Window on Eurasia

Clashes in Karelian City Said to Be a Wake Up Call for Russia

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, September 4, 2006 – Clashes over the last week between Russians and
immigrants from the Caucasus in the Karelian city of Kondopoga which
have left at least three dead, many injured or detained, and some
property destroyed and on which Moscow sought to impose a news blockade
until yesterday must be a wake up call for Russia.

Indeed, even though they disagree on specific facts and on who is to
blame and what should be done, Muslim, Russian nationalist, and liberal
commentators are virtually unanimous in their view that the events in
this city of 40,000 in the Russian north raise important issues many in
Moscow and the West are afraid to discuss.

From the first clashes last Wednesday night through Saturday when some
2000 to 5000 residents of Kondopoga staged a mass protest against what
many of them view as an overly tolerant approach to immigrants in the
region, the authorities in Petrazovdsk and Moscow succeeded in imposing
a virtual news blackout.

As a result, almost all of the coverage available until yesterday and
today was provided by groups like the Movement Against Illegal
Immigration, which used its website and posters in Moscow subways, and
human rights, Muslim and Caucasus groups, each of which tended to slant
the story to make their respective points.

Today, articles about Kondopoga began to appear in the Moscow press,
and one by Aleksandr Lebedev in “Novyye Izvestiya” entiled “The
Pogrom from the ‘Chaika’” provides the first detailed and apparently
balanced account of what Russians and Caucasians in Kondopoga have done
and how the authorities have reacted.

More details are likely to surface in the next day or two, but perhaps
more intriguiing than even the facts of the case are the ways in which
Russia’s Muslim leadership, Russian nationalist community, and
liberal commentators are already drawing “the lessons of Kondopoga” for
Russia as a whole.

In an interview posted on the Agency of National News today, Sheikh
Nafigulla Ashirov, the mufti of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD)
for the Asiatic Part of Russia, said that tragically for the future of
the country, events like those in Kondopoga were “entirely
predictable,” the result of social problems and official malfeasance.

Today, he continued, such violence is likely “not only in the border
regions of Russia but also in such major cities as St. Petersburg,
Moscow, and Yekaterinburg,” where officials have by acts of
commission and ommission opened the way to the rise of “fascism.”

Ashirov sharply criticized the country’s law enforcement agencies
that he said had failed to react in an adequate way to “direct violations
of the Constitution by chauvinist forces which unfortunately already
sit in the organs of state power and local administration and already lead
entire oblasts.”

And the mufti suggested that the negative image of Muslims propagated
in the media and particularly in films was coming home to roost. In the
past, he said, Russian heroes were shown fighting Nazis; now, they are
shown fighting those who cry out “Allah is Great!”

Consequently, Ashirov said, it is critically important for everyone
that those who attacked the Caucasians in Kondopoga – and while he does
not say so, most of them were ethnic Russians -- be punished promptly and
severely, lest their actions spread rapidly and contribute to “the
disintegration of the Russian Federation.”

Not surprisingly, Russian nationalists have an entirely different take
on what happened and what lessons the country should draw from the
Kondopoga events. In an essay posted today on the “Russkaya liniya”
news portal, Aleksandr Pestov interprets the situation in a
diametrically opposed way
[http://www.rusk.ru/st.php?idar=104505].

According to him, “Kondopoga is the result of the total denial of the
vital interests of the Russian people, their right to be Russians in
their own state. Just as it was in Soviet times, so now it continued.
The Russian people, deprived of real power in its own state, is being
pushed into a new cage by special units of the militia.”

This “cage,” he suggested, is called “tolerance.”

But unlike the officers of the law enforcement organs and the
representatives of economic power who have kept quiet about the latest
crimes of the illegal immigrants, the residents of Kondopoga have not
stayed quiet.” Instead, he said, they have made their city “a new
people of Russian honor.”

In standing up to the illegal immigrants, he continued, they have
behaved just like their ancestors did at Kulikovo field, “to affirm
our right to live on the Russian land and to raise our children on a
secure territory, free from aliens.” Not all Russians were prepared
to do that even then, he said; some took their “30 pieces of silver and
stayed away – but only those who did act to defend their land have
gained “eternal glory.”

“Today,” Pestov concludes, “every Russian man while following
with concern what is taking place in Kondopoga must remember that tomorrow
the tragedy of Kondopoga can be repeated in hundreds of cities of
Russia. And the government must do whatever is necessary to defend the
rights of the indigenous population of Russia.”

Meanwhile, however, human rights and more liberal commentators adopted
a very different tack. Today’s “Kommersant” quoted Georgiy Satarov,
the head of the INDEM Foundation who said the Kondopoga events show
that the Russian authorities “are not in a position to stop the way of
aggressive xenophobia in the country.”

In his view, the media have made things worse. When they finally
covered these events, he said, they made “out of the pogromshchiks the
people’s avengers and prsented their action as a positive national
explosion.” That represents a major and disturbing change in Russian
life, he continued.

“Fights analogous to what took place in Kondopoga occurred five and
ten years ago. But they did not have the same consequences [either on
the ground or in the media, a development, he continued, that suggests
that] “in the country has been created an atmosphere which provokes
such outbursts of violence.”

There can be no doubt, he concluded, that those in power plan to
exploit the situation to strengthen their own position and that those in the
nationalsit camp believe that such events will open their way to power.
But in neither case will the interests of democracy or human rights be
served.

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