The 46-year-old car engineer was born in Kazakhstan. But on Wednesday, he sat with his wife and four children in another stinking railway carriage provided by the Kremlin. This time the carriages are going nowhere, moored on a siding in the tiny region of Ingushetia near the border with Chechnya, makeshift homes for Aidayev's family and another 2,000 refugees who have fled in the face of Russia's month-long assault on their homeland. ``All we want to do is to go home. Who wants to be here?'' he groaned.

For the past two weeks, the 2,000 Chechens, mainly women and children, have been crammed into 44 train carriages the Russian government's main contribution to solving the worsening refugee emergencytriggered by its bombing of Chechnya. They are part of a wave of close to 2,00,000 refugees swamping Ingushetia to the west, which itself has a population of only 3,00,000.

At the railcar encampment there are no kitchens, no sanitary facilities, no running water. The windows are sealed. Latrines have been hastily built in little wooden sheds down the embankment from the tracks. Each carriage was designed for 81 seated passengers but now has 54 permanent residents. Each family lives in one sleeping compartment. The weather is still mild here in the valley at the foot of the Caucasus mountains. But the snow already dusts the peaks and a bitter winter looms. ``They started giving us food yesterday, sugar, oil, and butter,'' said Toita Saidullayeva. ``But it's not enough. We can't wash our clothes. There's nowhere to bathe. What are we supposed to do with the children?''

Another 2,000 Chechens are subsisting in mud and squalor in tents a couple of hundred yards from the railway siding. Amid the mayhem of therapidly growing Chechen diaspora, Aidayev bristled with pain, humiliation, and indignation. ``Many of my family died in the railway transports in 1944. My parents survived but my father was killed in 1995 in the last war launched against Chechnya by the Russians,'' he said. ``And now we're back in railway carriages. Just look at the conditions we're living in.''

-- The Observer News Service