Russians run migrants from town in race violence

KONDOPOGA, Russia, Sep 13: Dozens of wrecked market stalls rot in the rain and a restaurant stands burnt and looted, its windows boarded up.

This is the scene of Russia's latest explosion of race violence in which, for the first time, an alliance of locals and Moscow-based extremists appears to have driven almost an entire ethnic group from a town.

Three dark-skinned men from the Caucasus region interviewed by Reuters in Kondopoga, near the Finnish border, said there had been 150 migrants in the town before the violence. Fewer than two dozen remain.

''If things don't improve, we'll have to leave too. And we don't think they'll get any better,'' one of the men said, talking in a lowered voice and glancing nervously around the empty market.

''This is unique,'' Maria Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center said. ''Disturbingly, this is what the people of Kondopoga were demanding, that the Caucasians be hounded out of town.'' Since the collapse of Communism in 1991 already simmering racist attitudes have grown in Russia, partly aggravated by Chechen separatist attacks that have fanned suspicion of people who do not look Russian.

Trouble started in Kondopoga, a town of 40,000 in the Russian province of Karelia, after a bar fight over an unpaid bill between locals and Chechens. Two Russians were killed.

OUTSIDE INFLUENCE

The deaths ignited smouldering resentment against the small Caucasus community -- which included Chechens, other Russian Caucasians as well as immigrants from Azerbaijan and Armenia -- whom the Russians said controlled the market and had bought off the police.

And they now wanted the migrants out.

So locals turned to the Moscow-based Action Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), a self-styled far-right consultancy and public relations group, who willingly admit their involvement.

''We are in favour of removing all illegal immigrants from Karelia,'' Alexei Mikhailov, a DPNI leader, said. DPNI, which sent members to Kondopoga, considers most migrants to be illegal, he added.

Russia's constitution says all its citizens, regardless of ethnic origin, have the right to work anywhere in Russia. But Mikhailov -- a 30-year-old electronics engineer with a physics doctorate from Moscow University who used to work in San Francisco -- has little time for such statements. ''We have nothing to say to the ethnic diasporas, they should be removed from negotiations,'' he said.

On September 2, a couple of days after the fight, around 2,000 locals attacked businesses and property owned by Caucasus natives. They ripped market stalls apart, stoned migrants' homes and burned and looted the Azeri restaurant where the Russians were killed.

RAMPAGE

The rampage lasted long into the night and was only quelled after authorities called in police reinforcements from Petrozavodsk, the regional capital.

DPNI had not planned a riot, Mikhailov said, but he viewed the result as positive.

''It was a big PR success. We got our message across.'' In an old sanatorium a few kilometres outside Petrozavodsk, special forces with Kalashnikov rifles protect some 50 Chechens who fled Kondopoga after the violence.

''This is not a simple inter-ethnic fight,'' Hamzat Magamadov, a 42-year-old Chechen who had lived in Kondopoga for seven years, said. ''In this conflict, we have a pact between local criminals and nationalist groups against the Chechen community.'' The Moscow-based Sova Center, which tracks race attacks across Russia, said they were rising every year, and that racists had killed 33 people and injured 280 already this year, including 11 people killed in a bomb in August in a multi-ethnic market in Moscow.

After the Kondopoga riot, DPNI staged a peaceful rally in Petrozavodsk a few days later. It plans other anti-migrant rallies later in the year and has offered to help other cities that want to chase out migrants.

Karelia's governor, Sergei Katanandov, has been keen to present the riot as localised inter-ethnic trouble, stirred up by agitators from Moscow, that will smooth itself out.

''It was a problem between two criminal groups,'' Katanandov's spokesman, Alexander Smirnov, said. ''With the help of outsiders, a local criminal violent clash was turned into a conflict with wider implications.''

REUTERS