Moscow mayor, Yury Luzhkov, wants to crack down on outsiders, whom he says are responsible for 40 percent of the Russian capital’s crime, the UPI news agency reported Tuesday.
Popularity: 2% [?]
April 4, 2007Under a new law that went into effect this week, non-Russians will not be allowed to work as salespeople in shops and markets.
Popularity: 1% [?]
A Russian ultra-right movement has launched a campaign to propose Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko as a candidate for Russia’s 2008 presidential election, the Radio Free Europe reported on Wednesday.
Popularity: 2% [?]
February 28, 2007A Russian youth group plans to offer volunteer patrols for the region surrounding Moscow to help police fight crime and spot illegal migrants, its leaders said Thursday, the Associated Press reports.
Popularity: 4% [?]
November 30, 2006A 17-year-old university student was attacked in northern Moscow earlier this week by unknown thugs. Ethnic Chechen identified as Kazbek Dadakhanov is said to be related to former mayor of Grozny Bislan Gantamirov, Kommersant Daily reported Friday.
Popularity: 1% [?]
November 10, 2006Police in Moscow on Saturday arrested more than 200 suspected rightwing extremists demonstrating against immigration by non-Russians.
Despite the arrests, around 2,000 people gathered for a demonstration lead in the Russian capital called by ultranationalist parties in honour of Russia’s newly created Day of National Unity.
Popularity: 2% [?]
November 7, 2006Vladimir Putin on Wednesday severely criticised Karelia’s head Sergei Katanandov for having gone on a vacation before a new administration was formed in Kondopoga, a scene of recent ethnic clashes, Itar-Tass news agency reports
Putin expressed hope that Katanandov will learn his lessons for the future.
Popularity: 1% [?]
November 2, 2006Russia’s FSB security service defended on Friday deporting an Uzbek man to his Central Asian homeland despite an order by the European Court of Human Rights to stop his deportation, Reuters reported.
Russia’s Federal Security Service, the main successor to the KGB, said Rustam Muminov was deported on Friday, Interfax news agency reported. His supporters have told Reuters Muminov was deported on Oct. 24.
The FSB said Muminov had moved to Russia in 2001 and started “preaching religious extremismâ€, Interfax reported. The FSB said it had worked with Uzbekistan’s National Security Service on the investigation of Muminov.
Rights groups have said Muminov could face life in jail, death or torture in Uzbekistan, accused by the West of jailing thousands of dissidents and using torture in prisons.
Officials in Uzbekistan, an authoritarian Central Asian state, deny those accusations.
While in Uzbekistan, Muminov “occupied himself with the propaganda of religious extremism and made calls for the armed takeover of powerâ€, Interfax quoted the FSB as saying in a statement.
A spokesman for the FSB said statements were only forwarded to those his superiors deem should receive them and declined to send Reuters a copy. He declined to comment further.
Rights groups such as Human Rights Watch have called on the European Union to demand Russia cease sending refugees or asylum seekers back to countries where they face harm.
The FSB said that Muminov was “an active member of the international terrorist organization Hizb-ut-Tahrirâ€. Hizb-ut-Tahrir is an Islamic group banned in Russia and Central Asia.
Popularity: 1% [?]
October 27, 2006An Uzbek asylum seeker, Rustam Muminov, has been forcibly sent back to Uzbekistan from Russia, Radio Free Europe news service reported on Wednesday.
Yulya Pigarina, an official at the Moscow transit camp for foreigners where Muminov was awaiting deportation, told RFE that Muminov “has already been expelled to Uzbekistan†but said she did not know when he was removed.
Muminov was arrested in Moscow on October 17 on charges of violating residency regulations.
He had moved to the Russian capital after a court in the central region of Lipetsk last month ruled against his extradition to Uzbekistan and ordered his release.
Muminov was first arrested in February 2006 on an Uzbek warrant.
Authorities in Tashkent claim he is a member of a banned extremist religious group and that he is involved in last year’s popular uprising in the eastern city of Andijon.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Georgia’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday it had protested to the United Nations about Russia’s crackdown on illegal Georgian migrants, demanding a stop to what it called “persecution on ethnic groundsâ€, AP reports.
The ministry said in a statement that it had turned over materials “on violation of Georgian citizens’ rights†to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and other international organizations.
Moscow responded to Georgia’s brief detention of four alleged Russian spies last month with a sweeping transport and postal blockade and a crackdown on Georgian migrants in Russia — sanctions the Kremlin has refused to drop despite Western calls for restraint.
Russia and Georgia have had a history of friction since they went their separate ways with the 1991 Soviet collapse. That tension increased after Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili came to power in 2004, pledging to bring separatist regions back into fold, bolster ties with the West and lead his nation to join NATO in 2008.
Georgian officials sharply criticized Russia’s tough actions, particularly the deportations of an estimated 800 ethnic Georgians allegedly caught working illegally in Russia and the harassment of Georgian-owned businesses.
The Georgian Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that Russian authorities had requested schools and universities to provide lists of people with Georgian surnames as part of the continuing crackdown on Georgians in Russia.
It urged Russia “to stop persecutions on ethnic grounds, safeguard universally recognized human rights and freedoms and solve existing political problems through talks and constructive dialogue.â€
The ministry said Tuesday that Georgian Foreign Minister Gela Bezhuashvili would visit Moscow for talks next week, the first high-level contact since the worst post-Soviet crisis in bilateral relations erupted last month.
Bezhuashvili talked with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov over the phone Tuesday and they agreed to meet in Moscow on Nov. 1-2 at the sidelines of a conference of Black Sea nations, the ministry said.
Popularity: 1% [?]
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