From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 4/27/2007 3:09 PM
April 27th 2007 · Prague Watchdog / Umalt Chadayev       
    
    
Grozny’s “Potemkin villages”

By Umalt Chadayev

In the city of Grozny the work of repair and restoration being widely advertised by both local and federal authorities is an almost round-the-clock operation. The city is literally changing before one’s eyes, but in the opinion of many experts the quality of the work merits serious criticism.

"It can’t be a bad thing that Grozny’s streets are being cleared of debris, building waste and household garbage, and semi-destroyed buildings restored. But the process of reconstruction is accompanied by a wide range of negative factors and various nuances which suggest that the emphasis is on the number of buildings being renovated and the quantity of the work rather than the quality of its implementation," says 54-year-old Grozny resident Usman Takayev, who in Soviet times worked as an engineer.

"It’s been announced that by May 1 more than 750 buildings will have been put back into service and 24 streets restored. The work on sites in the Chechen capital are being done in three shifts. Safety measures are practically non-existent. People are working at their own risk, without receiving even basic means of protection such as helmets. As far as I know, several building workers, including women, have met their deaths, and there have been dozens of injuries," he said.

The scale of the construction work in the Chechen capital is truly impressive. The fronts of the buildings that face the main highways are being restored first, with the rest of the work being started only later. Thus, for the inauguration of Ramzan Kadyrov the facades of the Leninsky district apartment buildings along the road that leads to Grozny airport were hastily refurbished. The numerous guests who arrived in the Chechen capital from Moscow and other Russian regions, saw with their own eyes the metal-tile roofing and walls of buildings sparkling with new paint.

"After so many years of destruction, disorder and inaction on the part of the authorities, one can only welcome what is now being done," says Zelimkhan, a student at the Chechen State University. “Most of the republic’s inhabitants are delighted at the changes that are taking place, the restoration of buildings, roads and so forth. People have grown unused to all this, though in principle what’s being done in Grozny today is no more or less than what any normal government is supposed to do."

“Not many people today give any thought to the obverse side of this "recovery ". Everyone knows where money for all this work is coming from. It’s a portion of the salaries of public-sector workers who are ‘voluntarily’ transferring them to the Akhmat Kadyrov Foundation, which, if the official statistics are to be believed, is supplying the core funding for the reconstruction project. But on the whole, the quality of the work merits a separate discussion. It all reminds me a lot of the well-known story of the ‘Potemkin villages’ of Catherine the Great.

“One of my relatives is working on a construction site in a Grozny neighbourhood, and I know what the true situation is. For example, concrete kerbs are being installed along roadsides in Grozny. But if they get a more or less severe impact or are subjected to other pressure, they just disintegrate,” says Zelimkhan. “Because they’re manufactured without any armouring, and the quality of the cement is also probably sub-standard. The same situation pertains in all the other areas of the work: the roof repairs, the plastering and painting of buildings. It’s all being done in haste, it’s all just temporary."

Chechen and Russian media have recently been talking enthusiastically about the construction of the “Ramzan” cottage village in Grozny's Staropromyslovsky district. By May 1, 180 low-income families from temporary accommodation centres for displaced persons will have been resettled there. The refugees are happy, and the government is preparing to deliver a report on its new achievements.

However, there are many interesting details about the construction of this village. For one thing, the building of the cottages began in the days of the Soviet Union. The one and two-storey houses were intended for employees of one of the republic’s main enterprises. Another question-mark hangs over the fact that dozens of those employees are already in possession of documents which certify their right to this accommodation, but were issued prior to the break-up of the USSR. However, they are now to be deprived of this housing, as the government wishes to use it in order to settle other people there.

"My friend has a cottage in this village which is named after Ramzan Kadyrov. Actually there was almost nothing that needed to be built from scratch for the refugees. Those cottages were built about 20 years ago, under the Soviet government. All that was left to be done was the work on the interiors – the walls, roofs, and so on were already finished. Because of the two recent wars, the lack of money and other factors, many legitimate owners of the cottages have not been able to reoccupy them. There were no resources for completing the work. And now that housing is being taken away from them, on ‘legitimate grounds’,” says 55-year-old Grozny resident Mukhadi Ismailov angrily. “They say it was necessary to settle the refugees in time. Are people to blame for the fact that there have been two wars on their land, that they’ve even been left without the means of existence, let alone repair work and that sort of thing!"

"I’ve been told that some 23 or 26 people have all the documentation for their cottages in the ‘Ramzan’ village. They’ve filed appeals to the courts and the prosecutor's office, but they’re just told to go away. No one dares to take up this case because everyone is scared. Nobody wants to know about these people, because it’s more advantageous to be in with the ‘Kadyrovites’. So in this case it seems that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Ramzan Kadyrov seems to be doing a good job in helping people who don’t have a roof over their heads, but at the same time he’s effectively making other families homeless. Where is the logic there?” Mukhadi wonders.
http://www.watchdog.cz/?show=000000-000002-000002-000059&lang=1