Union of Councils for Soviet Jews: Bigotry Monitor: Volume 5, Number 38

News

Bigotry Monitor: Volume 5, Number 38

(September 30, 2005)

Volume 5, Number 38 Friday, September 30, 2005

BIGOTRY MONITOR

A Weekly Human Rights Newsletter on Antisemitism, Xenophobia, and Religious Persecution in the Former Communist World and Western Europe

EDITOR: CHARLES FENYVESI (News and Editorial Policy within the sole discretion of the editor)

Published by UCSJ: Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union

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PUTIN VOWS TO MAKE SKINHEADS DISAPPEAR FROM THE MAP. “We shall do the utmost to make skinheads and fascist elements to disappear from the country's political map,” President Vladimir Putin said in a televised phone-in broadcast on Russia TV on September 27. “I can only bring my apologies for the incidents that have already taken place.” He was responding to an unidentified foreign student’s question, read aloud by correspondent Natalya Semenikhina from the call center. The student said that members of Nazi organizations often attack foreigners in Russia and he wondered how in such circumstances he and his colleagues could keep their trust, respect, and friendship toward Russians.

Putin said that both he and the Russian public are concerned about the issue. “Unfortunately, Russia is a part of the modern world, and we see the growing number of such manifestations in practically all countries of the world,” he added. “This is a common disease.” The only medicine that can counteract it, he said, is society’s rejection of such manifestations.

The nearly three-hour-long call-in program – his fourth since becoming head of state, according to “The Moscow Times” – covered a wide range of issues. Among the 60 questions, “carefully screened” wrote “The Moscow Times,” the one by the foreign student (and Putin’s response) received scant attention in the news media that gave other issues a great deal of attention. The human rights group Memorial said that in Vorkuta, security guards assaulted its local co-chair and her husband when they tried to join the televised audience.

CHIEF RABBI BARRED FROM REENTERING RUSSIA. On September 27, Russian border guards denied entry to Pinchas Goldschmidt, chief rabbi of Moscow’s Choral Synagogue, the Associated Press reported. Goldschmidt, a Swiss citizen who had been living in Russia for nearly 15 years, was ordered to leave Moscow upon arrival from Israel and to take a return flight. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he had his multi-entry Russian visa annulled at passport control. Speaking on Ekho Moskvy radio, Goldschmidt urged the authorities to review his case and allow him to return to Russia. He said he hoped that the incident was a misunderstanding.

While in recent years border police have annulled visas of foreign clerics serving congregations in Russia – mostly Roman Catholics and Protestants – rabbis have not been targeted, or at least such cases did not get publicity.

MP WANTS TO DROP LAW BANNING INCITEMENT OF COMMUNAL HATE. Nikolai Kuryanovich, a member of the extreme nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia elected to the State Duma from Moscow District, has called for the Russian Criminal Code to dump an anti-incitement provision used occasionally to prosecute inciters of ethnic hatred, according to a September 26 report by the news web site Polit.ru. Kuryanovich claims that Article 282 of the Criminal Code is being misused.

As Polit.ru pointed out, Kuryanovich has a reputation for making statements that could easily fall under an Article 282 prosecution were it not for the fact that his membership in the State Duma grants him immunity from prosecution. During his election campaign, he allegedly called for the deportation from Russia of “migrants from the criminal south” and earlier this year unsuccessfully promoted a law making it illegal for Russian women to marry foreigners. He has unsuccessfully sought to have the Prosecutor General's Office shut down the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, an NGO affiliated with UCSJ that cited some of his racist comments in a report on xenophobia in Russia.

ARRESTS IN KILLING OF CONGOLESE STUDENT. Three suspects in the murder earlier this month of a Congolese student in St. Petersburg may be responsible for several other murders and assaults in the city's Kalinsky district, according to a September 26 report by the local news web site Fontanka.ru. Several of the arrested men have previous convictions, some related to attacks on non-Russians.

The attack on the Congolese student, which resulted in his death on September 13, sparked protests from the city's foreign student community, especially since city officials refused to characterize the killing as race-motivated. The head of the city police crime squad, Vladislav Piotrovsky, seemed to blame the victim in a statement to the press shortly afterwards. However, evidence has surfaced that points to a racist motivation for the crime. One suspect had a swastika on his cell phone and at the time of his arrest was wearing a racist T-shirt. Police later found out that the suspects tried to attack three other Africans a few days before the murder, but the intended victims managed to escape. Two other unsolved murders of non-Russians in the city are now being examined for a possible connection to the suspects.

The suspects were originally arrested in connection with a September 20 attack on a Jordanian, according to a September 26 article in the local newspaper “Vecherny Petersburg.” Police in that case as well pointed to motives other than racism, theorizing that the attack was an attempted robbery. The author of the article, however, pointed out that police have not said exactly what the suspects robbed and why they did not take some of the victim's jewelry if they intended to rob him.

With evidence mounting that their early public assertions were incorrect, local officials are wavering a bit. A spokesman for the City Prosecutor's Office told the press on September 26 that the murder of the Congolese student might have been a racist killing. On the other hand, he added, it may simply have been “a murder provoked by a hooliganistic mood” and claimed absence of evidence that the suspects belong to an extremist group.

FIVE SKINHEADS JAILED OVER RACIST KILLING. A court in the Russian city of Saratov sentenced five skinheads to jail terms of between five and 13 years for beating to death a builder from the Caucasus province of Daghestan, news agencies reported on September 26. Mikhail Krasnoshchekov and Alexander Shevtsov were each sentenced to 13 years for murder, while Denis Melentev, Roman Tukmanov, and Ilya Proshenko received lesser sentences, according to Interfax. They were among the ten skinheads who beat to death builder Dzhavad Sheikhov, 39, in Saratov last year.

POLICEMAN JAILED FOR NINE YEARS FOR WOUNDING TAJIK. A Moscow metro police officer who shot and wounded a Tajik national after failing to extort a bribe has been sentenced to nine years in prison. The Preobrazhensky District Court found Sergeant Boris Kostruba guilty of attempted murder and abuse of authority, according to Public Verdict, a human rights organization that defends the rights of those who suffer police brutality, in a statement posted on its web site on September 23. According to investigators, Kostruba detained Rustam Baibekov, 20, as he and a companion tried to enter the Sokolniki metro station on a single ticket on July 21, 2004, the statement said.

Learning that Baibekov had no Moscow registration documents, Kostruba threatened to deport him back to Tajikistan and demanded a bribe. After Baibekov refused, Kostruba shot him but the bullet exited from Baibekov's shoulder without hitting any vital organs.

CHECHEN AND KABARDIN STUDENTS CLASH. Chechen and Kabardin students clashed over the weekend in Nalchik, capital of the internal Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, according to the national daily “Kommersant” of September 24. Tensions between youths from the two ethnic groups have been simmering in the city since at least two years ago when an anti-Chechen riot led to more than 50 injuries.

The current clash was sparked by a confrontation at a movie theater the preceding Thursday that ended without any injuries. But on September 23, the conflict escalated. Relatives of the Chechen students arrived from Chechnya and went looking for Kabardin students. The confrontation ended in a mass brawl with around 100 participants on each side. Police made several arrests. Later that day, crowds of Kabardins gathered outside government buildings demanding that the republic expel the Chechens. Some charged that the Chechen relatives who traveled to Nalchik were pro-Russian Chechen paramilitary soldiers known as “Kadyrovtsy” after their leader.

Mosvar Ibragimov, minister for nationalities in the Moscow-backed administration of Chechnya, journeyed to Nalchik to meet with local officials in response to the violence. He characterized the clash as typical youth violence that has nothing to do with any inter-ethnic animosity.

ANTI-ROMA VIOLENCE ERUPTS IN PSKOV. A previously unknown nationalist group is suspected to have been behind attacks on Roma (Gypsies) in Pskov, according to a September 26 report by the Sova Information-Analytical Center. Citing a report by the St. Petersburg branch of the human rights NGO Memorial, Sova reported that leaflets calling for violence against Roma were circulated in the city, accusing them of drug trafficking and comparing them to spiders. The leaflets were signed by a movement calling itself Free Russia and asked Pskov residents to provide it with lists of names and addresses of Roma living in the city.

On August 30, a Roma named Vladimir Berezovsky was kidnapped and murdered. Afterwards, his family began to receive threats, which police reportedly refused to investigate. However, police are looking into his murder and the September 2005 beating of local Roma Aleksandr Mikhailov. Reportedly, his assailants preceded their attack by asking him his ethnicity and even mentioned the murder of Berezovsky.

KOSHER RESTAURANT AGAIN VANDALIZED. For the second time in a year, the kosher restaurant “Shalom” has been vandalized in St. Petersburg, according to a September 26 report by the Rosbalt news agency. Vandals shattered the restaurant's windows and damaged its door. The city's chief rabbi has asked for a police investigation.

BELARUS SLAPS HUGE FINE ON CHURCH ORGANIZER. On September 23, two months after police raided a Sunday morning service of the New Life charismatic church in Minsk, a court fined church administrator Vasily Yurevich the equivalent of 160 times the minimum monthly wage for organizing an “illegal” service, Forum 18 News Service reported on September 28. Yurevich told the news service that Judge Natalya Kuznetsova ignored the testimony of church members that he had not organized the service, while the court decision maintained that the judge “believes offender Yurevich is trying to evade responsibility for what has been committed.” This is Yurevich's second massive fine and he fears further fines in the wake of a police raid on the church's September 4 service.

In separate cases, one Baptist punished for organizing “illegal” worship was able to overturn his fine in August, but two other Baptists have been fined.

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK, PROMISE OF AN ERA * * * Responding to liberals who have accused him of suppressing political opposition and curtailing democracy, President Vladimir Putin said in his televised call-in show on September 27: “The danger of a return to a monopoly of power does not exist.”

NEW LAW TO CURB REFUGEES UPSTAGED BY STAMPEDE EU Backs Asylum Bill While African Migrants Riot in Melilla

The European Parliament has given “a cautious welcome” to a draft law setting a common standard in the 25 countries of the European Union (EU) for asylum-seekers, BBC reported on September 27. But coincidentally or by intelligent design, on the same day the draft law was approved, hundreds of African migrants attempted to break through the 9-foot razor-wire fence around Melilla, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, and were nearly successful in their stampede. The notion of Fortress Europe was given yet another illustration, as EU lawmakers begin the long process of defining their common standards of acceptability.

1. NEGOTIATING COMMON EU STANDARDS WILL TAKE TIME. The Common Asylum Standard Directive is part of a program agreed by the EU member states to tighten up their borders with the non-EU world and to stop people who go from one EU member state to another applying for asylum, a tactic called “asylum-shopping.” However, the majority of MPs rejected the idea, recommended by the European Commission, of listing “super-safe countries” from which asylum claims would not be accepted.

Full agreement on a common standard and on the measures to deal with failed asylum seekers is “a long way off,” the BBC correspondent on the scene said. The lawmakers’ objective now is to create a standardized fast-track process and to agree on exclusion clauses for people deemed to be a threat to security or who had committed serious crimes.

The draft directive approved this week will now be considered by the 25 EU member states. Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini told the European Parliament that the treatment of refugees must be harmonized. When the projected comprehensive new law comes into effect, the currently more than 20 different systems of asylum will be superseded. The EU is already negotiating readmission agreements with several countries, including Morocco, Turkey, China, and Ukraine. Progress is being made. Last year, the EU adopted a common definition of who is a refugee, and EU states can now compare the fingerprints of asylum applicants to verify if they have already applied in another country.

2. FORTRESS EUROPE BESIEGED. While the EU is debating the new law on refugees, unemployment south and east of the EU bloc remains high, would-be migrants are desperate, and the situation is explosive.

African migrants trying to enter Europe without documents have come up with a new focus and a forceful new tactic. On September 27, hundreds of them tried to break through the border fences around the Spanish enclave of Melilla in North Africa, police sources told the BBC. African immigrants see Melilla and Ceuta, under Spanish rule for the past 500 years, as “stepping stones” to Europe.

In the September 27 mass attempt to scale the razor wire fences in Melilla, some 270 homemade ladders were used, dozens were injured in the melee that developed, and about a hundred migrants who did get through were arrested, according to news agency reports. The charity organization Doctors Without Borders criticized what it called “the violence” used by the Spanish and Moroccan security forces.

Far more – as many as 1,000 a week – are caught and many others drown while attempting to reach Spain in rickety boats either across the Mediterranean Sea or over the Atlantic Ocean to the Canary Islands. Last week, the Moroccan authorities arrested more than 1,000 people preparing to travel illegally to Europe. Some 300 were Moroccans and the others from sub-Saharan Africa.

On September 29, Reuters confirmed the death of at least two Africans trying to enter Ceuta in the third mass assault in as many days on the barrier. On the same day in Melilla, some 500 would-be migrants attempted to break through and about 100 did make it. Spanish authorities say they will double the height of the fences now 9 feet high. Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero announced that he would send in the army to support the Civil Guard. * * * *

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