Crackdown on Chechens Seen After Blasts

When news of Moscow’s second bus bombing came over the radio, bus driver Olya Levchinka finished her route. Alyona Pavlova headed home on the No. 12. Mamed and Ayaz drank tea in the market where they sell fruit.

But in the sizzling summer heat wave, fear blazed within them all.

No one took responsibility for the two blasts, which wounded 33 people Thursday and Friday. But Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov and other officials blamed separatists from Chechnya, and they appeared to signal a crackdown against the city’s dark-skinned ethnic minorities.

President Boris N. Yeltsin told state security officials that the city of 8.8 million is “infested with terrorists.”

And as 1,000 federal troops streamed into the streets and city police fielded a record 55 bomb threats Friday, frightened Muscovites wondered what the violence meant and whether it would damage Russia’s fragile democracy.

“I never thought I’d live to see the day when I’d be afraid in my own bus,” said Levchinka, who pulled her bus over several times to check under the seats for stray packages.

“I have lived in Moscow all my life, and there has never been anything like this,” said Pavlova, 73. “I don’t want to take the bus, but I have no other choice. I cannot go by foot.”

Both bombs exploded on trolley buses during the morning rush hour. Each was stowed in a cloth bag under a seat near the middle of the vehicle. Early reports that one of Friday’s victims had died proved false; that person was reported in critical condition.

Friday’s bomb was the third on Moscow’s heavily traveled public transportation system in just over a month. A subway blast killed four commuters June 11.

Moscow’s lumbering trolley buses, which are less well-guarded than the subway, are powered by overhead cables that crisscross the city.

Luzhkov declared Friday that it is time to evict “the entire Chechen diaspora” from the city.

“We plan to clear Moscow of both homeless people and dangerous elements,” the mayor said. “There will be no half-measures.”

He cited threatening phone calls received since the blast Thursday from callers with “the southern, Caucasian accent.”

After a shaky cease-fire signed May 27, heavy fighting resumed this week in Chechnya’s 19-month-old war for independence. The war has driven many Chechens and other ethnic minorities from the Caucasus Mountains to Moscow.

In Grozny, the Chechen capital, Russian Interior Minister Anatoly S. Kulikov said there was a “Chechen trace” in the bomb attacks.

But other theories abounded. Some said mafia gangs might be testing Yeltsin’s new security chief, Alexander I. Lebed, who was given a mandate this week to fight crime in the capital. Ultranationalist politician Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky said “foreign secret services” planted the bombs.

Still, many Muscovites reflexively blame the Chechens for any trouble here. They applauded Luzhkov when his police rounded up and expelled at least 10,000 dark-skinned Caucasians in October 1993, and they reelected him last month with 90% of the vote.

Mamed and Ayaz, Azerbaijanis in a central Moscow fruit market who declined to give their last names, said nearly a third of the vendors had not come to work Friday because they were expecting a police raid.

“Every time something bad happens in the city, they use it as a pretext to come and beat us,” Mamed said. “It doesn’t matter who we are, if we are Chechen or Georgian or Azerbaijani, they do not treat us as humans.”

Oleg Orlov of the human rights group Memorial said: “I am afraid that we are in for a cleansing campaign in Moscow similar to the one we witnessed in 1993. These dark people are also Russian citizens. Why should they be persecuted on the grounds of their ethnic coloring?”

Some Muscovites said Friday they were fighting terrorism on their own--by refusing to be cowed.

“Someone wants to scare us,” Nikolai Golubev, 56, said as he ran to catch his bus. “I’d rather have my intestines wound around the trolley cables than let them scare me in my own city.”