Union of Councils for Soviet Jews: Bigotry Monitor: Volume 3, Number 12

News

Bigotry Monitor: Volume 3, Number 12

(March 21, 2003)

Volume 3, Number 12
Friday, March 21, 2003

BIGOTRY MONITOR
A Weekly Human Rights Newsletter on Antisemitism, Xenophobia, andReligious 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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ANTISEMITIC AND ANTI-AMERICAN SPEECHES AT COMMUNIST RALLY. Last weekend's meeting of Russian and Belarusian Communists featured an antisemitic speech and numerous attacks on Israel and the United States, according to a March 17 report posted on the news web site "gazeta.ru." Nikolai Kondratenko, former Krasnodar Kray governor and now the region's representative in the upper house of the Russian parliament, drew loud applause when he claimed: "We Russians on our own soil are like the Palestinians in Israel. Is it really normal that in the government there isn't one Russian, that in financial structures there isn't one Russian, and that on television, it's hard to find a Russian face?" (On February 5, Gennady Zyuganov made a similar public statement contending that Jews controlled the Russian government.)

Well known for his antisemitic utterances, Kondratenko was given "a prominent spot" on the speakers' list, according to the web site. Kondratenko's speech inspired "a torrent of antisemitic jokes" by other delegates, including members of the State Duma, according to the "gazeta.ru" reporter. Yet the speech was not posted on the Communist Party's web site.

Another speaker was Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader, who accused the United States of trying to build "a new world order of liberal fascism" by bombing Yugoslavia, "seizing Afghanistan, and supporting the aggression of Israel against the Palestinians. The American 'peaceful order' is the poverty, humiliation, and extermination of peoples!"

More than 1,000 delegates crowded into Moscow's Izmaylovo sports complex for what the organizers called the Congress of Peoples of the Union State. "Union State" refers to the amorphous union formed by Belarus and Russia in the 1990s, designed to promote the eventual merger of the two states.

MASKED GUNMEN SEIZE CHECHEN HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST. Masked gunmen seized Chechen human rights activist Imran Ezhiev over the weekend, the Russian human rights group Memorial said on March 18, according to an Associated Press (AP) item from Moscow. A member of the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) human rights organization, Ezhiev was stopped Saturday evening while driving with a colleague from Shali to Serzhen-Yurt in southern Chechnya, Memorial said. Masked gunmen emerged from two cars, checked Ezhiev's identity documents and then forced him into one of their vehicles.

Ezhiev, who also heads the regional office of the Society for Russian and Chechen Friendship, has been an outspoken critic of human rights violations in Chechnya. According to Memorial, he has been detained frequently by Russian authorities. "Without a doubt, the seizure of Imran Ezhiev is directly connected with his professional activities,"' Memorial said, pointing out that at the time of his seizure, he was collecting information for a MHG report on Chechnya.

Memorial and MHG appealed for Ezhiev's immediate release. In Vienna, Austria, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights appealed to President Vladimir Putin and Akhmed Kadyrov, the Moscow-appointed chief of Chechnya's administration, to help locate and free Ezhiev.

On March 18, Ezhiev was released from captivity, AP reported from Moscow, citing his colleagues. He was left on a roadside, said Ludmila Alexeeva, the Moscow Helsinki Group's chairwoman, then he made his way home. He was held blindfolded in a basement and interrogated by his captors, she added, but had not been beaten or tortured.

The kidnappers either were Russian servicemen or people loyal to the Moscow-appointed chief of Chechnya's administration, Akhmad Kadyrov, Alexeeva speculated. "I know it wasn't the rebels,"' she said. His release was due to efforts by colleagues in the human rights community, she added.

Also on March 18, 60 prominent Russian cultural figures issued an appeal for negotiations to end the war in Chechnya, in a rare public protest against the conflict. "The deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers and officers, tens of thousands of civilians, and the wholesale destruction of all of Chechnya cannot be justified by 'state interests' or by arguments about the threat of world terrorism,'' said the signatories who included chess champion Garry Kasparov, poet Bella Akhmadulina, film director Pyotr Todorovsky, and writers Fazil Iskander and Vladimir Voinovich.

NOVOSIBIRSK EXTREMISTS RALLY OUTSIDE JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER. On March 15, some 50 members of the Novosibirsk branch of the stridently antisemitic National Great Power Party of Russia (NDPR) demonstrated in front of the city's Jewish community center, according to local Jewish activist Elena Turetskaya. Demonstrators held signs that read "Zionists, Go to Israel!" and "Down With the Jewish-Fascist Dictatorship!" Other signs expressed opposition to the war in Iraq. While city administration officials advised the local NDPR branch against the demonstration, they did not ban it.

TWO ESTONIAN ANTISEMITES ARRESTED. Two young men were arrested in the Estonian city of Sillamae earlier this month on charges of inciting ethnic hatred, according to UCSJ's Baltic Bureau's summary of a March 13 article in the local newspaper "Valgamaalane." According to the Security Police, the men daubed the words "Jews Out" along with swastikas on the walls of apartment buildings.

NON-MUSLIM COMMUNITIES CAN'T GET REGISTERED IN KARAKALPAKSTAN. "We have now lost all hope of registering our church," Khym-Mun Kim, a leader of the Peace Presbyterian Church in Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan in northwest Uzbekistan, told Forum 18 News Service, a new Christian news agency reporting on religious freedom. "The authorities deliberately keep coming up with new excuses to refuse us registration. The authorities say we have no right to hold meetings without registration. And in fact the police could descend on any of our services."

Kim believes that the Karakalpakstan authorities are deliberately creating "intolerable" conditions for religious minorities. Only one non-Muslim religious community has managed to gain registration in the autonomous republic.

FRENCH COURT RULES AGAINST MUSLIM HEADSCARF. France's fierce insistence on secularism has scored another point against the dictates of religion increasingly asserted by Muslim residents. A court in the northeastern French town of Nancy has ruled that a Muslim law student could not take the obligatory secrecy oath while wearing her headscarf, Reuters reported. The dispatch suggested that she would be barred from continuing her studies in France after her repeated refusals to swap her headscarf for a black cap traditionally worn in the oath-taking ceremony. France is "a secular state. Its motto is to avoid any discrimination between citizens," Nancy public prosecutor Gilles Lucazeau was quoted as saying in "Le Figaro" of March 19. "This student lawyer wants to appear different. And it is not a good thing to show those on trial the presence of a person who could show signs of affiliation or allegiance."

Earlier this month, Reuters added, 150 teachers from a secondary school in the city of Lyon went on strike to protest a Muslim student's insistence on wearing a scarf to cover up her hair. The teachers said that secularism must be respected and cited the law that bans "ostentatious religious symbols" in the classroom.

Reuters observed that countries such as the mainly Roman Catholic France have shown less tolerance for Muslim customs since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

GERMAN COURT REJECTS BAN ON FAR-RIGHT PARTY. On March 17, the Constitutional Court, Germany's highest, threw out a bid to outlaw the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), which the government compared to the Nazis and charged with inciting racial hatred, Reuters reported from Karlsruhe. The reason for the bid was specific -- the need to cope with the surge of attacks on foreigners in 2000 -- and the upper and lower houses of parliament backed up the government. The court's rejection followed a suspension of the legal proceedings a year ago after it transpired that the government's case included testimony and speeches from informants. The NPD contended that the government had tried to bolster its case by telling the informants to incite racial hatred and recruit violent neo-Nazis. Embarrassed, the government offered to present new arguments.

However, this week the chairman of the judges, Winfried Hassemer, said the Constitutional Court would not reopen the case. Yet another knot of complexity is that the court needed a two-thirds majority to reopen the case, so a minority of three of the seven judges won by rejecting the government's bid. Hassemer, who was with the minority voting to dismiss the case, emphasized that the decision was not a judgment on whether the NPD was unconstitutional, but an expression of dissatisfaction with the government's methods. Reuters notes that the NPD has not been successful with the electorate, as its best postwar show at the polls was 4.3 percent on the federal level, in 1969, still short of the five percent threshold needed for parliamentary representation.

The case constituted Germany’s first attempt to ban a party in 50 years. The last parties the Federal Republic outlawed were the Communist KPD and the far-right SRP.

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * *
Vladimir Rushaylo, the secretary of Russia's Security Council in the Kremlin, declared at a conference in Moscow on March 18, according to Interfax: "Under federal law, the state must resolutely interfere with and curb the activity of Nazi, fascist, or other parties and movements of the sort, as well as totalitarian sects, which on one hand represent the interests of a certain section of society, [but] on the other hand, they represent a catastrophic threat to society as a whole."

STRAWS IN THE STORM

As the world is anxiously waiting for news from Iraq, other conflicts on other fronts are moving on at a slow pace.

1. Bank Tells Uzbeks to Improve Human Rights Record or Face Fewer Investments.
Less than two months before its scheduled annual meeting in the Uzbek capital Tashkent, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) adopted a new "country strategy" for Uzbekistan that demands that its repressive regime comply with human rights standards or face the prospects of fewer investments.

In a statement published on March 16, EBRD found that Uzbekistan's progress toward democracy and human rights remained "slow and characterized by setbacks." The statement pointed out "systematic violations of the freedom of religion, expression, association, and assembly," and "arbitrary arrests and torture of detainees in order to obtain confessions or incriminating statements." It noted that the renewed interest by the international community in Central Asia in the wake of September 11, 2001 was "a good opportunity for the country to accelerate political and economic reforms," which the Uzbek government had "failed to use effectively." The strategy concluded that "Uzbekistan needs to take a number of critical steps to put the country on a path of sustained progress" and set specific benchmarks for the government to fulfill, including greater political openness and freedom of the media; free functioning of independent civil society groups; and improvements of the country's human rights record, including implementation of the recommendations issued earlier this month by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture following his visit to Uzbekistan in late 2002.

The "country strategy" promises that in a year the EBRD will conduct a progress review and declares that if no progress is made, "the scope for new investments in Uzbekistan during the strategy period, both in the private and public sector, will be limited."

On March 19, Human Rights Watch (HRW) welcomed the EBRD decision. "The Bank has made clear that it expects reforms in exchange for engagement," said Elizabeth Andersen, executive director of HRW's Europe and Central Asia division. "The ball is now in [President Islam] Karimov's court, and the international community is watching closely what steps are taken as a result." "In previous months, the EBRD had been reluctant to use benchmarks to put pressure on the Uzbek government," the HRW statement noted. "Just weeks before the [Tashkent] meeting, that now seems to have changed."

2. Martyrdom Has Its Rewards in Serbia.
Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian prime minister who was gunned down on March 12, was a supporter of human rights and the chief mover behind the extradition of former dictator Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague international court to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. These positions made a radical reformer out of a soft-spoken intellectual, a rare figure in Serbian politics: a moderate par excellence. On March 18, Serbia's parliament voted in as the new prime minister Zoran Zivkovic, whose outlook resembles Djindjic's. Before the vote, Zivkovic promised to promote Western-backed reforms and to crush organized crime, which the government says is linked to Milosevic's secret police and ordered the assassination to create chaos.

According to the Associated Press (AP), many Serbs believe Djindjic's killing could shake the Serbs out of their lethargy and sense of hopelessness. The AP dispatch says that Djindjic was never too popular because of his radical demands for change. "The worst is that his killing could strengthen an assumption that in Serbia only authoritarian rule is possible," Aleksa Djilas, an author and commentator, wrote in the newspaper "Danas." Djindjic's assassination, Djilas argued, came "when we started to come out of the nightmare caused by Milosevic's erroneous rule." He concluded: "Djindjic's views could become popular because of his martyrdom."' AP quotes Vojin Dimitrijevic, a law expert, who agreed: "Djindjic's killing is a tragedy, but it may not lead into apathy. The tragedy can inspire."'

Another hopeful sign is that some half a million people attended Djindjic's funeral, the largest crowd since Josip Broz-Tito's funeral. AP suggested that it was "both a display of sorrow and defiance," and quoted a 25-year-old participant expressing confidence that the size of the crowd showed that no one can turn the clock back in Serbia.

3. Polish People Smuggler Arrested on German Border.
According to a Reuters report based on a dispatch by the Polish news agency PAP, Polish border guards stopped 76 Ukrainians and Moldavians attempting to cross the border into Germany surreptitiously on March 16. The illegal immigrants were crowded into a trailer of a Polish-registered truck on its way to the Netherlands. Though the number of people involved may be small and the news probably did not merit front-page attention in any capital city, the event is a possible harbinger of a mass migration as well as a signal of the European resolve to block it before it becomes unmanageable.

The European Union has repeatedly urged Poland to seal its porous eastern borders ahead of its expected accession next May. (Other former Warsaw Pact governments have been receiving the same message, along with suggestions of programs worth millions of euros as well as frank talks on the destabilizing effects of a large-scale influx of impoverished foreigners.) The immigrants will be deported to their home countries, PAP said, and the Polish driver faces up to three years imprisonment as a people smuggler.

4. New International Court Ready to Try Its First Case.
On March 11, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague opened for business, and supporters express the hope that it will play a crucial role in averting as well as prosecuting violations of human rights. The question asked by observers is whether the ICC will target the war in Iraq. The United States and Iraq are not members -- and are thus immune to prosecution -- but coalition members Britain, Spain, and Australia are. Writing for the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Chris Stephen suggested that Britain could find itself in the new court's firing line and has already taken legal advice on the matter. According to Stephen, one law firm in London says that it will push for prosecutions in case British troops commit war crimes in the conflict and "human rights groups who have backed the ICC are likely to highlight evidence of any atrocities." The court's task is to try individuals -- not nations or armies -- accused of crimes against civilians. The judges, 11 men and 7 women from all over the world, will be part of what has been repeatedly called the most ambitious initiative in international law.

Though the court is independent of the U.N., Secretary General Kofi Annan was present at the opening ceremony and said he was looking forward to supporting its cause, "which is the cause of all humanity." He said: "Unspeakable crimes must be deterred." Other speakers tried to dispel the fears of America and others such as China, India, Iraq, and Turkey that are not among the 89 governments that have ratified the Rome Treaty which created the court in 1998. The ICC "is not the world's crucible for vengeance," said Prince Zeid al-Hussein of Jordan, but a "court of last resort," with statutes mandating that it must defer to national courts first.

The Bush administration has campaigned fiercely against the ICC on the grounds that a politicized prosecutor could indict American officials or military personnel on missions abroad. According to "The New York Times," one of the private American citizens who attended the court's opening -- which the Bush administration boycotted -- was Benjamin Ferencz, 82, the legendary prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. "The Times" quoted him as saying that the current American leadership "seems to have forgotten the lessons we tried to teach the rest of the world."

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