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English Language Page Another emergency occurred in a rural area of the Volgograd region, occupied primarily by Cossacks. A Cossack, Roman Lopatin, was killed in a street fight between Chechens and Russians in late July of 2001 in the village of Kletskaya, the administrative center of the Kletsky district. Immediately after the funeral, a huge crowd numbering, according to different estimates, from 700 to 3 000 people gathered. Then, a part of the crowd went about “driving out the Chechens.” They smashed several kiosks, set fire to a dormitory, which housed a Chechen family, (as a result of the fire, three apartments occupied by Russians were also destroyed) and burned down and looted a wagon belonging to an old Armenian shoemaker. The village was in turmoil for several days. Sentiments were so intense and drawn out that it took the full set of regional leaders from the prosecutor to the chief of regional police and the Deputy Governor to calm the emotions of the population. It should be noted that this was not the first attempt to “send the Chechens back to Chechnya.” Furthermore, the position of the authorities is gradually changing for the better in this respect. To illustrate this relative improvement, compare the above to the following incident, which occurred in the neighboring Stavropol territory shortly before the breakout of war on June 18–21, 1999. One hundred and forty Chechens (including 80 children of various ages) and one Lithuanian were forcibly driven out of three villages in the Kursk district adjacent to Chechnya. The authorities had already taken similar measures in June of 1995 when, in the wake of the attack on the city of Budenovsk conducted by the Chechen armed unit of Shamil Basayev, 36 Chechen families were driven out of their homes in the village of Tersky (Budenovsky district) and sent beyond the boundaries of the Stavropol territory. This time, the deportation was instigated by the killing of four policemen by unidentified persons on the administrative border with Chechnya. The deported people, who found refuge in a milk farm in Chechnya, testified later that a full military operation had been conducted against them. Armed people in camouflage and ski-masks (local policemen and Cossacks) surrounded the village with APCs and vehicles, drew people from their homes, beat up some of them and ordered them to “bugger off” to Chechnya. Their houses were set on fire and their cattle were mostly dispersed throughout the area. All of them were blamed by the assailants for collaboration with bandits, who conducted regular raids from the territory of Chechnya into the territory of the Kursk district, abducted people for ransom, stole cattle, cars and agricultural machinery and now killed several policemen and civilians. No investigation was conducted following the accusations. None of the Chechen villagers were arrested and no one was officially charged with collaboration with bandits. |
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