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APPENDIX 1
The Refugee crisis in the North Caucasus
The collapse of the USSR and the outbreak of violent ethno-political conflicts across the
whole of the Caucasus have drastically altered the basic demographic profile of the North
Caucasus. 153 The number of refugees and “forced migrants” who have both fled from and found
refuge within the North Caucasus since 1988 exceeds one million people. 154 This figure includes
refugees from the wars in Chechnya, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, North Ossetia and Ingushetia, and
Nagorno-Karabakh; and those escaping the ethnically-motivated discrimination and crime, and
difficult economic conditions prevalent throughout the Russian Federation and the former Soviet
Union. The effects of these conflicts on the population of the North Caucasus are comparable in
scale to the effects of the deportations by the Soviet Government in 1943-1944, in which
approximately one million North Caucasians were relocated to Central Asia. 155
Before the outbreak of war in Chechnya, the most serious demographic dislocation in the
region was associated with the influx of refugees and forced migrants from the former Soviet
republic of Georgia, where violent ethnic conflicts assumed a permanent and protracted character
from 1991. According to official statistics released by the Migratory Service of the Republic of
North Ossetia, for example, approximately 100,000 Ossetians refugees fled to North Ossetia at the
beginning of the South Ossetian conflict in January 1991, and 41,300 still remained in North Ossetia
in April 1995. 156 A further 256,000 refugees fled from the conflict in Abkhazia into Georgia and the
153 Material for this section is taken from Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Khasan Dzutsev, “The Refugee
Problem in the North Caucasus.” An edited and shortened version of this paper has also been published in the
June 1995 CMG Bulletin, pp. 42-43.
154 According to the Russian Federation’s legal code, a “Refugee” is a person who has sought refugee in Russia but
is not a citizen of the Russian Federation, or is not entitled to apply for citizenship. A “Forced Migrant,” on the
other hand, according to the preamble of a February 1993 law, is “a citizen of the Russian Federation who has
been forced to leave his or her place of permanent residence in another state or in the Russian Federation,
because violence or other forms of persecution have been committed against him or her, or members of his or
her family––or because there is a real danger of being subjected to persecution on the basis of race, nationality,
religion or language, or because he or she belongs to a certain social group or holds certain political
convictions––as a result of hostile campaigns against individual persons or groups of persons, mass disturbances
of public order, or other circumstances that significantly infringe on human rights.” See the Russian Federation
law On Refugees, and the Russian Federation Law On Forced Migrants, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, No. 54, March 20,
1993, p.4. This means that in accordance with Russian terminology most of the people displaced by ethnic
conflicts within the North Caucasus fall under the category of “forced migrants” rather than refugees.
155 Source of figures: Minority Rights Group, The North Caucasus: Minorities at a Crossroads (London, 1994),
p.21.
156 This figure includes 34,400 Ossetians officially registered as refugees and 6,900 who have not been granted
refugee status by the government and are expected to be repatriated to South Ossetia. See CMG Bulletin, June
1995, p.50. The total figure is equivalent to approximately 5% of the population of South Ossetia, and 6% of the
North Ossetian population.
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