Gunmen target ethnic Russians in south - Kremlin

NAZRAN, Russia, Sept 13 (Reuters) - Ethnic Russians in the southern republic of Ingushetia are being targeted by gunmen in an attempt to drive them out, President Vladimir Putin's envoy to the north Caucasus said on Thursday.

Two wars in Chechnya since 1994 between rebels and Russian soldiers have scarred the region but the focus of violence has shifted firmly to Ingushetia this summer.

The rebels -- a mixture of separatists and Islamists -- mainly attack government or military targets, but in the last few months non-Ingush civilians have been murdered.

"Clearly, in a very blunt and inhumane way, people are trying to prevent the return of Russians to the republic," Putin's envoy, Dmitry Kozak, told news agencies.

"I assure you that they (the rebels) will not succeed."

The Kremlin wants to portray the north Caucasus region as returning to normal. As prime minister in 1999 Putin sent Russian soldiers back into Chechnya and nearing the end of his second, and final, four year term as president he wants to display the mission as a success, analysts say.

Thousands of Russians left the north Caucasus area in the 1990s but the Kremlin has encouraged them to move back to boost its line that the war has been won and that the region is returning to normal.

In Ingushetia, which shares both borders and kinship with Chechnya, many Russians said they live in fear of their lives.

"Too much has been said already, I don't want to talk," a Russian woman dressed in black for mourning said in dusty sun-baked Nazran, the Ingush capital, after opening her door.

"I'm afraid, I have a daughter, my only child, we are guilty of nothing, we have taken nothing." She shut the door.

Gunmen killed a Russian doctor in Nazran last week and murdered a father and his two children and another female teacher and her two children earlier this summer. The funerals of the teacher and her two children were bombed.

Most Russians in Nazran refused to speak but Vera, a Russian woman, was defiant. "My family have lived here for three generations," she said. "I don't want to leave, I want to stay here, this is also Russia."

Ingushetia's towns are full of armed men in military uniforms and an uneasy calm pervades. This week gunmen killed a father and his two sons, a family described by the local interior ministry as gypsies.

The father's eldest daughter, Svetlana, told Reuters the gunmen were not Ingush but Slavic in appearance. Some wore face masks, she said, used silencers on their rifles and specifically killed the men and let the women and children go free.

"When they had found all three men they took them away to the sauna and firstly killed the two brothers and then father," she said. "They did this so father could see their deaths."





source:Reuters