Victims of the construction of a hydroelectric power station in Dagestan in 2008 complained to the head of state about the government

More than 50 deputies from a number of regions of Dagestan asked Vladimir Putin to pay attention to the problems of residents of the republic who lost their property due to the construction of the Irganay hydroelectric station. Several thousand Dagestanis were left homeless back in 2008 because their villages were flooded. The court recognized their right to compensation, but federal ministries and regional authorities cannot agree on the amount of payments.

The letter to the president was signed by more than fifty deputies representing residents of five villages in the Untsukul and Gergebil districts of Dagestan. As Kommersant reported, in 2008, several settlements in the republic were flooded during the construction of a hydroelectric power station, their residents lost their homes and gardens, and since then have been trying for many years to obtain compensation from the state. In November 2020, the “Irganai people” – named after the hydroelectric power station and the flooded village of Bolshoy Irganai – filed a lawsuit in the Presnensky District Court of Moscow on behalf of 567 people. The list of victims of the flooding is not limited to the plaintiffs – another 9.5 thousand people were waiting for compensation.

The plaintiffs asked the court to declare illegal the inaction of the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation, the government of Dagestan and the republican Ministry of Energy. The Presnensky court, chosen at the location of the Ministry of Economic Development, rejected the claim.

But in 2022, the Moscow City Court recognized that the government of Dagestan was inactive in solving the problem of the “Irganai”, and imposed an obligation to “eliminate violations.”

Representative of the plaintiffs, lawyer of the Memorial human rights center (included in the register of foreign agents and later liquidated by the court) Marina Agaltsova in in a conversation with Kommersant expressed hope that “everything will be completed within a reasonable time.”

In February 2023, the government of the republic sent a budget request to the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation. The requested amount for payment of compensation to the “Irganayans” amounted to about 9 billion rubles. However, the ministry responded that within the framework of the state program “Development of the North Caucasus Federal District” there are no budgetary allocations for the payment of these compensations. According to officials, there is no money for the “Irganayans” and there will not be until 2025. Later, the federal agency clarified that regional authorities had not prepared a final list of flooded property.

In July, more than 4.7 thousand flood victims signed a collective complaint addressed to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. They stated that the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and the government of Dagestan were “sabotaging” the work to solve their problem. They did not receive a substantive answer, the Irganians say, so their representatives sent a letter to the President of the Russian Federation (Kommersant has it).

“People are extremely disappointed,” the deputies told the head of state. “For 15 years they have been fighting for the compensation that they are entitled to by law for the houses and gardens that were flooded in 2008.”

According to them, the response of federal officials “killed the hope” of victims to receive compensation. They ask the head of state to “put the well-being and rights of our rural residents as a priority,” and also to establish coordination of work between the government of Dagestan and the Ministry of Economic Development.

Lawyer Marina Agaltsova told Kommersant that the victims asked the Ministry of Economic Development to organize a meeting of all interested parties and raise specific issues for discussion, “since the feeling is that the parties have reached a dead end.” After this, the department responded that “it wants to see information from the government of Dagestan about checking the lists of victims.” The response, signed by the director of the department of socio-economic development of the North Caucasus Federal District, Igor Khranovsky (Kommersant has a copy), states that the collective letter to the ministry was signed by 4,705 people, while the final list of victims presented by the government of Dagestan included 3,963 people, and in the warrant drawn up in November 2020, 565 citizens were named.

Mrs. Agaltsova notes that the correspondence with officials raised new questions among the “Irganay residents”: “From the response of the Ministry of Economic Development, one gets the feeling that in order to compensate for the flooded houses, it is planned to put the victims on the general queue for housing. But the general queue stretching in Dagestan for decades, of course, will not suit the victims. After all, this is not a question of social, but of tortious obligations of the state, that is, obligations arising as a result of damage caused by the flooding of lands in 2008 without prior and full compensation.” According to her, now the victims have asked for clarification from the federal Ministry of Construction, “to understand what they think about this.”

Yulia Rybina, Makhachkala