Market Closure Stirs Fears of Crime

The closure of Moscow’s sprawling Cherkizovsky Market, which left tens of thousand of people jobless, might lead to an increase in crimes by migrants, a nationwide organization for migrants said Friday, calling on authorities to provide financial support to the jobless migrants.
Meanwhile, migration officials announced that they would deport 151 illegal migrant workers from China and Vietnam who had been employed at Cherkizovsky.
“Many people are in a desperate situation. The atmosphere surrounding the market is volatile and might even lead to a rise in crime,” said Rashid El Arabi, an official with the Migrants of Russia Federation, at a news conference Friday, RIA-Novosti reported.
In addition to ordinary migrant workers, the market had been “a center of attraction for criminal groups” that smuggled goods using the support of corrupt officials, El Arabi said.
More than 100,000 migrant workers became jobless after the market’s closure on June 29, El Arabi said.
“Desperate people who now can’t even pay their rent have been spending their nights under the trees in the street,” the head of Migrants of Russia, Madjumder Mukhammad Amin, said at the same news conference, Interfax reported.
Amin called on authorities to provide financial support to the migrants.
His organization has opened a field kitchen not far from the market to provide free hot meals for the jobless migrants, Amin said.
Another aim of the kitchen is to “control” migrants “so that they don’t violate Russian law,” he said.
The kitchen provides migrants with pilaf, vegetables, meat, tea and water from noon until 7 p.m. daily, Amin said.
His organization will also provide legal assistance to migrants on how to protect their rights as entrepreneurs, Amin said.
The Federal Migration Service said Friday that within the next 10 days it would deport 151 illegal migrant workers from China and Vietnam who had been employed at Cherkizovsky, Interfax reported.
Amin criticized the move, saying, “Ordinary people who have committed an administrative offense have become scapegoats, while criminals walk free.” “But no official, no businessman has been detained,” Amin said.
The Investigative Committee asked a court on Friday to suspend for 90 days the activities of two subsidiaries of AST Group, which had run operations at Cherkizovsky Market, and four other affiliated companies over violations of fire safety and sanitary rules, RIA-Novosti reported.
The closure came after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called for “convictions” in connection to a seizure there last year of about $2 billion in purportedly contraband goods. The market is owned by multimillionaire Telman Ismailov, who was the target of a documentary film aired on state television last month that claimed that billions of dollars have been laundered at Cherkizovsky Market.