Racist Assaults on the Rise After Terror Attacks
By Anatoly Medetsky

The Moscow Times
Monday, September 13, 2004. Page 1.

Staff Writer The recent terrorist attacks caused a spike in assaults
on dark-skinned people from the Caucasus region and elsewhere last
week, human rights activists said.

Decorated former test pilot Magomed Tolboyev said Friday that he was
assaulted by police officers during a document check near the Vykhino
metro station. The officers said he had a Chechen-sounding last name,
he said.

In Yekaterinburg, gangs of young people attacked three Armenian and
Azeri cafes, killing one person and injuring two, police said.

Authorities have blamed the downing of two planes, the explosion
near a Moscow metro station and the Beslan school siege on Chechen,
Ingush and Arab fighters and suicide bombers.

Dark-skinned people have in recent years increasingly been the targets
of racially motivated attacks — attacks that police usually write
off as hooliganism. But the increase over the past week can only be
attributed to the terror attacks, said Alexander Brod, director of
the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights.

“Anti-Caucasian sentiments always get stronger after terrorist
acts,” Brod said. “People blame everyone in the Caucasus. This is
the stereotype in people’s minds.

“Unfortunately, the authorities don’t do a good job explaining that
terrorism doesn’t have a nationality,” he said.

Tolboyev, an assistant to State Duma Deputy Viktor Semyonov and a
native of Dagestan, said two police sergeants stopped him to check
his papers Thursday near Vykhino in Moscow’s southern outskirts.

He showed them his Duma ID and told them that he had been decorated
with the title Hero of Russia, which he received for his participation
in the Soviet space shuttle program, Interfax reported.

The officers took the ID. When Tolboyev attempted to get it back,
one of the officers went behind him, put his arm around his neck and
began to strangle him, Tolboyev said.

“My throat still aches, and I haven’t been able to swallow for two
days,” he said, Interfax reported.

Asked by telephone Friday why the officers had confronted him, Tolboyev
said, “I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t like something about me.”

Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin confirmed Sunday that police
had stopped Tolboyev to check his documents. But he said a police
investigation found that Tolboyev had been treated properly considering
his “disobedience, aggression and abuse.” He did not elaborate.

Tolboyev said he was stopped as he was returning from the North
Ossetian administration’s office in Moscow, where he had expressed
his condolences over the school siege.

He said he finally got back his ID.

In the Urals, a group of young people broke furniture in the Azeri
Kaspy cafe in Yekaterinburg on Thursday night and then hurled in
Molotov cocktails, according to news reports. A 52-year-old relative
of the cafe’s owner died in the fire, which gutted the building.

That same night, about 20 young people armed with sticks and chains
broke into an Armenian cafe, Oasis Plus, and beat the Armenian staff,
wounding four. Two were hospitalized with skull and brain injuries,
news reports said.

Attackers tossed Molotov cocktails in another Armenian cafe, the
Shartash, on Thursday night, but the staff was able to douse the
flames before anyone was injured.

In a fourth attack Thursday, unidentified men set fire to the U Davida,
an Armenian cafe in Verkhnyaya Pyshma, a village near Yekaterinburg,
police said. Cafe staff quickly put out the fire.

Yekaterinburg police said they have detained two suspects but dismissed
any possible racial motive in the attacks, calling them hooliganism.

“They are in no way related to Beslan or any ethnic issues,” said
Valery Gorelykh, spokesman for the Sverdlovsk regional police, which
includes the city of Yekaterinburg.

Mikhail Matevosyan, deputy chairman of the regional Armenian
association Ani-Armenia, said he has no doubt that the cafe attacks
were connected to the recent terrorist attacks.

Whenever Chechen rebels score a victory over federal troops in Chechnya
or commit terrorist attacks, groups of young people begin targeting
Caucasus natives, he said.

“They probably think, ‘You hit us there, and we’ll hit you here,'”
he said by telephone from Yekaterinburg.

He ruled out a Armenian-Azeri turf war as a possible reason for
the attacks.

Elsewhere, four young men with close-cropped hair beat to death a North
Korean citizen in Vladivostok the weekend after the school siege ended,
Noviye Izvestia reported. Unidentified assailants painted a swastika
on the gate of a Jewish cemetery in Irkutsk on the night of Sept. 6-7,
the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights said.
From: Baghdasarian