"Lena-apa, the police has me again." I regularly hear these words on the phone in my apartment and on the cell phone - mornings, afternoons, and evenings. The callers are refugees, almost invariably Uzbeks. Citizens of Uzbekistan account for the majority of immigrants who fled political or religious harassment in their native country.

There is no need to elaborate here on the repressive nature of the Uzbek regime. Volumes have been written on the subject. Less widely known is the position Uzbek refugees in Russia find themselves in.

Fleeing harassment at home, they earnestly hope to find protection and security for themselves and their families here in Russia. The refugees include democratic opposition members and human rights activists, witnesses of the tragedy in Andizhan, and even those who observed Islamic rites and customs in private without ever being socially active.

Each and every one of them is guaranteed a shock on arrival, caused by the understanding that there is no place for him or her in this vast and thinly populated country. Most of the immigrants leave their native country with barely enough to pay their fare here. Very many of them flee imminent arrest, leaving behind the families they hope to reunite with once they have settled in Russia.

The process of settlement begins on Day Four upon the arrival when the immigrant finds him- or herself standing in violation of the Administrative Code. The document demands registration on the territory of the Russian Federation within the very first three days. Even assuming the impossible - that the refugee's native aunt is longing to offer the relative her own apartment - even then the registration will certainly take longer.

As a rule, however, human rights activists from Kokand and farmers from Karsha, Moslems from Namangan and gapers from Bobur Square in Andizhan cannot boast of an aunt in Moscow, Arzamas, or Novosibirsk. Respectably-looking con artists are waiting for them at railroad stations and airport terminals instead, with offers of "official registration" which will take "just a couple of hours" and "a moderate sum". Moderate or not, but a lion's share of whatever the immigrant has brought with him or her ends in their pockets. The immigrant will be lucky to have enough left to pay the very first policeman who is guaranteed to stop "an Asian" to take a look at his or her papers. (Even though policemen on patrol duty are not supposed to be doing so.) Or else it is a protocol on violation of the foreigner presence regulations and a trial that will take but 5 minutes to order the refugee deported from Russia again, or criminal charges for the use of forged documents. A person has barely escaped Karimov's cannibal regime. What evil should he or she regard as lesser of the two and therefore choose?

"Headhunters in police uniforms" avoided or at least paid to look the other way for a moment, the refugee makes it to the local office of the Federal Service of Immigration and this is where things get really interesting. The procedures differ from region to region.

In Moscow, the refugee will be told to turn up for an interview at 10 a.m. sharp on a specified day in... 2009 or so. Personnel of the Municipal Directorate of the Federal Service of Immigration do not tolerate slipshodness and that is probably why the text of the invitation includes the following in small print, "Failure to turn up for the interview without a valid reason will be regarded as the applicant's refusal to proceed. Interviews are not rescheduled."

In Nizhny Novgorod, the visitor will be immediately forwarded to the Federal Security Service where some officer has a seemingly endless list of questions concerning what other Uzbek refugees the visitor knows, where and how they reside here, if anyone of them ever travelled to Ukraine (and when someone did, was he or she perhaps a sympathizer with the Orange Regime)...

SOP of the Tyumen Directorate of the Federal Service of Immigration is the simplest of all. Its officials produce an extradition request from the Uzbek Prosecutor General's Office concerning the person in question wanted for "encroachment on the constitutional regime" by way of observance of Namaz rites, and send documents to the Regional Directorate of the Federal Security Service. When the latter replies that capital punishment in Uzbekistan is abolished (is it, now?) and that "harassment for political motives is history", the applicant has his or her request flatly denied. And that is that. Needless to say, the refugee is taken into custody "in view of the necessity to turn him or her over to law enforcement agencies of the Republic of Uzbekistan." Bairamali Yusupov, formerly of the Samarkand University expelled for devotion to Moslem rites, has already spent nine months in Tyumen Detention Cell 1 on this pretext.

Even if all these barriers are scaled and the request for the status of refugee is to be considered three months later, the decision on the matter is always uniform. Any lawyer worth his name will tell you the following without even bothering to consult the papers, "The status of a refugee on the territory of the Russian Federation is denied because criteria specified by Clause 1 Provision 1 Article 1 of the Federal Law "On refugees" do not apply in your case." Paradoxically as it undoubtedly is, but the criteria specified by Clause 1 Provision 1 Article 1 of the law in question recognize as valid precisely the reasons that compelled the refugee to flee his or her native country in the first place. In the meantime, proving that this is so is a sheer impossibility because not one constitution in the Commonwealth permits harassment for racial, religious, ethnic, social, or political motives. It follows that fabricated trials, murdered or maimed relatives, surveillance, or direct threats from officers of the Uzbek National Security Service or Interior Ministry are not arguments at all in this dispute between an individual and the state apparat.

And yet, the application is a must. It takes time to consider it and to have the court confirm the denial afterwards, and the applicant is not to be deported from Russia throughout it all.

Unfortunately, not all policemen are aware of that. In the meantime, all policemen practically without exception become devout and suspicious patriots as soon as they encounter a foreigner. That is why I often hear the no less traditional sequel with the Uzbek accent "He says I'm illegitimate, he says my papers are forged!" right after the traditional "Hello, Lena-apa." It was already mentioned here that this patriotic frenzy may only be cooled by a banknote or by a telephone conversation needed to explain to this particular fighter with illegal immigration why precisely this "foreigner" had better be set free right away or the police may count on a run-in with the nosy human rights community. Extricating my charge from the police station, I'm always painfully aware of the fact that the detail on duty will more than recompense for the "loss of profit" before long.

In any case, everything eventually comes to its inevitable end, and so does the period of waiting for the final - ultimate in its finality - denial of the coveted status. The refugee (fed up with the international friendship, and lucky if he or she was not murdered or injured by skinheads) has the mission of the UN High Commissar for Refugees as the last resort. Some, smart or plain lucky, appeal to it while still waiting for the denial from the Russian authorities. Interviews and examinations there take months too, but they do offer a chance that the refugee will finally be issued a blue permit - ID of a person under protection of the international community. This is the paper that may yet see the person into a region in the world where hair color or slanted eyes do not matter.

It is but a provisional detention center for all others, essentially a jail for whoever is to be extradited. As soon as the person's family or friends raise the sum necessary to pay for the ticket to the sun-bathed Uzbekistan, he or she will be sent back to the country once escaped from.

To tell you the truth, it is not every refugee that is expected to pay for his or her way back to the vindictive Uzbek security structures. Whoever has had a brush with the so called power vertical - even its lowest levels - will be sent to Uzbekistan with the vertical itself paying. It happened so to Marsel Isayev, once a student of a college in Kazan, who would not lie to the court no matter how desperately one Kirienko of the Kazan Municipal Organized Crime Directorate begged him to. Kirienko knew better than to dally, and Isayev was extradited to Tashkent even before the republican office of the Federal Service of Immigration denied him the requested status. Even federal Ombudsman Lukin proved helpless in this case. Lukin appealed to the Interior Ministry of the Republic of Tatarstan and was told that the latter could not help because the process of Isayev's extradition was in the hands of "others". It does not take a genius to guess who the "others" were.

All of that is routine. Things stop being routine for whoever is wanted by Uzbek counterparts of the Russian "others" for treason against Karimov's regime. It does not even matter what particular form this treason took: human rights activities, observance of religious rights, being a relative to a hapless victim of the massacre in Andizhan, or just having been in the wrong place at the wrong time (say, passing Bobur Square en route to the office on May 13, 2005).

It does not matter that some of the would-be victims of the friendship between presidents of Russia and Uzbekistan were in Russia when the tragedy in Andizhan was unfolding. Whoever gets caught in a raid had better be ready: the name is faxed to Tashkent, a concocted extradition request is flashed back, and that is that. This is what happened to fourteen Uzbeks in the city of Ivanovo last July. Were it not for the public outcry caused by the bleeding hearts of the human rights community, Russian law enforcement agencies would have turned them over to the Uzbek authorities long ago. As things stand, however, I can only admire how painstakingly the Russian Prosecutor General's Office is observing all necessary procedures in this case - monitored by the media and non-government organizations. On the other hand, the Prosecutor General's Office does not really care about the international law that expressly forbids extradition into the countries where capital punishment and torture are practiced.

As for the Russian legislation and particularly Constitution that forbids extradition of citizens of the Russian Federation... A person and the extradition request are all it takes. Citizenship of the Russian Federation is not fingertips. Citizen today - not a citizen tomorrow. Everything is amazingly simple. All it takes is a paper that the person the National Security Service wants once obtained Uzbek citizenship and abandoned it afterwards for citizenship of the Russian Federation. One of the Ivanovo prisoners Khatam Khadzhimatov was told by a plainclothesman who arrested him, "You, a citizen of Russia? Forget it. Take a look at your Russian passport. You'll never see it again. We'll issue you an Uzbek passport instead with the permanent residence in central Tashkent. Confess involvement in Andizhan, and you'll draw but a decade behind the bars. Or else get ready to face the music."

Fortunately for Khadzhimatov, this defender of the authorities' right to execute citizens of their own country kept the first promise only. The arrestee never saw his Russian passport again. He was told that the court ruled to invalidate his citizenship on the basis of the documents sent in from Uzbekistan. The second promise was never kept. Khadzhimatov is in Ukraine now, courtesy and under the protective wing of the UN High Commissar for Refugees.

Alisher Usmanov was less lucky. Like Khadzhimatov, Usmanov has never been a citizen of Uzbekistan. In his particular case, however, the Vakhitov District Court of Kazan never bothered to read to the end the Uzbek law on citizenship, the paragraph that specified the necessity of the person's own willingness to become citizen of Uzbekistan. Kazan judges must have fallen victim of the old Soviet habits and decided that procedures in Tashkent could not differ from those in Moscow (if the person was living in the country when the law came into effect, then the person in question must be a citizen). Shortly speaking, Usmanov's Russian citizenship was annulled. The day he was released from prison he had been confined to for some planted munitions, Usmanov was kidnapped right from a detention cell in Kazan, shoved into a plane, and (according to PR Department of the Uzbek National Security Service) "escorted to Uzbekistan in accordance with the plan of combating international terrorism charted together with the Russian Federal Security Service."

It may be added here that the Prosecutor General's Office as the only structure in the country that is supposed to handle all extraditions did not know anything. Neither did border guards. Their spokesman admitted to human rights activists that border guards do not compile lists of whoever crosses the border and only count them. In other words, nobody knows why Alisher-aka would want to make the trip from a Kazan detention cell to another in Tashkent to yet another in Namangan and eventually to a maximum security penitentiary in Karshi or why he would want to spend the next eight years there.

I could continue on the subject of friendship between the Russian and Uzbek regimes and the lot of their subjects... but the phone is ringing again.

"Hello, Lena-apa! How are you?" - "Come on, Ravshan. It's past midnight. What police station?" - "The Ostankino one..."

P.S.

According to the data from the Federal Service of Immigration of the Russian Federation, 26,065 persons had the status of refugees in Russia in 2000, 8,725 in 2003, and 452 in early April 2006.

The figure is approaching zero fast.

***

Yelena Ryabinina is the head of Programs of Assistance to Central Asian Political Refugees of Civil Assistance Committee