Several hundred Chechens and dark-skinned people from the Caucasus have been forced to flee a town in north-west Russia after a brawl in a restaurant prompted a race riot at the weekend.
The exodus of minorities from Kondopoga in the Karelia region near the border with Finland follows events on Saturday when a mob rampaged through the town and burned down the Chayka (Seagull) restaurant belonging to an Azeri businessman. The conflict was triggered by the death last week of two ethnic Russians after a fight in the restaurant.
That fight apparently started when a group of Russians celebrating the release of a friend from prison argued with an Azeri barman, who then called the restaurant’s partly Chechen security.
Six people were later detained in connection with the fight, which involved about 25 people — some armed with knives, baseball bats and iron bars — and also left three seriously injured.
Police said on Monday that 109 people had been arrested in connection with the riots, which developed after a demonstration about the restaurant brawl on Saturday. The protest of about 2 000 people was partly organised by xenophobic groups calling for revenge on Caucasians over the internet.
No one was hurt but several businesses belonging to people from the Caucasus were attacked at the weekend and local authorities helped about 30 Chechen families flee in buses to safety in another town. The riots reflect growing social tension after a wave of racist attacks that have seen ultra-right groups target immigrants and people from Russia’s north Caucasus republics. Last month 10 people died when two men placed bombs in a Moscow market where they thought there were too many Asian traders.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the Prime Minister of Chechnya, launched an attack on police in Karelia on Monday, blaming them for not taking stronger action against rioters.
”I appeal to the Russian authorities, to all sane Russian forces to do the utmost to prevent the nationalist infection and xenophobia that is ripening in society and spreading like a cancer throughout the body of our common home,” he said.
He called for a ban on the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), which he blamed for inflaming the situation.
Alexander Smirnov, a spokesperson for Karelia governor Sergei Katanandov, said prosecutors were investigating video footage of DPNI activists’ participation in the demonstration that led to the pogrom.
Katanandov earlier told reporters that locals’ ”expression of rightful indignation over the death of our compatriots in a bloody showdown” at the restaurant had been hijacked by hooligans.
Smirnov added: ”This was a domestic conflict that several extremist websites used to try to wind up the population, especially young people.”
In an interview with The Guardian, the DPNI leader Alexander Belov denied he had caused the riots. He said his organisation had helped erect a stage and urged locals to demand that authorities expel Caucasians who arrived after 1991 because they ”did not fit in”.
”Some young people decided to take matters into their hands,” he said. ”I warned them to be responsible. But they said, ‘We can’t take it any more.”’
Belov said animosity was high against Chechens because people thought they had behaved with cruelty during the restaurant brawl. ”They cut people’s ears, smashed bones with iron bars and stabbed people in the eyes,” he said.
But Viktor Birin of the Karelia state committee on national politics said Chechen businessmen had told him they were hated in the town because they had refused to give in to an extortion racket. – Guardian Unlimited Â