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Protesters in southern Russia demand local leader step down, clash with riot police


Associated Press
Sept. 22, 2004 10:15 AM

ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia - Hundreds of protesters demanding that a local leader step down clashed with riot police Wednesday in an impoverished region of southern Russia, authorities said.

Riot police beat protesters with truncheons and riot shields and dragged people away in scuffles that injured as many as 15 people in the remote Kalmykia region. Police arrested more than 85 people, authorities said.

More than 2,000 protesters marched into the central square of the region's capital, Elista, demanding that President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov step down. The protesters were angered by high unemployment and accuse the president of violating human rights and stifling dissent.

Video on Russian television showed protesters breaking through police barriers and throwing rocks.

"I have never before seen such a horrifying beating," said Semyon Ateyev, president of the Kalmykia Human Right Center and one of the protest organizers.

"They pounded everybody they saw ... including women and kids. Then they started chasing people around the town," Ateyev told The Associated Press from a hospital where he was taken after being beaten by police.

Regional officials said most of those detained in the protest were drunk and would not face criminal charges.

"The main reasons that brought us together were high unemployment in Kalmykia, the falsification of election results and severe violations of federal legislation by Kirsan Ilyumzhinov," said Valery Badmayev, chairman of the executive committee of the Extraordinary Council of the Kalmyk Peoples, which organized the demonstration.

Ateyev said the protest was part of a civil disobedience campaign aimed at ousting Ilyumzhinov, whom they view as authoritarian and incompetent.

Ateyev said Ilyumzhinov spends most of his time abroad "visiting kings and monarchs" and does not spend more than several days a month in his home region. "He is a disgrace on our republic and even on the federal authorities."

Ilyumzhinov, a millionaire who also is the president of the world chess body federation, has ruled Kalmykia since 1993. Kalmykia is a barren region in southern Russia, populated in part by descendants of Mongol nomads who settled there in the 17th century. Half of the region's 300,000 residents are Buddhists.

Kalmykia was the site of massive anti-government rallies in December 2003, when people took to the streets to protest what they called rigged legislative elections, in which two liberal parties were voted out of parliament.

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