Volume 2, Number 13
Friday, April 5, 2002

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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PALESTINIAN VIOLENCE SPREADS TO WESTERN EUROPE. In what appears to be a coordinated series of nearly simultaneous attacks in two European countries with large Arab populations, four synagogues in four French and Belgian cities were set on fire this past weekend. The violence followed anti-Israel demonstrations in those cities, each with several thousand participants. The first attack took place in Lyon on March 30, Saturday morning, before the protest march began. Eyewitnesses report that about 15 hooded men drove two cars through the large wooden doors of a synagogue in the Jewish neighborhood of La Duchere and then set it on fire. Firemen were able to save the synagogues in Lyon, Strasbourg, and Brussels, but Marseille's Or Aviv was burned to the ground. On April 1, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin pledged that "any act of antisemitism, no matter what the pretext, will be extremely firmly pursued and cracked down upon," and he announced the deployment of 1,110 extra police officers to guard synagogues and Jewish schools. President Jacques Chirac visited a synagogue in Le Havre and called the attacks "unimaginable, unpardonable, and unspeakable."

In Paris, the Jewish community's central organization known as Consistoire compared the attacks to "the beginnings of a new Kristallnacht, with the government totally passive." (Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was the name of the action organized by the Nazi Party on November 9, 1938 targeting synagogues, Jews, and Jewish-owned businesses throughout Germany.) In Lyon, Jewish leaders called the attack on the synagogue "a commando operation," and many French Jews are drawing the conclusion that the violence constitutes coordinated acts of terrorism rather than the spontaneous anger of Arab teenagers. In response, according to the newspaper "Le Monde," "a wave of indignation" is sweeping the country. The grand mufti of Marseille, Soheib Bencheikh, first condemned "these barbarous acts," then explained: "Our natural and spontaneous solidarity with the Palestinian people, who submit to daily murders and humiliations orchestrated by Israel's bloody and vengeful leaders, cannot let us forget two undeniable truths: Jews and Arabs have shown, across their long history, an astonishing capacity to live together."

Recently, leaders of France's 600,000 Jews compiled a list of some 400 anti-Jewish acts perpetrated over the past few months and charged that neither the government nor the public has responded with sufficient force. Many French Jews are convinced that France's pro-Palestinian foreign policy has the effect of encouraging attacks on Jews by the young generation among France's more than five million Muslims. The government counters that its Middle East policy is even-handed, based on opposition to violence and bigotry. Officials cite the Foreign Ministry's recent condemnation of Israel's occupation of Yasir Arafat's compound as well as Palestinian suicide bombings.

MOSCOW SKINHEADS KILL AZERI; POLICE DENY RACIAL MOTIVE. After nightfall on March 28, five teenagers with shaved heads and wearing paramilitary uniforms and boots stabbed to death an ethnic Azeri man, a 23-year-old Russian citizen originally from Armenia, in an underground passageway in Moscow, eyewitnesses told the local news media. As on previous occasions, a spokesman for the Moscow police denied that the killers were skinheads. Ravil Sofin, acting chairman of Moscow's northern district police department, asserted that racism did not motivate the murder and that the assailants do not belong to a fascist organization but are technical school students coming from different ethnic groups, including some Muslims. Sofin said that the motive was robbery, as the murderers stole the victim's bag and running shoes. According to NTV, the victim's relatives and their lawyer do not trust the police explanation.

RUSSIAN POLICE PROMISE TO CONTROL EXTREMIST YOUTH. The Russian Interior Ministry intends to assume "tough and close control" over the activities of extremist youth organizations operating in the country, according to an Interfax item on April 2. The report quoted Lt.-Gen. Mikhail Nikiforov, deputy chief of the police service of the Interior Ministry, as saying that the law-enforcement bodies "are alarmed by the growth of nationalist feelings among young people." He promised that "a control and monitoring case will be opened for every organization." Nikiforov said that the scheme would cover radical groups such as the skinheads, Russian National Unity, and the National Bolshevik Party. According to the ministry's estimates, about 10,000 young people belong to the best-known extremist groups. He acknowledged that while such groups are monitored, information is still lacking about their leaders. He added that the situation is "aggravated" in the south of Russia where "mosques are built with the money of Arab sponsors, where young people are taught Arabic and extremist views, and Wahhabism [the Saudi version of fundamentalist Islam that Russians use as a term covering all Islamic fundamentalists] is propagated."

SKINHEADS VANDALIZE SYNAGOGUE IN CENTRAL RUSSIA. Skinheads desecrated the synagogue of Kostroma, a town northeast of Moscow, the Russian news agency Interfax reported on April 1. While the Jewish community celebrated Passover, youths reportedly belonging to an extreme nationalist group scrawled a black swastika on the synagogue wall and wrote insulting inscriptions signed the "Skins."

VOLGOGRAD AUTHORITIES CRACK DOWN ON ANTISEMITIC MEDIA. After repeated appeals to local authorities over several months, the Volgograd Jewish Religious Community, under the leadership of the city's chief rabbi Zalman Ioffe, has persuaded the regional administration to cancel a local television show spreading antisemitism, according to UCSJ's Volgograd monitor Yael Ioffe. The program "Russian Hour," hosted by local antisemitic publisher Stanislav Terentev, was broadcast on a station established by the regional administration. In addition, the editor of a local antisemitic paper called "Cossack Circle" was forced into retirement after the regional administration threatened to cut off its financing.

CHARGES AGAINST RABIDLY ANTISEMITIC NEWSPAPER DROPPED. For the third time, charges against the Lviv newspaper "The Idealist" for inciting ethnic hatred have been dropped, according to a March 22 report by the Anti-Defamation League of Ukraine. However, after a February 5 protest letter written by seven Ukrainian MPs, the Prosecutor General's Office has decided to conduct a study of the newspaper's content. The paper's latest issue calls for "a law on the deportation of kikes from Ukraine."

PROSECUTION OF RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN CHECHNYA LAGS. Interviewed by the radio station Ekho Moskvy on March 22, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe spokesman on Chechnya Lord Judd said: "A huge gap remains between the number of complaints about human rights violations and the number of criminal proceedings into such cases and prosecution of people found guilty of criminal offenses." Another gap he noted was "between the number of criminal proceedings started and the number of cases that actually reach courts."

LITHUANIAN PM CALLS FOR A STUDY ON PROPERTY RESTITUTION. Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas suggested to President Valdas Adamkus the establishment of a special working group on the restitution of Jewish communal property, Interfax reported on April 1. "This is a very pressing issue," Brazauskas said, "very closely related" to the country's prospects for membership in NATO and the EU. He asked for a presidential decree, "that will go beyond our governmental competence," referring to legislation and law enforcement. Brazauskas believes that the first step is to assess the properties, then decide how much of it should be returned to the Jewish community, and, finally, determine the ways of compensation. Before the war, 220,000 Jews lived in Lithuania, and Vilnius was known as one of the largest centers of the Yiddish culture. The Nazis and their local supporters killed nearly 90 percent of Lithuania's Jews.

REPRESSION BREEDS EXTREMISM IN CENTRAL ASIA. Continued government repression is breeding extremist movements in all five Central Asian republics, particularly in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, according to four leaders of human rights organizations active in Central Asia who spoke at a briefing at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Washington offices last week. Vitaly Ponomaryov, head of the Central Asian Program of the Moscow-based Memorial Human Rights Center, characterized the regime of Turkmenistan President Saparmurat Niyazov as "unprecedented among the republics of the former Soviet Union" in its efforts to repress its citizenry. According to Ponomaryov, Niyazov imprisons more political dissidents than all of the post-Soviet states combined, and his regime persecutes and tortures the families of opposition members who have fled Turkmenistan. Although some political prisoners have been released, new trials of dissidents are under way.

Pulat Akhunov, a former political prisoner in Uzbekistan and senior member of the opposition Birlik Party, said that September 11 gave Uzbek President Islam Karimov a new "opportunity to crack down" on political and religious opposition. Akhunov said that the government's repression of the religious opposition has been even more severe than the measures it has taken against the secular political opposition. Atanazar Arifov, the general-secretary of the opposition Erk Party of Uzbekistan and also a former political prisoner, said that "the will of the Uzbek government is anti-democratic" and that the "negative developments overshadow the few positive steps" the Karimov regime has taken in recent months "because of the U.S. presence." According to Arifov, "the Clinton Administration did have a program", but that effort appears "to have been put aside."

Abdusalom Ergashev, head of the Ferghana branch of the Independent Human Rights Organization of Uzbekistan, said that recent convictions of political activists in a Ferghana district court, where members of Hizb-ut Tahrir -- a group sometimes called "utopian" as it seeks the non-violent establishment of an Islamic Caliphate in Central Asia -- received 7 to 20-year sentences, could drive this group to become a terrorist organization like the Islamic Movement for Uzbekistan (IMU). Ergashev said that the IMU, which is based outside Uzbekistan, had grown out of the government's repression of a peaceful Islamic political movement, Adolat.

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * * "For Chechens, having a Russian slave is a status symbol," London's "Sunday Times" of March 31 quoted Vladimir Yepishin, 49, who just regained his freedom after a succession of Chechen masters kept him a slave for 13 years. "I didn't exist. I thought it would never end."

CAN THE FUTURE BE MASTERED BY FALSIFYING OR MYSTIFYING THE PAST?

Confronting the truth of a troubled past takes some courage, and the exercise may not yield immediate political advantage. Redefining the past only to serve the momentary needs of the present can further obfuscate the truth. The following are four current cases in point.

1. Serbian Media Praise Milosevic's "Spirited Defense" at The Hague Serbian coverage of Slobodan Milosevic's trial at The Hague tribunal suggests that many Serbs still refuse to accept the reality of the war crimes committed under his rule. Since the beginning of the trial, the Serbian news media have been flooded with praise for the way Milosevic has been defending himself, Bogdan Ivanisevic wrote in Belgrade's "Politika" on March 25. The Serbian media are "wowed by Milosevic's spirited defense," he continued, and the commentaries suggest that the former dictator "is getting the better of the tribunal prosecutors." However, Ivanisevic countered, "the real story" emerging in the courtroom is "a detailed account of specific criminal acts committed in Kosovo" and that is ignored in the Serbian media. As for Milosevic's responses, they are "legally irrelevant to the charges he faces."

For example, to undermine the eyewitness testimony of Bajram Bucaliu of the village of Staro Selo, last week Milosevic asked questions suggesting that members of Bucaliu's ethnic Albanian family were petty criminals and that in 1981 Bucaliu himself had broken a window and stolen something from a store. Ivanisevic reported that "Judge Richard May stopped Milosevic at that point, noting that even if Milosevic's smearing of Bucaliu and his family were based on facts, it would not fundamentally challenge the crux of Bucaliu's testimony: that in spring 1999 Serb forces compelled the Albanians from Staro Selo to flee."

A researcher at Human Rights Watch, Ivanisevic concluded that although "the Serb media covering the trial are impressed by Milosevic's audacity and his detailed knowledge of the witnesses and the events in Kosovo," his defense "only demonstrates that he has always been in a position to know just about everything happening in Kosovo -- including the criminal campaign to ethnically cleanse the territory."

2. Romanian Premier Is of Several Minds About Holocaust Guilt On March 18, Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, a legal scholar and prominent intellectual, issued a well-wrought philosophical statement that was read aloud to about one hundred members of Romania’s military and political elite who attended the opening of the first course on the subject of the Romanian Holocaust at the National Defense College. “History must be known,” Nastase wrote, and responsibility for historic events must be assumed. "The future cannot be built on falsification and mystification," he continued, and declared that the 1941 pogroms in Iasi, Bessarabia, and Bukovina, as well as the mass deportations of Romanian Jews resulting in "tens of thousands of victims" are "in no way different from” the Nazi plan for the Final Solution. The lecturer, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum scholar Radu Ioanid, told the audience that 250,000 Jews perished in the Romanian Holocaust and that Romania "cannot enter NATO with [Marshal Ion] Antonescu on its banners." (On March 28, the pro-Nazi wartime dictator’s statue in Piatra Neamt was dismantled, "on orders from Bucharest," as local officials explained, according to the Romanian newsletter Divers which specializes in ethnic minorities. Several other statues in other localities remain on display even though earlier last month, Romania’s government approved an ordinance prohibiting the public display of statues of Antonescu and the naming of streets in his honor.)

On March 23, Nastase struck a populist tone. He expressed his opposition to "attempts to generalize guilt for the [Romanian] Holocaust to the Romanian people as a whole." He might have been responding to a speech by U.S. Ambassador Michael Guest on the March 18 opening of the five-lecture course at the Defense College. The American diplomat spread the guilt from Antonescu and his government to “citizens who openly supported” his policies and others who “remained silent.” In a statement aired by Romanian radio, Nastase reverted to the standard defensive line endorsed by some nationalists, placing all responsibility for the atrocities on Romania's leaders and the governments of that time. Then he slipped some more and minimized that burden by an invidious comparison. History, Nastase said, has registered war crime “situations whose gravity was far more extensive" than those in Romania, and "nobody thought of accusing the German, Russian, American, or any other people of that."

3. Russians Use a World War II Controversy Against Ukrainian Politician The Russian media's coverage of a controversial proposal to honor the veterans of the Waffen SS Division Galizien in western Ukraine has been "largely inaccurate and designed to portray the front-running Our Ukraine bloc as Nazi supporters in the run-up to the parliamentary elections," argued Serhiy Rakhmanin in the Ukrainian weekly "Zerkalo Nedeli" on March 29. (For a description of the controversy about the SS division, see Bigotry Monitor of March 22, Vol. 2, No. 12.) As Ukrainian voters, who include many veterans of the Red Army, watch Russian television, Rakhmanin believes that the coverage was intended to discourage them from supporting a politician who, as one program claimed, "legalized SS members."

Rakhmanin presented a convincing case that the politician, reformist Viktor Yushchenko of the election bloc Our Ukraine, (A) had nothing to do with the decision of the Ivano-Frankivsk city council granting war veteran privileges to people who joined the SS division and (B) "the aforementioned decision has not come into force yet and, even if this happens, this does not mean 'the legalization of SS members.'"

Rakhmanin suggested that it was no happenstance that the exoneration of former soldiers of the SS division -- "an issue which has been fruitlessly speculated on since long ago" -- was raised right before the Ukrainian elections. Suspecting the motives of the Russian news media, he asked if "the official Russian media" and the Ukrainian government might not have "completely identical positions" with regard to the party that should win the election. As Ukrainians know well, the Russian ambassador in Kyiv, former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, endorsed the government party as well as the Communists and condemned the opposition alliance led by Yushchenko as "anti-Russian." (Yushchenko's party categorically denied any connection with the SS veterans and characterized the allegation that Yushchenko was behind their attempted exoneration as "an outrage against the memory" of his father, Andriy Andriyovych, who had been held a prisoner in Auschwitz as a Red Army soldier.)

4. Slovak Jews Say Holocaust Denial Is on the Rise In a statement on March 19, the Central Association of Jewish Communities in Slovakia said that denial of the Holocaust is becoming increasingly common in the country, the news agency CTK reported. (On March 25, the community marked the day of the first transport of 70,000 Slovak Jews to Nazi extermination camps where most of them perished.) The statement expressed regret that growing number of Slovaks deny the facts "despite a large number of witnesses, archives, documentaries, newspaper articles, and mass graves." It said Holocaust denial is part of the struggle of revisionists for "controlling the past in order to master the future." The murdered Jews "cannot be killed again, [but] the last thing that can still be taken from them is the forgotten shadow of their existence."
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