Los Angeles Times
Sept 23 2004
Civil Rights Suffer as Fear, Anger Grow in Russia
After several bombings and a school hostage crisis, police in Moscow
have arrested 11,000 — most of them from the North Caucasus.
By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer
MOSCOW – Magomed Tolboyev is a retired Russian air force colonel and
a decorated test pilot who flew under the cosmonaut program. He is a
recipient of his nation’s highest honor, the Hero of Russia award.
But on Sept. 8, none of that could compensate for his dark hair and a
passport that shows he was born in Dagestan, one of the turbulent
republics of the North Caucasus. Police at a downtown subway station
demanded Tolboyev’s documents, as they do of many Caucasian-looking
people these days in the wake of attacks linked to Chechen and other
Caucasian insurgents. The officers then grabbed him by his shirt and
choked him until he almost passed out.
“As an officer, I was deeply insulted,” Tolboyev said Wednesday. “I
told them their age is small enough to be one of my children. And
that they should salute a colonel when they talk to one, and not
stand there nibbling sunflower seeds…. But I knew these cops could
bundle me into their car, take me away and simply kill me.”
Tolboyev got an apology from Moscow’s police chief. But thousands of
other people haven’t been as fortunate. In recent days, more than
11,000 people – many of them Caucasians – have been rounded up by
police on charges of living in the capital without legal
registration.
Nearly 900 had been deported by midweek, and reviews of other cases
were pending. City officials acknowledge that it often can be
difficult for Caucasians to obtain the proper documents, which
require exhausting paperwork and a large bribe. But public objections
to the arrests have been nearly absent.
“I can say that Russia is really standing on its ears right now.
Everybody’s worried. Everybody’s in shock,” said Vsevolod Krasnikov,
a 19-year-old student in Moscow. “First of all, we need to establish
real law and order in Chechnya, because most of the terrorists come
from Chechnya. And then we should lock the borders and check out
everybody who tries to come here.”
“Russia is for Russians, and Moscow is for Muscovites,” fellow
student Denis Bely said.
In a survey last month – before a bombing at a Moscow subway, the
near-simultaneous crashes of two jetliners and a mass hostage-taking
at a school blamed on Chechen insurgents – 46% of Russians in 128
cities favored limits on where natives of the Caucasus can reside.
Some Moscow legislators now want to prohibit Caucasians from even
entering Russia’s capital during periods of insurgent violence.
“The Constitution defines 31 rights and freedoms, and I think the
most important right and freedom is the right to life,” said Moscow
city legislator Yury Popov, who proposed the temporary ban. “While I
see that realistically we can’t ensure for all Muscovites this
particular right, I think we have a moral obligation to temporarily
restrict some other less important rights … to ensure this most
important right, to life.”
For years, visitors from Chechnya and the surrounding republics have
been subject to special scrutiny by Moscow police. But in the last
two weeks, since the school siege in Beslan in the Caucasian republic
of North Ossetia, police have stepped up their inquiries.
Some said they try to stop nearly everyone of Caucasian appearance –
meaning dark-haired and dark-skinned.
“I look for faces of people from the Caucasus. Dagestanis, Chechens,
people like that. First of all, I stop him and check his ID. If his
ID looks basically OK on the spot, I still take him [to the subway
police office] for further questioning,” said Danila Kuliyev, a
junior police sergeant in north Moscow whose father is from the
Caucasus.
Kuliyev said it would be a “good idea” to evict Caucasians from
Moscow – though he didn’t mention his own family. “If you take them
away from the markets and everywhere, it will make the work of the
police easier and much more reliable,” he said.
About 5 a.m. Tuesday, police barged into a hotel room where Zalina
Dzandarova and her two children, all of whom had been held hostage in
the school at Beslan, were sleeping. The family was in Moscow to
visit Dzandarova’s sister-in-law, who was hospitalized with serious
injuries suffered in the attack.
“I said, ‘Are you looking for terrorists? If you are, you came to the
wrong place. Don’t you know we are from Beslan, that we are victims
of terrorists?’ ” Dzandarova said.
“I’m sorry,” one officer replied. “We have our instructions.” Then
they proceeded to search the family’s bags and peer under the beds.
In addition to intense police scrutiny, Caucasians apparently are
also being targeted by thugs. On Saturday, about 30 young men entered
a subway car and attacked three Caucasians, beating them severely.
“They were picking out the dark-skinned people, but when such a big
fight started, other people got beaten, too,” said Bagrat Pogosian,
an Armenian refugee from Azerbaijan who suffered a deep knife wound
to his shoulder in the attack.
“I screamed, ‘Brothers, kill the bastards!’ But people were scared,
and they were running away…. I went to the very back of the car and
started fighting back as strongly as I could. They stabbed at me
several times.”
The other victims, he said, “were beaten up, really, to a pulp.”
Pogosian, recuperating at a Moscow hospital, said the attackers wore
steel-toed boots of the type favored by skinheads.
“The way they entered the car, the way they ran away, the way they
were obeying orders of the leaders, they were very well-organized,”
he said. “Basically, they were terrorists without explosives.”
Popov, the Moscow legislator, has proposed making it easier for
newcomers to the city to register legally and imposing heavy fines on
employers who hire illegal workers. City statistics, he said, show
that 49% of crimes are committed by non-Muscovites – an argument, he
said, for his proposal to allow the city to temporarily close its
borders to residents of “certain areas.”
Though his bill is on hold, Popov said the federal Interior Ministry
had assured him that “they included a lot of my bill” in its proposed
anti-terrorism legislation, part of a still-unpublished package of
measures under discussion in parliament.
Some Russians worry about what may emerge. “If we start deporting
people back to the Caucasus, we will live in a totally different
state,” said professor Boris Chernyak, 79. “It will be a mono-ethnic
state, and a very dangerous one.”