Race clash in Soviet city

Press, 13 November 1981, Page 6

Race clash in Soviet city

NZPA-Reuter Moscow Soviet authorities had sent in security forces and imposed a curfew after clashes between ethnic groups in the north Caucasus, unofficial Soviet sources said yesterday. The clashes in Ordzhonikidze, capital of the North Ossetian Autonomous Republic, occurred at the end of last month and involved Ossetians and Ingushi, two small ethnic groups with a long history of feuding. The sources, quoting unofficial reports reaching Moscow from residents of the region, said the area had now returned to normal arid the curfew had been lifted. Details of the clashes were sketchy, but the trouble started when an Ingush, one of the 20,000-strong minority in Northern Ossetia, murdered an Ossetian taxi driver, they said. Clashes between the two communities began after the man’s funeral, and according to one source there were more deaths. The Russian

population of the city took no part in the incident. The sources said police and troops with armoured vehicles, probably security units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, were called in to restore order. There has been no confirmation of the reports from official Soviet sources. Civil disturbances, rare in the Soviet Union, are almost never reported in the press. Hostility between the two ethnic groups goes back to Tsarist times. The Ossetians, of Indo-European stock, were Christians who looked to Rrussia for support while the Muslim Ingush and Chechen peoples were mountain tribesmen who fought for decades against the Tsar's armies and then against the Communists. In 1944 Stalin deported the Chechen and Ingush peoples to central Asia for alleged collaboration with Nazi Germany, a move in which tens of thousands died. In 1957 they were rehabilitated and allowed to return to their native territory.