Union of Councils for Soviet Jews: Bigotry Monitor: Volume 3, Number 16

News

Bigotry Monitor: Volume 3, Number 16

(April 25, 2003)

Volume 3, Number 16
Friday, April 25, 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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U.N. COMMISSION FAILS TO CENSURE RUSSIA ON CHECHNYA. For the second year in a row, the United Nations Human Rights Commission -- the U.N.’s top human rights body -- failed to pass a resolution censuring Russia for human rights violations in Chechnya. “Western governments have weakened the commission’s response to some of the worst human rights situations," the Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement on April 16. “In a sudden and deeply disappointing shift in its approach, the United States decided not to co-sponsor a resolution on human rights violations in the Chechen conflict in Russia."

“The commission is trapped between governments intent on undermining it and those that lack the political will to take them on," said Joanna Weschler, HRW’s U.N. representative. She said that the vote shows that “many commission members are more concerned with protecting each other than protecting the victims of human rights abuse." She charged that the vote “highlights how Western governments have lost the political will to take action against abusive governments, particularly their newfound friends in the fight against terrorism." HRW pointed out that “a growing bloc of repressive governments – including Algeria, China, Cuba, Libya, Russia, Sudan, Syria, and Zimbabwe – have become progressively more aggressive in blocking or obstructing resolutions critical of any specific country." For instance Libya, the African group’s controversial choice to chair this year’s session, voted against each and every country resolution. At the conclusion of the six-week session, on April 25, Weschler said that the “‘abusers club’ of governments hostile to human rights has further consolidated its position and blocked several important country initiatives, while the United States and to a lesser extent, the European Union, have not exerted positive leadership. The commission appears to be in a really serious decline."

Liberal Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalev told reporters that Western democracy has "fallen asleep" over its response to Moscow's three-and-a-half-year conflict. He suggested that Western democracy "is well-nourished by its own prosperity. It feels comfortable. It is lazy and shortsighted." While Russian human rights leaders criticize the international community for not taking the Russian government to task on Chechnya, they are embarking on a project they say will most probably fail: They are turning to the country’s highest court to challenge the legitimacy of the referendum carried out in Chechnya last month. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Lev Ponomarev, whose organization called For Human Rights filed the case on April 1, argues that in carrying out the referendum, the government violated Russian law by attempting to change regional legislation.

Citing what it says is a leaked Russian government document, HRW said that disappearances, killings, and torture continue unabated in Chechnya. According to the document, more than 1,100 civilians were killed in the region last year. Russian officials deny that such a report exists. President Vladimir Putin's envoy for human rights in Chechnya, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, denounced HRW as "an extremist organization spreading totalitarian notions about Europe's democratic values," Interfax reported. Sultygov has promised that the government will set up its own commission to investigate abuses by both rebels and Russian soldiers.

RUSSIAN POLICE STEP UP UNDERCOVER WORK AMONG ‘CRIMINAL YOUTH.’ The Russian police "are currently taking steps to intensify undercover work among young people to track and localize leaders and activists of criminal youth movements, including skinheads," the Interior Ministry told Interfax on April 18. According to the Interior Ministry, there are up to 15,000 skinheads in Russia, with the largest groups operating in Moscow and its environs, where they total more than 5,000. In St. Petersburg, skinheads number up to 3,000 and there are about 1,000 in several other big cities such as Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Yaroslavl, Pskov, and Kaliningrad. Interfax learned that thanks to the increased undercover activity, police were able to block a national skinhead convention in Moscow last year as well as a recent plan for a torchlight procession in St. Petersburg.

According to an Interfax source in the Interior Ministry’s department dealing with organized crime, Russia has up to 50 extremist youth organizations.

While the Interior Ministry maintains that the crimes committed by skinheads are “relatively low in number," the leader of the People's Deputy group of deputies in the Duma, Gennady Raykov, told “Ekho Moskvy" radio on April 17 that “the roots" of State Duma member and Liberal Russia party leader Sergey Yushenkov's assassination should be sought among them. Raykov has no doubt that the killing was politically motivated and called for tougher penalties for violent crime.

SKINHEADS BURN ALIVE FOUR TAJIK WORKERS. A village in Tajikistan’s northern Mastchoh District has buried the bodies of four Tajik migrants who were burned alive by Russian skinheads in a suburb of Yekaterinburg, the Tajik newspaper “Varorud" reported on April 16.

According to “Varorud," five Tajik migrants lived in a trailer close to their place of work, as they were unable to pay rent for an apartment. After failing to extort money from them, skinheads locked them in the trailer and set it on fire. Four of the migrants died while the fifth, Tavakkal Yusupov, 22, was hospitalized in a critical condition. Citing “independent experts," the newspaper wrote that 43 percent of Tajiks live outside their country, mostly in Russian towns. The report concluded: “Neither the absence of elementary human rights, nor the humiliation of their dignity, nor tragic consequences prevent them from leaving the country to earn money."

FOREIGNERS IN MOSCOW FEAR SKINHEADS THE MOST. Foreign citizens who have lived in Moscow for at least two years are most afraid of skinheads, police officers, and automobile drivers, the web site “lenta.ru" reported on April 15, citing a recent survey titled "Security in Moscow Through the Eyes of Foreigners," conducted by the Romir polling agency. In a similar study by Romir last year, the majority of respondents identified groups of skinheads or young hooligans -- rather than thieves or muggers -- as representing the greatest threat to their security.

KURSK SKINHEADS GET SLAP ON THE WRIST. Seven skinheads responsible for multiple assaults against students from Malaysia, Tanzania, and Egypt in Kursk were given suspended sentences, according to an April 22 report by the Regnum news agency. Local human rights groups intend to appeal the verdict and have accused the judge of "openly siding with the defendants." During the trial, Judge Vladimir Feokistov reportedly dropped charges of inciting ethnic hatred, which could have resulted in 3-to-5 year prison terms. Instead, the skinheads were given suspended sentences ranging from 10 months to two years. According to the news web site “Gazeta.ru," two additional suspects remain at large and police found Nazi literature in the skinheads' possession.

ULTRA-NATIONALIST SENTENCED TO FOUR YEARS; FSB CHASTIZED. A court in the central Russian city of Saratov sentenced the leader of the National Bolshevik Party, Eduard Limonov, to four years of imprisonment for illegal acquisition of firearms and ammunition, the state news agency Itar-Tass reported on April 15. But in its dispatch headlined “Limonov Declares Victory Over FSB" (the former KGB), “The Moscow Times" emphasized that the court cleared Limonov of the far more serious charges of terrorism. Staff writer Nabi Abdullaev wrote: “In a sharp rebuke to prosecutors and FSB investigators, Judge Alexander Matrosov demanded that the Federal Security Service and the Prosecutor General's Office discipline them for putting forward a weak case filled with inconsistencies and fabrications."

The court also sentenced Sergei Aksyonov, the 32-year-old editor of the party's newspaper “Limonka," to three years and six months in prison on charges of illegally acquiring weapons and being a member of an organized crime group. Party members Dmitry Karyagin and Vladimir Pentelyuk, both 26, were sentenced to 30 months each for arms possession. Party member Oleg Laletin, 31, got 27 months for buying two more rifles, while party member Nina Silina, 26, was given 28 months for delivering money from Aksyonov to Karyagin to buy the weapons.

"The Moscow Times" reported that journalists and party members who were “mostly young people in black clothes and heavy boots" packed the courtroom. "A dozen court guards were reinforced with a dozen OMON officers armed with batons and a black Rottweiler," the report added. It noted that the defendants appeared downcast when the hearing started but began to relax as Judge Matrosov read the 194-page verdict, which took five hours, dismissing charges that they had plotted to overthrow the government, created illegal armed formations, and planned terrorist acts.

State prosecutor Sergei Verbin had asked that Limonov be given a 14-year sentence and Aksyonov 12 years. Verbin accused them of masterminding a plan to carry out an armed invasion of northern Kazakhstan, an area populated mostly by ethnic Russians. The plan was described in several articles in “Limonka" and newsletters circulating among party members in 1999 and 2000. Limonov and Aksyonov denied drafting the plan and insisted that they had never called for the violent overthrow of the government of Kazakhstan. The court said that prosecution failed to prove Limonov and Aksyonov had put together the plan. Investigators offered the court audiotapes secretly recorded in Limonov's Moscow apartment in 2001 in which he discussed an invasion of Kazakhstan with party members. The court called the conversations "common theoretical talks."

Judge Matrosov said that the National Bolshevik Party's acquisition of guns did not necessarily mean it was planning terrorist acts or building illegal armed formations, as investigators claimed. He explained that he handed out relatively light sentences because the defendants had been so closely monitored by the FSB that they never posed a threat to anyone. He lashed out at the prosecutors and investigators, charging that they collected a vast amount of information unrelated to the case, some of it grossly manipulated.

Itar-Tass quoted Limonov's lawyer Sergei Belyak to the effect that he was pleased that the court had acquitted Limonov of the most serious charges. He called the arms charge “banal" and “a pretext by the FSB to frame him and punish him for his views." Belyak pointed out that Limonov, 60, had spent 13 months in police custody, or about half of his jail term, and expressed the hope that when the sentence takes effect, he will be paroled.

ANTISEMITIC VANDALISM IN ST. PETERSBURG AND YOSHKAR-OLA. Three teenagers were arrested on the grounds of a St. Petersburg Jewish cemetery, according to an April 22 report posted on “Jewish.ru," a news website sponsored by the Federation of Jewish Organizations of Russia (FEOR). The youths are accused of defacing photographic images on an unspecified number of gravestones.

Also on April 22, the Volga Inform news agency reported that a swastika and antisemitic slogans were painted on the walls of a building housing a Jewish organization in Yoshkar-Ola in the Republic of Mari-El and that appeals by the Jewish community to law enforcement agencies for help against several past incidents of antisemitic vandalism have met with silence. The chairman of the republic's Jewish community, Mark Aron, is quoted in the report as sharply criticizing the authorities: "There is nothing surprising in any of this [vandalism], since the only state newspaper of the Republic of Mari-El, founded by the [regional] government and the [regional] parliament cultivates nationalism and xenophobia in its writings."

RUSSIAN COURT CLOSES DOWN BIBLE COLLEGE. A Primorsky Kray regional court in Russia's Far East ruled to close down the Charismatic Faith in Action Bible College in Vladivostok, the religious news service Forum 18 reported on April 21. Speaking to Forum 18, the public prosecutor's representative in the case, Nina Saiko, defended the court-ordered closure, arguing that the college was conducting "educational activity" without a license in violation of the education law. The college's lawyer Aleksei Kolupaev said that it was not conducting educational activity "but simple study for religious believers, a right guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Russian Constitution." Others suggest that the FSB has been harassing the college and looking for excuses to close it down. Prior to its closure, 11 senior and 19 junior students were resident at the college.

ROMA FAMILY FROM SLOVAKIA RECEIVES ASYLUM IN BELGIUM. The family of Anastazia Balazova, who was beaten to death by skinheads in Zilina, Slovakia, in August 2000, has been granted asylum by the General Commissioner for Refugees in Belgium, the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) announced.

According to ERRC’s account, in the early morning hours of August 20, 2000, four skinheads broke into the home of Frantisek Balaz and attacked his children with baseball bats. When his wife Anastazia tried to protect her daughter, she herself was clubbed and died three days later from a cerebral hemorrhage. The perpetrators, Peter Bandur, Pavel Hrcka, Pavol Kozak, and Marian Skalican, all in their twenties, were eventually convicted of racially motivated bodily harm and given sentences ranging from three to seven years, although the first instance court had refused to recognize the presence of racial motivation. Following Mrs. Balazova’s death, her husband and children were verbally abused and at times physically attacked by townspeople in Zilina, apparently blaming the family for the bad international publicity Slovakia received following the vicious murder. In April 2002, while on his way to Budapest to meet with his legal representatives, Frantisek Balaz was assaulted by three skinheads at the train station in Zilina. The family subsequently fled to Belgium where, assisted by the Belgian League for Human Rights, they applied for asylum.

In a letter to the General Commissioner urging the granting of refugee status to the Balaz family, the ERRC cited incidents of skinhead violence in Slovakia and noted that the publicity about the case had made the Balaz family a target of skinheads throughout the country. In its 2000 and 2001 accession reports, the European Commission identified “violence, notably at the hands of ‘skinheads,’" as a continued serious threat to Roma in Slovakia. The ERRC welcomed the Belgian decision as an “affirmation that European asylum systems are still, in some instances, capable of providing protection to refugees, despite intense pressure to contract the asylum right to the point of meaninglessness." The General Commissioner’s decision indicates that “Belgium’s commitments under international law to protect refugees take priority over political considerations," said attorney Alexis Deswaef, who argued the Balaz’s case to the General Commissioner. The Belgian Home Office did not appeal the decision.

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * * “The Russian intelligentsia generally dissociates itself from [Eduard] Limonov's radical political views, while praising him as a writer," wrote Boris Kagarlitsky in “The Moscow Times" on April 22. “But the state's case against Limonov has as little to do with his literary achievements as it did with his politics… The ruling elite wanted to stage a show trial against an extremist group. Any extremist group. That their trial fell through in the end is an enormous achievement for the Russian judicial system."

FRANCE INVITES ITS MUSLIMS ‘TO THE TABLE OF THE REPUBLIC’

But the Interior Minister Issues Stern Warnings that Muslims Must Integrate Into French Society

France’s right-of-center government is taking a tough, no-nonsense position against fundamentalist Islam, which has shown unexpected strength in the elections for a new council that will represent the country’s estimated 5-6 million Muslim residents. “Imams who propagate views that run counter to French values will be expelled,'' Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told “Europe 1" radio on April 22. (According to the Interior Ministry, the majority of Muslim leaders in France are of foreign nationality.) Sarkozy warned that he was determined to curb extremism in Western Europe’s largest Muslim community and that he would not permit the council to be used as a vehicle for spreading Islamic law. “Islamic law will be applied nowhere because it is not the law of the Republic,'' he declared.

Outspoken, bold, and unabashedly ambitious, Sarkozy was instrumental in persuading Muslim leaders to agree to the formation of the Muslim council last December to serve as a channel of communications with the government. But he did not expect that the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF) – linked to Egypt's banned fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood – would win 14 of the council's 41 seats. The moderate, Algerian-backed Mosque of Paris, which was his clear favorite among the Islamic groups, won only 6 seats.

Under a pre-election agreement negotiated by Sarkozy, the head of the Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, 62, will preside over the council initially. “But Dr. Boubakeur is not a happy man," noted Elaine Sciolino in “The New York Times" of April 21. “Algerian-born Dr. Boubakeur, who calls himself a moderate and staunchly defends the enforcement of secularism by the French state, finds himself the man in the middle." Sciolino sees him “caught between a group that will be dominated by Muslims whose view he does not share" and “Sarkozy, the law-and-order minister of the interior."

Until now, the absence of a formal, central structure such as the ones built by the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish community left France’s Muslims divided into factions and allowed a large percentage of them, probably the majority, to practice their faith in makeshift prayer rooms, many of them in cellars and garages. “If fundamentalism or extremism has spread so much, it is because we condoned an Islam of cellars and garages,'' Sarkozy said. It is the council's announced purpose to oversee the construction of more mosques and encourage foreign imams to learn French.

An activist who frequently visits immigrant slums others consider too dangerous to enter and engages its residents in dialogs, Sarkozy is staking his political future in confronting what the French call “a national crime wave" and in integrating Muslims into French society – and he bluntly connects the two issues. He does not coddle criminals, nor does he court Muslims. In speaking to Muslims, he has identified himself as their “demanding friend." He has warned that his government will keep a close watch on the new Muslim council and that he expects it to rigorously observe French law. “It is precisely because we recognize the right of Islam to sit at the table of the Republic that we will not accept any misconduct,'' he has said.

On April 19, Sarkozy was unfazed by the boos and whistles at a Muslim gathering when he declared that Muslim women must remove their veils and headscarves for identity photographs. He chose to make the remark at the annual congress of the fundamentalist UOIF. According to Reuters, protests drowned out his words when he declared that Muslims must obey the law, even if that meant baring their heads. "The law states that the holder of a national identity card must be bare-headed in their photograph, whether they are male or female," Sarkozy told an audience of 7,000. "This is respected by Catholic nuns, and there is no justification for Muslim women not to respect it." We’ll obey the law, UOIF leaders replied, but the law must change.

According to the daily “Le Figaro," Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right candidate who received 18 percent of the popular vote in last year’s presidential race, warned that Sarkozy “has put his hand in a hornets’ nest." “Le Monde" noted that in facing observant Muslims at the UOIF rally, Sarkozy received both "ovations for his courage" and hisses for his stance against headscarves.

At 48, Sarkozy, known as “Sarko," is mentioned as a future prime minister. The Associated Press has called him “the brightest star of the government."
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