Nationalists say that the detainment of their leaders contributed to the disorder at their meeting in Stavropol, June 5, 2007.
Photo: AP
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Slavic Riot in Stavropol
An entire delegation of federal officials and MPs arrived in Stavropol yesterday to get to the bottom of the unrest between Russians and Caucasians, the murder of two students and the unauthorized meeting that nearly turned into a pogrom. Interior Minster Rashid Nurgaliev stated that nine criminal cases had been initiated and 51 people taken into custody, although “there was no riot” and “the murders that were committed in Stavropol were not ethnically motivated.” Nationalists in Stavropol claim that the clashes with police after the meeting were due to provocateurs. Nonetheless, they claim that “the patriots won because they managed to shake up the authorities.”
Stavropol law enforcement spent the day yesterday giving account of the previous day's unauthorized meeting held by the city's Slavic organizations. The mass meeting occurred on the occasion of the funerals of Dmitry Blokhin and Pavel Chadin, who were killed nine days after a brawl in the northwest district of the city in which Chechen student Gilani Ataev was a casualty. About 200 people went to the Tourist Hotel with violent intentions toward the Caucasians living there, where special forces troops were able to disperse them. More than 50 people were taken into custody, but damages were limited to a few broken store and car windows.
The police released everybody the next morning, with the exception of Alexander Chernovolov, leader of the local division of the Russian National Union and the so-called Ermolovsky Front, who was charged under article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Incitement of Ethnic Enmity”). He is also accused of creating leaflets of a radical nature calling the local populace to the unauthorized meeting.
Russian National Union members say that Chernovolov was not apprehended after the meeting, but half an hour before it started. “People in civilian clothes came to his job and took him to the prosecutor's office,” they said. His colleagues Alexander Potkin, leader of the Movement against Illegal Immigration (Russian abbreviation DPNI) and Boris Smirnov, head of DPNI-TV, were also sidetracked from the meeting. “On June 5, we flew from Moscow to Mineralnye Vody, because there were no tickets available for Stavropol,” Potkin told Kommersant. “A policeman in the airport in Mineralnye Vody stopped us to examine our documents. Then they detained us at the road police [Russian abbreviation GIBDD] post and from there sent us to the organized crime department [UBOP]. There they said that we had nothing to do in Stavropol and wouldn't get there in any case and suggested that we take the first flight out of Mineralnye Vody. We flew to Rostov.”
“The meeting was planned to be exclusively peaceful,” Potkin said. “The police did everything they could so that it would get out of the control of its organizers.” Russian National Union sources say that unknown persons showed up at the leaderless meeting and urged people to loot the stores of non-Russians. “Probably the police and FSB didn't want a peaceful meeting. They wanted to show the scale of the threat they were fending off,” a RNU member commented.
The nationalists considered the meeting a success in any case. The authorities really were shook up. Nurgaliev stated at a conference on religious and political extremism in Makhachkala that the situation in Stavropol “is under control and will not develop according to the scenario in Kondopoga.” After lunch, he flew to Stavropol with his deputy Alexander Edelev, presidential representative for the Southern Federal District Dmitry Kozak and Deputy Prosecutor General Ivan Sydoruk, where they were met by territorial governor Alexander Chernogorov, whose resignation had been demanded at the unauthorized meeting in Stavropol. They went from the airport directly to the territorial police department [GUVD], where a three-hour meeting was held behind closed doors.
The actions of the police were assessed positively as a whole. Chernogorov and his guests from Moscow then held a meeting with leaders of the ethnic diasporas and everyone was happy in the end. The Slavic nationalists received attention. The minorities were assured of the support of the authorities, and no one lost their jobs.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of June 07, 2007
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