anyway it was incredible to meet persons and see places in real which I read so much about: walk through Kabardino-Balkaria’s capital Nalchik, along the Terek river in Vladikavkaz or pass through Beslan, where in 2004 at a terrorist attack in a school several hundred persons died. In Ingushetia already in 2006 I needed a guard to move around – within the last three years the security situation in this neighbour republic of Chechnya even deteriorated to an incredible extent. I conducted about 40 interviews – for instance with high-level human rights activists Sergej Kovaljov, Svetlana Gannushkina, Tanya Lokshina, Lidja Yussupova, Sainap Gashaeva and so on - and gained a detailed insight in human rights and humanitarian work in a conflict zone. What still makes me sad is the fact that I also had planned to talk to the journalist Anna Politkovskaja which eventually could not take place as she was murdered on 7th October 2006. One of my interlocutors told me about the situation in Chechnya: “Even though there are improvements - reconstruction and so on - you have to build up a society again.” This phrase still is of high validity in today’s Chechnya.

A Book is Born

Shortly after finalizing my thesis I had a discussion with a great colleague – the political scientist Thomas Schmidinger about the topic. He also worked on Chechnya and with Chechen refugees in Austria already several years. Soon the idea of publishing an anthology was born – the aim was to build a bridge between the situation in Chechnya and the diaspora in Austria. As the topic of our book most likely was not one ending up being a bestseller the search for a publisher was not easy. Finally we were very lucky to find the “Verein Alltag Verlag” in Wiener Neustadt. After gathering some 30 texts coming from Austrian, German and Chechen social anthropologists, journalists, social workers, political scientists, psychologists but also artists the book was published in May 2009. It provides a very broad view on Chechnya and Chechens in Austria. It shows the situation in Chechnya historically (e.g. the Profil-journalist Tessa Szyszkowitz and the social anthropologist Andrea Strasser-Camigni) and currently (e.g. ORF-journalists Susanne Scholl, Georg Dox and Markus Müller).

Reality

Several articles draw a positive picture of integration in Austria, others show problems (e.g. Michael Genner from Asyl in Not, Herbert Langthaler from Asylkoordination). I think we accomplished our goal to provide information on the largest refugee community of the last years in Austria. This knowledge about their situation here and in their home country should lead to more understanding and subsequently to better integration. We want to show that the picture of the criminal refugees who only want to utilize the asylum system which often is drawn in the media or used by politicians is not a correct one. That the Chechens seeking asylum in Austria are human beings in need of (to a great extent psychological) help, freedom and security who shouldn’t be generally prejudged. The anthology is to be a first step on that very young topic – the first Chechens entered Austria in a perceivable amount only in 2002.
What really makes me happy is that at last the book contains one of the last interviews with Anna Politkovskaja from August 2006 which a colleague from Vienna provided. Even though I didn’t have the honour to talk to her personally any more.

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