Roma Pogroms in Chelyabinsk Make a Mockery of Russia’s Days of National Unity and Accord and Reconciliation, Anti-Discrimination Expert Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 25 – In a few days, Russia will mark its Day of National Unity (Nov. 4) and its Day of Accord and Reconciliation (Nov. 7), but what is happening in Chelyabinsk Oblast makes a mockery of the values those holidays are supposed to embody, Stefaniya Kulayeva, an anti-discrimination expert at Memorial says.

            In Korkino, on the outskirts of Chelyabinsk, “crowds of angry people are destroying the houses of Roma residents, demanding the deportation of their neighbors even though these neighbors as citizens of the Russian Federation have nowhere to go, burns cars, and attacking everyone who seems ethnically alien to them” (kavkazr.com/a/tyurjma-narodov-o-prazdnike-i-pogromah/33175042.html).

            According to Kulayeva, “the lynching of local residents is aimed at the Roma community as a result of information that has apparently been disseminated by nationalist groups like the Russian Community and Northern Man concerning the death of a taxi drive at the hands of a Roma resident of Korkino.”

            “Hundreds of police officers who came to stop the pogrom failed to do so, and houses continued to burn on the second night of unrest,” she adds, pointing noting that “the authorities were afraid to denounce the actions of the brutal crowd” but instead promised raises on Roma residents.

            Moscow officials made the situation even worse by talking about how a diaspora had attacked the indigenous peoples of Chelyabinsk, ignoring the fact that the Roma have been living in that oblast for decades and are as much an indigenous people there as are the ethnic Russians, Kulayeva says.

            In the upcoming holidays, there will be much talk about “agreement” among all the peoples of the country and  their unity, she continues “but there is no agreement among them and unity is manifested only in the oppression of all peoples by a single one,” something prompting talk about Russia being “a prison house of nations” (youtube.com/watch?v=ipmkkqAPC14).  

Indigenous rights advocates are sounding the alarm about rising nationalism, anti-migrant and anti-Asian sentiment, and fear that Russian Community branches in Siberia are also dangerous for the region's indigenous people, the Memorial expert says. But “in the Urals, a Russian revolt is already rating, one merciless and cruel.”