Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 25 – A clash
between North Caucasians and Roma in a Minsk market last weekend has sparked
fears that Belarus, the site of few ethnic clashes in post-Soviet times, may be
about to experience its own version of Kondopoga, the 2006 fight in a Karelian
city between Chechens and Russians that has come to symbolize ethnic problems
in Russian cities.
Rosbalt’s Maksim Shveits reports
that “for Belarusians, this [clash last Saturday] was a shock” because their
country has “so few immigrants from the south” and because the government of
Alyaksandr Lukashenka has not been slow to crack down even on the appearance of
ethnic divisions there (www.rosbalt.ru/exussr/2012/10/23/1049817.html).
In
a dispute that reportedly began over the price of a mobile telephone, North
Caucasian and Roma sellers exchanged blows and then bullets, and 43 of the
participants were arrested. All of those involved in the fighting, the militia
says, are in jail, “and none of those detained has been let go.”
“Belarusian
markets, in contrast to Russian ones have never know massive inter-ethnic
fights,” Shveits says. Almost all of the
traders in them are Belarusians, there is less money involved because of
Belarusian poverty and hence less corruption, and “immigrants from the North
and South Caucasus are no more numerous than Vietnamese.”
But
perhaps the chief reason things have been quiet on this front, the Rosbalt
journalist says, is the attitudes and actions of both Belarusians themselves
and their government. He notes that when
several years ago, two Chechens “raped three students” in a hostel, Belarusian
students “beat not only the rapists but also all ‘blacks’ whom they saw” near
the scene.
And
the Belarusian militia, instead of simply trying to maintain law and order, “did
everything to ‘cleanse’ the [district center where this took place] of persons
of Caucasus nationality, kicking them out of apartments they had rented under various
pretexts.” The Belarusian government has been quite willing to expel them from
the country.
The
Rosbalt journalist says that Belarusians owe the quiescence of the small
diasporas to the tough line President Lukashenka has adopted, a line many Russians would like their own government to take, and points to the
latter’s decision to expel, despite agreements with Russia, any migrants who
cause any problems for the Belarusian regime.
Whether
Lukashenka’s toughness will continue to work, however, is now very much in
doubt. Over the last year, Shveits
writes, “the number of persons of Caucasus nationality arriving in Belarus has
risen significantly,” some of them seeking access to the European Union and
others interesting in exploiting Belarus’s low prices by selling its goods
elsewhere.
Nonetheless,
there are some grounds for hope, Shveits continues. There are relatively few major markets, and
immigrants from the Caucasus prefer to stay in Minsk, although some of them
have now appeared in smaller cities as well. Clashes in the latter may take
place without any notice in the media.
The
exact number of immigrants in Belarus is unknown, but experts say that there
are “approximately 100,000 Muslims” there, some of whom are indigenous, others
from the Middle Volga or Crimea, and the newest wave from the Caucasus and even
from the countries of Central Asia (islamrf.ru/news/culture/history/24604/).
The
Belarusian umma, Zorina Kanapatskaya reports this week, is divided into 24
communities, and there exist eight mosques, far fewer than existed before 1917
but far more than the one that was open at the end of Soviet times. She says
that relations between the faiths in Belarus are relatively good, “an honor to
the tolerant Belarusian people.”
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