Posted on August 31, 2012

Residents of Village Near St. Petersburg Residents Expel Migrant Workers.

Newzz, August 21, 2012

[Editor’s Note: The following is a translation completed by one of our readers.]

Law enforcement authorities in the town of Pobeda [Which translates to “Victory” in English — translator’s note] barely managed to prevent a serious ethnic conflict. Locals rose up against Asian immigrants, who work at the local poultry farm illegally, as it turns out. Local people have been putting up with this hell for too long — they had to resign themselves to the fact that their jobs were taken away for the benefit of strangers and that the immigrants are now trying to establish their own order in the town. The last drop fell when a 45-year old female resident — one of the very few who managed to keep her job — was brutally raped, writes Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP, www.kp.ru).

The regional Investigation Committee confirmed the rape and opened a criminal case. According to the case materials, the woman was heading to Udarnik poultry farm on the August 9 because factory management called her to work additional off-schedule hours. When the woman was in the field, she was attacked by an unknown man of Asian appearance, who violently beat the victim, and then raped and sexually abused her.

According to the victim’s mother, the woman was taken to the hospital with a brain concussion, a broken nose, and blood tumors all over her body. According to the information available to KP, after abusing the victim, the rapist took her cell phone. She remembered he looked Asian, so suspicions arose that the criminal was one of the immigrants.

On the evening of August 10, a civil riot began in the town. Vyborg district police authorities received a call that locals gathered in front of the farm demanding to check its compliance with immigration law and to control the progress of the rape case.

Leningrad region Vyborg district police, Federal Migration Service officers, and the head of Roshinskoye Town Settlement local government arrived to the scene. The number of people near the poultry farm had grown to 150 by that time, the Prosecution Attorney’s site says. However, according to the information KP has, three fourths of Pobeda town inhabitants went out, which is at least 250 people.

“We wanted the Gastarbeiters to come out, so that we could submit them to the police,” one of the demonstration participants told the newspaper. “But they could be lynched, so they got scared and then they all ran away. They were jumping right out of the windows of a two-storey barrack. Many are still hiding in the woods.”

According to this man, the number of “aliens” in the town has significantly grown during the last couple of months, and there are “about a hundred of them here.” The immigrant workers are willing to work for a pittance, and the farm management naturally finds this quite beneficial, which is why they started to squeeze the Russians out from the farm by considerably lowering their wages.

Most importantly, though, is that due to the immigrants, there is unrest in the town and it is scary in the evening, Pobeda inhabitants complain. According to them the migrants openly drink alcohol, bully the local people, and harass females, and now there is a rape.

The officials listened to the demonstration participants, and also explained to them that illegal actions, i.e. spontaneous meetings, are illegal and unacceptable. However they also attended to the complaints — the enforcement authorities were already working in the town before the people left the meeting.

During the inspection, more than three dozen illegal immigrants were found. Four more were caught in the woods by the local people, who beat them first and then submitted them to the police. The 54 total illegal immigrants were “harvested,” KP informs. They will be checked for involvement in the rape. The criminal left a lot of “traces” — biological material — on the victim. DNA samples were taken from all the arrested immigrants.

Alexander Drozdenko — Leningrad region Governor — promised that the guilty person will be severely punished. As for the rest of the illegal immigrants, they will simply be deported from the country as soon as possible.

According to the Leningrad Prosecution Attorney’s website, ten administrative cases have been initiated against Udarnik poultry farm: about use of illegal foreign labor, about violation of sanitary and epidemic regulations, and about violation of the employment procedures.

In order to prevent mass disorder in the town, round-the-clock patrolling by the police has been arranged, and inspections of compliance with the immigration law continue.

Now the town is quiet, but still there is unrest, write Komsomolskaya Pravda reporters, who personally visited the town of Pobeda. No immigrant workers were noticed on the streets, and certainly none at the poultry farm itself. Only mattresses stick out of the windows of the two-storey barrack, where the illegal immigrants lived.

However, local people are not going to settle down that easily — recent days’ events are actively discussed in the town. One of the most frequently asked questions is where the law enforcement authorities and illegal immigration fighters were before.

The town inhabitants are very angry — the crime that took place is not the only crime of this kind in Pobeda town, writes the paper New Region. In particular on June 24 they wrote that a 29-year-old woman from Pobeda submitted a complaint to the police saying that one day before she had been raped several times by two Asian men in the forest near Kirillovskoye village, who threatened to kill her. They were raping her from about 1 until 8 pm.

After August 9-10, Governor Drozdenko ordered a check of the whole region for illegal immigrants to be complete by the end of August. All businesses and farms will be checked for illegal immigrants. “The situation almost got out of control,” KP quotes him as saying. “We should find all the immigrants. If any of them work illegally, we will deport them from the country. Yes, we lack workforce, but everyone has to comply with the law. We should first of all give jobs and create conditions for comfortable life for our people — the inhabitants of Leningrad region.”

The Governor went even further. He suggested the establishment of municipal police with a sheriff in charge, who would be someone who knows all the local people, and who would be responsible for maintaining the order in the area. However, federal laws would need to be changed for that. Drozdenko promised that he will send a letter to the State Duma raising the appropriate initiative.

As an aside, illegal immigration divisions have been formed within the Moscow criminal police. According to statistics cited by the head of the capital’s police, Anatoly Yakunin, about half of crimes solved in Moscow since the beginning of this year were committed by guests — both from foreign countries and from Russian regions. In particular, guests account for one third of all rapes.