The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) reports that hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes in Chechnya since 1990.
[1] This included majority of Chechnya non-Chechen population of 300,000 (mostly Russians, but also Armenians, Ingush, Georgians, Ukrainians and many more) who had left the republic in the early 1990s and as of 2008 never returned.
[6] About 180,000 Chechens remained in Ingushetia by February 2002[7] and 150,000 by June 2002, most of them housed in a "tent city" camps, abandoned farms and factories and disused trains, or living with sympathetic families.
All official IDP centers in the republic were closed down and the foreign NGO aid severely limited by the government (including the ban of the Danish Refugee Council).
Since 2003 there is a sharp surge of Chechen asylum-seekers arriving abroad, at a time when major combat operations had largely ceased.
[10] In September 2009 Kadyrov said that Chechnya would open representative offices in Europe in an attempt to convince the Chechen migrant communities living there to return to their homeland.
[11] Austria granted asylum rights to more than 2,000 Chechen refugees in 2007, bringing the total number to 17,000 in January 2008, the largest diaspora in Europe then.
The largest Chechen communities in France exist in Nice (where there were reports of sharp conflict with the immigrants from North Africa[15]), Strasbourg and Paris (the home of the Chechen-French Center).
[9] Of some 4,000 Chechens who have sought safety in neighbouring Georgia, the majority have settled in Pankisi Gorge and over 1,100 registered refugees remain there as of 2008.
Since Yanukovich was elected, he has begun harassing the Chechen refugee settlements through police raids and sudden deportations, sometimes even separating families.