Window on Eurasia

Transnational Crime on the Rise in Russian Far East, Expert Says

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 21, 2006 – Organized crime, already widespread in the
Russian Far East, is not only growing stronger within that region but is
increasingly interlinked with criminal groups operating in the neighboring countries of China, Japan, and Korea, according to a leading Vladivostok specialist.

In an article on the “Political Barometer” website, Vitaliy Nomokonov, director of the Vladivostok Center for the Study of Organized Crime and Corruption, says it is “no exaggeration” to say that the Russian Far East has “the highest level of criminalization” in the country
[http://www.politbarometer.ru/journal_n25_art13.shtml].

According to Russian criminologists, he continues, “from 20 to 80
percent of the citizens” in the regions of the Russian Federation are
connected directly or indirectly with organized crime with the
percentages especially high in border regions like his own where
smuggling takes place.

Consequently, Nomokonov continues, it should come as “no surprise”
that five of the country’s ten regions most “unfavorably”
connected with organized crime are in the Russian Far East and that the
situation there has been deteriorating over the last decade in the
judgment of local officials and experts.

Moscow and regional officials regularly to a rise in the number of
prosecutions and convictions of those involved with organized crime in
the Far East, but the number of illegal acts committed by organized
criminal groups has been increasing far faster, not least because of
their expanding ties with foreign criminal groups.

Indeed, Nomokonov says, Russian criminal groups have become so
“international” both in their membership and their links with other
countries that they now are playing a significant role in the criminal
situation in neighboring countries, including the Peoples Republic of
China.

Russian criminal groups are represented abroad, the Vladivostok expert
says, and foreign criminal groups like the mptpropis “triads” of
China and “yakuza” of Japan have their men inside the Russian Far
East, working for their mutual enrichment to the detriment of the local
population and local government.

Among the contraband being smuggled out of the Russian Far East are
enormous quantities of wood and fish, something that is costing
legitimate operators and the Russian government billions of rubles
every year, Nomokonov says. Indeed, in some sectors, the amount being
smuggled may now exceed the amount being exported legally.

Illegal drugs are crossing the border in both directions, into Russia
from Central Asia and out of the Russian Far East to Japan and China,
Nomokonov says. Organized criminal groups are also involved in illegal
immigration to Russia and illegal trafficking in women and children.

There are now “about one million Chinese citizens” in the Russian
Far East, Nomokonov says, and “according to certain estimates, [their
number now] exceeds the number of the indigenous [Russian] population
in certain Far East population points and regions” along the border with
China.

And more than 15,000 young Russian women have been sold as “sex
slaves” in China by Russian and mixed Russian-Chinese organized
criminal groups, Nomokonov reports. They reportedly earn more than 200
million U.S. dollars every year for those who have sold them into this
form of bondage.

Dealing with any or all of these problems is not going to be easy,
Nomokonov says. Regional officials lack the power and often the will.
Moscow is interested in what is going on only intermittently. And now
that crime in the region has gone international, containing it will be
even more difficult.

Nomokonov concludes his article with an appeal for international
cooperation: Only if all the countries involved work together on a
constant basis will there be any chance of the authorities first
limiting and then eliminating the plague of organized crime along the
Russian Federation’s eastern borders.

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