Officials in Russia's Stavropol region reacted to claims that the murder of an Ingush student on April 20 (Hitler's birthday--traditionally a time of increased neo-Nazi violence in Russia) by denying that extremist groups exist in the region, according to an April 29, 2008 report in the local newspaper "Vecherny Stavropol." A government body that works on ethnic minority issues held a meeting last week to discuss security measures for the upcoming May holidays and the recent murder of an Ingush student, which has led to acrimony between law enforcement officials, who immediately issued a denial that ethnic hatred motivated the killing, and minority community leaders, many of whom think that the attack was a hate crime. Some of these leaders were invited to speak at the meeting. Dzhamalay Esambaev, head of a local Chechen-Ingush community group, and Vitaly Tatarenko, first deputy of the city administration in charge of security issues, expressed polar opposite views of the attack, with Mr. Tatarenko blaming unnamed forces wishing to destabilize the city. His view was echoed by the head of the local FSB.

Pavel Kolsenikov, deputy chief of the department of ethno-national relations, issued a categorical denial that "organized gangs of so-called skinheads" exist in the city, and asserted that inter-ethnic tension in the region, which borders on Chechnya, is much lower than in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He was contradicted by a representative of the Azeri community, who stated that skinheads gather in the city's Mamayka district, an assertion that police denied.

Finally, the head of a local Cossack organization proposed solving the problem of youth violence by granting greater police powers to Cossack paramilitary units. Not mentioned in the article is the fact that some Cossack organizations are explicitly racist and have been linked to anti-minority violence in the neighboring Krasnodar region.

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