| A controversial presidential bill on combating
extremism was pushed through the State Duma by Deadly Riot Erupts
After Cup Defeat
By Nabi Abdullaev and Natalia Yefimova
Drunken soccer fans rioted in
downtown Moscow on Sunday,
leaving at least one man dead and
dozens injured, in the worst street
violence the capital has seen since
the bombing of the parliament
building in 1993.
The boisterous crowd, made up
predominantly of young men, set fire
to cars, broke windows and beat up
anyone from fellow fans to police
officers as the Russian national team
lost to Japan in an important -- but
not deciding -- match of the World
Cup tournament.
Some 7,000 to 8,000 fans had gathered at Manezh Square, a
stone's throw from the
Kremlin, to watch the afternoon game on one of several huge
screens set up by the
city government, Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin told
reporters. Only 120 police
officers had been dispatched to maintain order at the downtown
site, where about 500
fans watched last week as Russia defeated Tunisia in its debut
at the tournament.
Sunday's melee began during the second half of the match, soon
after the Japanese
had scored what would be their winning goal and Russia failed
to even the score with a
devastating missed shot.
Brothers Nikolai and Alexei Panin, 16 and 18, who had been
among the viewers, said
the crowd was full of drunken fans, who sent beer and vodka
bottles sailing into the air
as it became clearer that Russia would not make a comeback.
"The bottles rained back down on people. There was a lot
of
bleeding and a lot of guys
bandaging their heads," Alexei said. Soon after, the brothers
saw a fist fight break out
nearby and spread like a ripple effect through the crowd.
"The cops didn't do anything," Alexei said, adding that
the
fight raged on for at least
15 minutes before police tried to interfere.
By early evening, several hundred rioters moved up Tverskaya
Ulitsa smashing store
windows and glass advertising stands. Most windows on the
first two floors of the
Moskva hotel were broken, as were several windows at the State
Duma and the historic
Yeliseyevsky food store on Tverskaya. Half a dozen restaurants
on the fashionable
pedestrian strip Kamergersky Pereulok were also vandalized.
At least seven cars near the Duma had been torched and dozens
throughout the
downtown area had been overturned or smashed.
Firefighters arrived before police did and the rioters
attacked their trucks, The
Associated Press said. Interfax reported that an ambulance was
set on fire and its
driver and a doctor were beaten.
When police did arrive, some fans reportedly tried to help
detain rioters.
As of 10:30 p.m., some 60 people had been detained and about
50 hospitalized, Interfax
reported, citing police and health authorities.
Conflicting reports continued into the evening about the man
who had been reported
killed. The cause appeared to be knife wounds, but some
officials said the unidentified
victim had been killed before the match.
Many Muscovites, including prominent politicians like Duma
Speaker Gennady
Seleznyov, blamed the disaster on the city government and
police. In a call-in survey
of 2,242 people on TVS television, 745 callers said law
enforcement officials were
responsible, while 1,113 said they blamed the "politicians"
who organized the public
broadcasts. Only 384 callers blamed the marauding fans.
Moscow officials insisted the violence was not their fault.
"The fans' actions were barbaric," Deputy Mayor Valery
Shantsev told reporters. "We
put up these screens for them, like in civilized places, but
it turned out they were not
ready for this."
Police chief Pronin said he assessed his men's response to the
violence as "positive,"
adding that the rioters were not fans but "a drunken throng."
Interfax quoted Mayor Yury Luzhkov's spokesman Sergei Tsoi as
saying that City Hall
had decided to suspend the big-screen broadcasts. Tsoi also
called on journalists who
had filmed or photographed the riot to submit their pictures
to investigators to help
identify the guilty.
Shantsev said the city would reimburse car and store owners
whose property was
damaged during the rampage. But victims of the violence said
this could prove
difficult, as many police officers refused to fill out reports
or document the damage.
A number of witnesses and news reports said that some rioters
were screaming out
racist and neo-fascist slogans. The crowd included some vocal
supporters of Alexei
Podberyozkin's nationalist Spiritual Heritage movement and
other waving the
ultra-right's yellow, white and black flag.
Television reports said that a Japanese student in Moscow to
watch the 12th
Tchaikovsky music competition had been beaten by soccer fans,
but Interfax later
clarified that the attack had taken place before the start of
the match. The student was
treated by a doctor at the Japanese embassy, the report said.
State-run RTR television, which often displays a pro-Kremlin
stance in its news
programs, tried to shore up some political capital after the
riot. Commenting during the
Vesti program, anchorman Yevgeny Revenko pointed out that the
violence broke out
meters away from the Duma, where just last week deputies gave
initial approval to a
controversial bill on extremism, which human rights activists
have condemned as a
potential Kremlin tool to suppress public protest.
"Today's events prove how necessary this bill really is,"
Revenko said. He added that
"it was clear" why the Communists and Agrarians voted
down the
bill, but wondered
rhetorically why it had been opposed by the liberal Yabloko
party, "whose
constituency is usually so sensitive to any manifestations of
extremism."
Yabloko lawmaker Sergei Mitrokhin said in an interview with
Revenko that a separate
focus of the investigation should be what he called "inaction"
by police and whom, if
anyone, it benefited.
"A common motto of the police is to be prepared for and to
prevent terrorist attacks.
Now, all of a sudden, [we have] such behavior when not
terrorists but ordinary
hoodlums, drunk with their own impunity, have gone this far,"
he said. "At a certain
stage, the main cause behind these pogroms was precisely the
impunity of these
thugs."
A driver standing next to his destroyed Volkswagen near Manezh
Square called the
fans "pigs."
"I knew these kinds of things happened in England. But to
think it could happen here,
that's just so painful."
See also:
the original
at
www.themoscowtimes.com
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