GROZNY, Russia, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Hassan, a softly-spoken 36-year-old, turned himself in to the pro-Kremlin authorities in Russia's Chechnya because, he said, he was fed up of security forces threatening to rape him.

Hassan is one of hundreds of former rebels who fought on the side of the rebels in a decade-long insurgency in Chechnya but have now taken advantage of an official amnesty, which expired on Monday.

But like many of the former fighters who surrendered, Hassan did not emerge from his hiding place in the forest with his rifle in his hands -- the picture of the amnesty that the Kremlin and its allies have been trying to present.

He had, in fact, turned his back on the rebels about a year ago and returned to his home. But, he said, he found it impossible to lead a normal life because of harassment from police who singled him out as an ex-rebel.

Since swapping his hideouts in the mountains at the beginning of last year, Hassan said the authorities had summoned and interrogated him three times before the amnesty started in mid-July.

"Every time they (the authorities) seized me they would say: 'We will rape you like a woman and leave your wife a widow,'" he told Reuters in an interview in Grozny, the battered Chechen capital.

Hassan joined the rebels fighting the Russians in 1999 at the start of the second Chechen war. Defending his friends, family and ordinary Chechens from Russian soldiers was his main motivation for siding with the rebels.

"I went to help those who were defending our people from oppression, I went to defend my family," he said

But after seven years he grew tired of living on the run. "Hunger, cold and suffering is not freedom," he said of his decision to leave the rebels. "We had these ideas that from the very start were Utopian."

After the harassment he suffered since turning his back on the rebels, the amnesty offered the chance of a different future.

"The conditions being offered can encourage people to go home, because ... the young people are tired and the mentality of our people does not allow you to wander far from your family."

"This is a step towards rebuilding peace on the long-suffering Chechen soil."

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