The events that began in Nalchik 15 September and have continued for a week, to-date are far from over, and there are details of new incidents emerging all the time. It appears that for pogrom organisers the first two days were something of a warm-up: two cases of beatings of three
Chechen university students and teenagers at the sports pitch of school No 23 in Nalchik went unnoticed.

17 September an angry mob of up to 300 people burst into the student accommodation block of Economics and Law
College No 1, where on the third floor about 20 students locked themselves behind thin doors. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,’ said Aimani Salamova, who arrived to the college as soon as she heard about the carnage. ‘The attackers completely blocked the building.
I could hear screams, the sounds of something breaking, something was falling down with a crash. I tried to pacify the attackers but nobody heard me. In this situation nobody listened or heard anything. Everything was driven by some animal instinct’.

This is how this terrifying scene was described by the eye-witnesses. The attackers appeared to be under the influence of drugs and alcohol. According to some eye-witnesses, among the attackers there were many students from PE faculty of the local university. They were carrying wooden bats and knives. Ilyas Salamov, a medical student, came to the college just before the violence began to pick up his younger brothers, and like the college students was brutally beaten along with his fellow student Alibek Dikiev from the same year. Both talk about what happened very quietly: both have obvious traces of beating on their faces,
Ilyas’s lip is bleeding and he has a bad bruise under his left eye, from time to time he clutches his side trying not to make it obvious. His friend Alibek Dikiev has suffered a concussion, he has bruises on his face, his nose is broken, his lip is bleeding and there are bruises all over his body. They were both continuously kicked and passed out at
about the same time; they don’t recall the end of the drama.

They didn’t regain consciousness until they were in a police cell. Then, when they were barely able to stand up, they were taken for questioning. According to Alibek, ‘one thing the police were most interested in was whether we
were going to write a statement to report the beating’. But the young men were feeling very poorly, they could hardly spare any strength for the red tape. To get out as soon as possible, they signed some papers that the policemen put in front of them. For all that, the students said that they were not going to write any statements. When they recovered next morning and read the copies of the papers they had signed, to their great surprise they learnt from the text of the documents that they apparently had been breaking public order by using obscene language in a public place and reacting with aggression to people’s remarks. Each of them had to pay 500 roubles in fine.

The events reached their peak 17 September. Several Chechen students were beaten outside Vostok cinema in the centre of Nalchik. A white Lada car drove up to a bench where a group of students were sitting. Four men got out of the car, called over one of the students, Ruslan Soltoukiev,
and asked him whether he was local. When he replied that he was from Grozny, they began to beat him. Soon the attackers were joined by ten more people. Three of the students passed out during the beating; the fourth was dragged aside and hidden in a nearby cafe by a waitress who worked there. At about the same time several more students of the Economics and Law College were beaten outside Elbrus cinema. According to the victims’ words, they could feel there was something amiss and decided to go home. They barely managed to get on to the minibus when it was surrounded by a dozen or so people. They demanded that the driver opened the doors. He turned off the engine, put on the light and left the vehicle staying away from it. The four students who remained inside the vehicle were brutally beaten. All the four lost consciousness. Similar scenes occurred in other parts of the city: three people were
attacked outside the State Concert Hall, eight were beaten at the school’s No 23 sports pitch, two students were beaten outside the university with one to two hour interval, and then three more were attacked. All the three suffered concussions. On the same day six students were beaten in the Academy of Agriculture. In every incident
the number of the attackers always exceeded the number of the victims by several times.

But most of all suffered the students in the accommodation block of the Economics and Law College. The police who arrived at the scene of the carnage took away 28 victims to the local police department. Six students under 18 were released immediately, the rest were offered to sign examination records which read as if they were carbon copies of the papers mentioned by Alibek Dikiev. When the young people refused to sign the documents, they were threatened by the police. The total number of those who suffered serious injuries such as concussion, fractures etc., was 54. All the victims are convinced that this is a carefully planned operation aimed at destabilising the
relationship between the people of Chechnya and Kabardino-Balkaria. The account of the incident given by Timur Turpulkhanov, a student of the Economics and Law College, also gives an idea of the attackers’ methods:
‘There were only five of us in the accommodation block when a mob began their attempts to break into the building. When they noticed other Chechen students returning from the lectures, they disappeared instantly. About half an hour later I went out. I was leaving the [college] territory when four people jumped onto me out of nowhere. They
began to beat me. Two of them held me down and the other two kicked me in the stomach. Then they threw me into a car and we drove off. When in the centre of the city the car stopped at the traffic lights, I hit one of the gang and jumped out. They followed, but at a bus stop I managed
to get into a passing minibus and lost them. Because the driver sped up, I managed to get away.’

Timur remembers his abductors and their car perfectly. Like Timur, other students who have suffered from the violence in these last few days, also remember their attackers’ faces
well. If the law enforcement officials of Nalchik were suddenly to show interest in what had happened, the victims are prepared to give the full information about those who attacked them.

Next day members of the Council of Elders and some members of the Chechen community in Kabardino-Balkaria who were concerned about the goings-on, went to see Khachim Shogenov, the Minister of Internal Affairs. The minister assured the elders that those guilty of the mass beatings of the Chechen students would be punished. He also promised
that there would be police patrols outside the accommodation blocks where Chechen students live. However, by the evening of 18 September there were no patrols. That is why members of the Chechen community had to take turns to keep guard outside the student accommodation blocks all
night.

There are still rumours about the militant youths in Nalchik who organised mass beatings of students from Chechnya. Law enforcement agencies continue to do nothing.