The Georgians deported on Friday were detained over the last several days in what officials have described as a sweep of illegal migrants. Viktor Beltsov, a spokesman for the Emergency Services Ministry, said that 153 deportees were flown to Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, aboard a ministry airplane from an airfield just outside of Moscow.
The campaign against Georgians has been echoed in television and newspaper reports that have indulged in stereotypes and lurid descriptions of Georgian mafias and criminality.
At the same time, however, the authorities have come under unusually sharp criticism in other parts of the news media.
"Searches in restaurants, closed casinos, threats of deportations looming over hundreds of thou-sands of people," a commentator, Demis Polandov, wrote in the newspaper Gazeta on Friday. "If this is not an ethnic cleansing, then I do not have a word to name it."
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