Baku. A dozen refugees from war-torn Chechnya staging a hunger strike in Azerbaijan to demand more aid from the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) threatened to expand their protest throughout the 3,000-strong Chechen refugee community here, a participant told AFP Thursday.

"We have been holding people back until now because very many want to join our hunger strike," said Ibragim Kaziyev, who fled fighting between Russia and separatist rebels in the Chechen city Gudermes five years ago.

Kaziyev and few other Chechens, some of whom lost limbs during bombings in the rebellious Russian republic, complained that the aid they receive from the UNHCR of about 80 dollars per person per month was not nearly enough to cover living expenses in oil-boom-town Baku.

Their strike is also over their status, which they want to be upgraded to make them eligible for resettlement in a western country.

"When we meet with the UNHCR to ask why they won't change our status, they make it clear to us that countries don't want to take us because we are viewed as terrorists," said Abubakar Darayev, one of the strikers who said he could not find work in Baku because he lost a leg in a Russian attack in Chechnya.

"They say its because of Beslan, but what did we have to do with that?" Darayev said in a reference to last year's school hostage massacre in southern Russia which resulted in the death of nearly 350 people, half of them children, and which was claimed by Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.

The UNHCR admitted that the level of care Chechen refugees here receive is not sufficient and malnutrition among the community is on the rise.

But according to the organization's chief representative in Azerbaijan, Jean-Claude Concolato, the procurement of UN funding for anything involving Chechens -- such aid is currently capped at 200,000 dollars annually in Azerbaijan -- has become a hard sell since Beslan.

"The Chechens are not happy when we speak about Beslan, but it is a fact that this has had a disastrous effect on our resettlement plan," Concolato told AFP in a telephone interview.

"There are countries, which I will not name, that have drastically cut assistance to this category of people."

Russian troops poured into breakaway Chechnya on October 1, 1999, causing hundreds of thousands of local residents to flee for the second time in a decade.

Those who came to Azerbaijan have been largely disenfranchised by local authorities who agreed to cut support after being pressured by Azerbaijan's former overlord Russia, which considers the mostly Muslim republic to have been a safe haven for rebels.