Kiev - Hundreds of ethnic Tartars and Slavs brawled on Thursday after a real estate company attempted to evict squatters from a proposed construction site, the Interfax news agency reported. The confrontation began in Simferopol, the regional capital of Ukraine's Crimea province, when some 300 security guards hired by the firm Olbi-Krym moved in on a tent encampment occupied by some 400 Tartar protestors.
One of the region's leading building firms, Olbi-Krym recently had obtained a court order instructing the Tartars to vacate the lot. The Tartar demonstrators had been squatting on the site for more than a year to protest alleged discrimination by regional government against them in land reform.
The private security troops attempted to force the Tartars off of the lot, sparking fistfights involving at times dozens of combatants. Some brawls spilled out into Simferopol city streets, blocking traffic and threatening pedestrians.
An estimated 400 police armed with shields, armour, and truncheons responded to the scene. Using tear gas and backed by two armoured personnel carriers, the law enforcers had separated the two sides by midday.
As of early afternoon the conflict was at a stand off, with the Tartar protestors separated from the ethnic Slav Olbi-Krym security personnel by a police cordon.
No one was seriously injured and no arrests had been made, a police spokesman said.
Ukraine's Tartars, generally following the Sunni Moslem faith, constitute some 20 per cent of the Crimea's populace. Ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, generally following the Orthodox Christian faith, make up the majority of the peninsula's inhabitants.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin exiled all Tartars from Crimea in 1944, because of alleged collaboration with German invaders during the Second World War. Tartars had settled in the region some 700 years previously.
When Ukraine became independent in 1991 the former Soviet republic's new government opened Crimea to Tartar return, without determining what land the Tartars should settle on. In most cases, the Tartars wound up in sustenance farming villages located on the arid peninsula's worst land.
Violent conflict between ethnic Tartars (convinced they are the original inhabitants of the region) and Crimean law enforcement and businessmen (primarily ethnic Russians or Ukrainians) has been on the increase in recent years.
The most recent outbreak took place in the Black Sea resort town Sudak in July, when seven policemen and an unknown number of Tartar were hospitalized after a street battle over whether Tartars would be allowed to demonstrate near the Sudak city hall.
Other violence in the last eighteen months included a mosque firebombing, a brawl between Tartars and Slavs over control of an open-air market, and the murder of a Tarter journalist investigating corrupt land sales.
