After the fatal stabbing of a young man in Moscow last week, word spread that the attacker was not an ethnic Russian. Racist mobs swarmed a wholesale vegetable market where many traders and handymen come from the Caucasus and Central Asia. In the wake of the violence, Moscow police began rounding people up. Incredibly, they weren’t rounding up suspected attackers – they were rounding up people from the Caucasus and Central Asia, putatively to protect them.
It was the second episode of racist violence in Moscow in a week. Earlier, a racist mob had swarmed a shopping mall, looking for “migrants.” Police detained some suspects, but most were quickly released.
In this video, Svetlana Gannushkina, one of Russia’s leading human rights campaigners, explains how common it is for police to arrest the victims of a crime when they are from Central Asia or the Caucasus.
