Kiev, 26 March: The Ukrainian parliament's human rights commissioner, Nina Karpachova, has asked Interior Ministry and Security Service of Ukraine [SBU] leadership to react to a march of xenophobes that took place at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, a national technical university, on 23 March.

UNIAN learnt from Karpachova's press service that she had received a complaint from Kiev Polytechnic Institute students about threats and manifestations of xenophobia on the part of certain political forces, which held a torch-lit march at the university's campus on 23 March. Participants in the march chanted the following slogans: "Migrants go home", "Ukrainian students should have the best hostels", "Alien, remember: the Ukrainian is the master here".

Karpachova believes that the event thus aimed to intimidate foreign students at the university.

She is surprised that the xenophobic march had not been banned by the administration of the university, where al! l political activity is banned, or by the Kiev city state administration, which had received a request for permission to hold the event and had not reacted to it even after similar marches were held under xenophobic and nazi slogans in Kharkiv and Chernihiv.

Instead, according to Karpachova, following the administration's instructions, the Interior Ministry's Berkut [riot police] units and SBU officers did all they could to ensure that participants in the event were able to march twice through the campus, shouting xenophobic slogans.

When a group of students started a protest against the nazi slogans, Berkut forced them to the pavement of Politekhnichna Street so that they did not get in the march's way, Karpachova said.

She is deeply worried by the events, because they took place against a background of a significant increase in the number of attacks on foreigners in Ukraine, who get beaten up. Some 35 such cases have been registered since the beginning of 2008. Two foreign citizens, from the Congo and Sierra Leone, were br utally killed.

/Source: UNIAN news agency, Kiev, in Ukrainian 1705 gmt 26 Mar 08 /

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