Volume 2, Number 27
Friday, July 12, 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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MOSCOW HELSINKI GROUP PROTESTS CHECHNYA ‘DISASTER’ AND WESTERN SILENCE. Russian police torture suspects and disregard a rising tide of nationalist violence, while abuse of Chechen civilians goes unchecked and Western governments have turned silent since Russia joined the Western anti-terrorist coalition, the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) stated on July 9. "The integration of Russia into the anti-terror coalition became a pardon of violations by Western democracies," said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who heads the group. "This ally that we had in Western governments, the U.S., the European Union, Canada, is immeasurably less of an ally now." In one example, she said German colleagues have reduced support for Russian human rights groups since September 11, saying that it is no longer the priority it once was. Alexeyeva's colleague Tatyana Loshkina accused the UN of allowing Chechnya to "drop off the agenda."

A large part of MHG’s 470-page annual report on human rights, released on July 9, deals with the human rights situation in Chechnya which it characterizes as “disastrous." The report accuses Russian troops of forming death squads that target Chechen men with no proven rebel ties, torturing civilians, and ransacking Chechen homes.

It dismisses Russian claims that they are fighting terrorists. “Participation in the anti-terrorist coalition gave Russia absolution on human rights issues,'' said Alexeyeva. The report accuses the Russian government of trying to force some 150,000 Chechens who fled to neighboring Ingushetia to return to Chechnya without giving them necessary assistance or security guarantees.

Beyond Chechnya's borders, the report finds the rise of racist violence, antisemitism, and xenophobia the most alarming new trend over the past year. The report cites breaches of basic rights, including suppression of free speech and election irregularities in Russia’s regions. “Things have become routine. The same violations are repeated each year,” said Sergei Lukashevsky, one of the report's authors. “Unfortunately we cannot say that we are able to radically influence this situation.''

Alexeyeva attacked the new anti-extremism law, saying it is so broad that even MHG could qualify as extremist and be prosecuted for its opposition views. The report said racist violence is "the result of a sense of impunity for this type of behavior" and accused police of overlooking, and in some cases taking part in, such attacks.

MAN KILLED TRYING TO REMOVE BOOBY-TRAPPED SIGN. On July 10 in the town of Baltiisk, near Kaliningrad, a man tried to remove a sign with “obscenities” written over it, according to Itar-Tass. It exploded, and he died instantly. Agence France Presse (AFP) identified him as Yury Antipenko, 50. Quoting official sources, AFP says that Antipenko was walking his dog when he noticed a sign outside his apartment block that read "Kovol bastard.” Police believe that the reference was to one of the building's residents, a 24-year-old Ukrainian man named Kovolenko. A woman accompanying Antipenko was seriously injured, a police spokesman said.

The attack was the first fatality caused by booby-trapped signs that have appeared across the country. (The first incident with a booby-trapped sign occurred on May 27 outside Moscow, seriously injuring a 28-year-old Russian woman who has since undergone plastic surgery.) Some reports say that Antipenko was a naval officer and that Kovolenko is Jewish. "An antisemitic motive has not been ruled out, but it is unlikely," a police spokesman told AFP.

On July 8, a sign saying “Death to the Kikes,” rigged with a hand grenade, exploded when two passersby attempted to remove it from the side of a highway in the Siberian region of Tomsk, according to news agency dispatches. According to Russia's RTR television, the men who removed the sign did not require hospitalization; other reports say they were hospitalized. The region's deputy prosecutor, Tatyana Melikhova, told the Russian daily “Izvestiya” that "there are no organized chauvinist-minded groups in Tomsk, so who knows in whose ranks we should look for terrorists." A few hours after the Tomsk incident, NTV’s popular news program “Segodnya” announced that the pro-Kremlin liberal party the Union of Right Forces offered a reward of 100,000 rubles to any citizen who helps the law enforcement agencies to catch those behind the explosion. The program quoted the party’s statement expressing “outrage” at the “fascist action.” On July 4, police sappers in the Pacific port of Vladivostok removed an antisemitic sign from a roadside and blew up suspicious-looking sacks wired to the sign. The sacks contained fake bombs made of wood.

ETHNIC ARMENIANS BEATEN, BUT POLICE INSIST IT WAS ‘AN ORDINARY BRAWL.’ On July 7, Sunday evening in Krasnoarmeysk, some 30 Russian teenagers armed with wooden clubs broke into apartments where Armenians live, dragged residents into the street, and beat them brutally, according to Karine Igityan, local chairwoman of the group Spiritual Union of Armenia, who called the Armenian cultural center, Ararat, in nearby Moscow, asking for help. Though the victims were mostly men, one severely injured woman was also hospitalized, she said. Igityan’s “impression” was that the teenagers had the addresses of all the Armenian homes. She heard that the attack had followed up a drunken row the night before between a local resident and an Armenian from Ivanovskaya District. While police arrested only two attackers, ambulances rushed to the hospital eight people, five in serious condition, in addition to 15 Armenians who needed only first aid. Igityan told her story to the Armenian news agency Yerevan Arminfo that carried it but could not get additional information from the police and the hospital.

Yerevan Arminfo also ran a statement by the Armenian Foreign Ministry denying that the beatings were ethnically or politically motivated. But on July 9, the Moscow daily “Nezavisimaya Gazeta” wrote that “the ethnic nature of this crime is clearly apparent even to the uneducated eye” and dismissed the refusal of the local police, later echoed by spokesmen for the Moscow region's Main Internal Affairs Administration, to admit it, insisting that what happened was “an ordinary brawl and hooliganism.” Discussing the State Duma’s recent adoption of a law against extremism, the newspaper suggested that “the legislators and the authorities on the one hand and the extremists on the other live in parallel worlds, and the existence of a law in one world has no influence at all on the remorselessness of the other, where skinhead nationalist thugs or people who like to play at revolution set their own laws. They have a keen sense of immunity that cannot be explained solely in terms of the absence of a legal document. After all, nobody has deleted Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code (incitement to ethnic, racial, or religious hostility). But with enviable persistence the police and the prosecutor's office bring cases time after time under all kinds of other articles (for instance, under "hooliganism," Article 213, after the notorious rioting at the Yasenevo market; and under Article 212 -- mass disorders -- after the rioting on Manezh Square).”

The newspaper quoted the unofficial explanation by the police: “They say it is hard to bring an ethnic hostility case when they know that proving the charge will be very difficult and that they will end up with another long-drawn-out case that nobody will thank them for.” But this explanation is inadequate, “Gazeta” wrote, arguing that the real reason is that the police may have tacit instructions "not to notice" extremist manifestations, and this "indulgence" must be coming “from the very highest ‘peak’ of power. But that does not influence the situation at all: The legislature urgently adopts a law on extremism and the local authorities do everything to ignore that extremism.”

The newspaper found it “noteworthy that Konstantin Kudayatov, chief of the Krasnoarmeysk police department, refused to clarify the situation regarding attacks on Armenians' apartments, claiming that he is not authorized to comment on what happened. The same line was adhered to by the Moscow Oblast Main Internal Affairs Administration where they stubbornly persist in talking only of a “mass street brawl.”

The daily “Izvestiya” noted that "it is interesting to imagine what the police would have done if a group of Armenians, let's say, broke into a block of apartments, shouting ‘Get the Russkies,’ went through the apartments, pulling Russian men out of bed, and knocking over Russian women and children. The fear felt by an Armenian is no different than the fear felt by a Russian, an Azerbaijani or a Jew when someone breaks into their home, shouting 'Get the Yids, the blacks or the Russkies.’” The “Izvestiya’ correspondent counted more than 20 injured people in the hospital and also saw a red Zhiguli in which two Armenian brothers were traveling, and “it had its windows smashed, and inside the car there were bloodstains and bloody marks made by baseball bats."

JEWISH GRAVESTONES DESTROYED. About 40 gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in St. Petersburg were destroyed or damaged by construction workers expanding a railway line, according to a July 5 report posted on the web site Jewish.ru. Officials from the railroad apologized for the damage, which they claimed only affected four or five headstones. However, according to the chairman of the St. Petersburg Jewish community, Max Freydzon, the night after the damage, railroad workers returned to the cemetery to cover up what they had done. An investigation has begun, which St. Petersburg governor Vladimir Yakovlev placed under his personal control, according to Ren TV on July 9. The TV correspondent found “a scene of devastation” in what she called “Russia's oldest Jewish cemetery”: fresh bulldozer tracks and fragments of gravestones, with dates and names no longer legible, trampled in the mud, with Stars of David identifying the faith of the dead. The program quoted St Petersburg chief rabbi, Menahem-Mendel Pevzner, who spoke about “a catastrophe” for observant Jews because in Judaism “life does not end with physical death.”

The TV correspondent said that rules stipulate that a railway cannot be laid as close as two meters to a cemetery. But, she said, “probably for this reason someone driving a bulldozer-- and the prosecutor's office is trying to identify him-- was given the task of increasing the distance between the railway and graves by at least seven meters, judging from the destruction.”

On May 28, seven gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in Voronezh were destroyed, local activist Konstantin Nikolaev told UCSJ. He added that the desecration took place in the part of the cemetery furthest from the entrance to the cemetery grounds. The police refused to start an investigation.

On July 9, unidentified vandals painted swastikas and fascist slogans on memorial plaques marking a Holocaust site in the Latvian city of Elgava, according to the web site Jewish.ru. The plaques are located in the far corner of a Jewish cemetery and are not visible from the road. The police began an investigation.

MUSLIM GRAVES DESECRATED. From Volgograd, Itar-Tass reported on July 10 the desecration of six graves in the Muslim section of the cemetery in the city's Traktorzavodsky district. Police officers said that “hooligans” broke the stone slabs and daubed swastikas on them, signing their work "skinheads." The prosecutor's office is pursuing a criminal case.

TRIAL OF EXTREMISTS DELAYED. On July 8, ultranationalist Russian writer Edward Limonov, 59, went on trial in Saratov, facing terrorism charges for forming an armed group, news agencies reported. Five other members of his extremist National Bolshevik Party are also charged, and the trial was closed to the public. The following day, the judge rescheduled the trial for September and decided that it will be open, as the National Bolsheviks requested it. The FSB detained Limonov in Siberia on April 8, 2001, two months after four party militants were arrested in possession of two Kalashnikov automatic weapons and ammunition.

Members of Limonov's party wear black shirts and sleeve bands with the Soviet symbol of hammer and sickle reshaped so it resembles the Nazi swastika. In March, PEN International called for Limonov’s release while emphasizing that many of his views ran counter to its own. If found guilty, Limonov faces a prison sentence of up to 20 years.

RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH REKINDLES DEBATE WITH ROMAN CATHOLICS. Archbishop Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy head of the Russian Orthodox Church's Foreign Relations Division, has charged that Bishop Jerzy Mazur of the Roman Catholic diocese of Eastern Siberia and the Far East did a lot to encourage proselytizing in Russia. Chaplin’s explanation was in answer to a query from the enterprising Russian news agency Interfax, which carried the story on July 8. Chaplin denied that the revocation of Bishop Mazur's Russian visa last April was an idea that came from the Orthodox Church. But he emphasized that Bishop Mazur is a member of a missionary order, the Verbists, and that "the clergy under him are engaged in broad-scale missionary activities in Eastern Siberia and the Far East," areas from which reports of Catholic proselytizing come continuously.

Interfax quoted a recent Orthodox document claiming that "Orthodox Christians in Kamchatka were outraged in 2000 by Roman Catholic priest Jaroslaw Wisniewski, one of Bishop Jerzy Mazur's staff,” telling them that 'it is not clear what kind of Christianity, Roman Catholic or Orthodox, Russia embraced over 1,000 years ago.'" The statement says that Mazur went on record as saying that in ten years the number of Roman Catholics in the Irkutsk region may reach 200,000. "It is quite clear at whose expense and by what methods he intended to increase his flock," the document noted. Father Vsevolod added: "The Vatican showed flagrant disrespect for Russia's territorial integrity" when it had for quite a long time referred to part of Bishop Mazur's area as the prefecture of Karafuto, as south Sakhalin was named during the years of the Japanese occupation.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Catholic leaders called the accusations groundless. According to the AP, about two thirds of Russia's 144 million inhabitants are Russian Orthodox, and there are approximately 600,000 Catholics.

The continuing dispute is likely to prevent a papal visit to Russia. Pope John Paul II has made improving relations with Orthodox Christians a goal of his papacy and expressed a desire to travel to Russia. The Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Alexy II, says that cannot happen until relations improve -- and the Catholic Church stops its proselytizing.

GEORGIAN ORTHODOX PRIESTS LED MOB ATTACK ON PENTECOSTALS. Two Orthodox priests led a three-day attack on a Pentecostal church in the Georgian capital Tbilisi over the weekend of July 5-7, witnesses told Keston News Service. "They arrived to blockade the house on Friday evening," the daughter of Pastor Nikolai Kalutsky said. "On Saturday, incited by the priests, a mob of about thirty or forty people burst into the house, beat people, frightened the children, stole Bibles, rummaged through people's bags, and uttered very many threats - to the believers and to our family. It was a pogrom. They didn't care if you were old or young -- they even beat pregnant women.” In a separate incident, a group of Catholics -- among them the Apostolic Administrator Bishop Giuseppe Pasotto -- who were on pilgrimage in eastern Georgia on July 3 were attacked by a group of people reportedly sent by two Orthodox priests. They told the pilgrims they had no right to walk about in their diocese.

Religious minority leaders have expressed concern about recent attacks in Georgia "I am concerned that the religious violence is continuing in Georgia, this time by the clergy of the Georgian Orthodox Patriarchate," Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili of the Baptist Union told Keston. In more than a hundred incidents in recent years, Jehovah's Witnesses, Baptists, Pentecostals, and Catholics have been subjected to violent physical attacks and arson. None of the perpetrators has been sentenced, although many are well known, despite repeated protests from minority faiths, local human rights groups, and international bodies. A Jehovah's Witness spokesman commented on Justice Ministry moves to draft a new religion law: "The problem of violence against religious minorities in Georgia is due not to a lack of laws, but to the failure to apply existing laws."

TWO JORDANIANS ATTACK WOMAN WEARING A STAR OF DAVID NECKLACE. On May 19, two Jordanians attacked a young Jewish woman wearing a Star of David necklace in the nightclub called Labyrinth in the Ukrainian city of Dnepropetrovsk, according to UCSJ's Kiev monitor Maksim Baryshnikov citing local sources. One of the attackers wielded a knife, but the young woman was not seriously injured. Witnesses called the assault antisemitic. Nightclub security guards detained the two Jordanians, but the police promptly released them after obtaining their written promises not to leave the city. One has since disappeared, while the other tried to bribe the victim’s relatives to drop charges and was again arrested.

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * * President Vladimir “Putin has the chance to demonstrate that he genuinely shares the values and interests of the Western democracies by joining in their effort to end a dictatorship that, without Russia, would have collapsed long ago,” a “Washington Post” editorial wrote on July 8. “Belarusian activists and Russian lawmakers reported last week that Mr. Putin had agreed to take up the cases of [President Alexander] Lukashenko's disappeared opponents; that would be an excellent way to start.”

MEMORIES THAT CAST A SHADOW
In Poland and Latvia, the History of World War II Is Being Thoughtfully Revised

Following decades of distortions both nationalist and totalitarian, heartfelt and propagandistic, scholarly progress is now being made in clarifying some of the most painful segments of the Second World War and revising sequences of events and the numbers of persecutors as well as victims. The reappraisal will continue on many levels, in parliaments and bars, in families and inside the heads of professors. The intensity of the debates will not diminish because it is the soul of a nation that is felt to be at stake. In the best of all worlds, the old lies will lose their appeal, and the new findings will prove to be closer to the truth and accepted as such.

On July 9, Radoslaw Ignatiew of the Polish Institute for National Remembrance said that Polish historians have concluded that Poles and not the German occupiers carried out a massacre of Jews in the town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, according to a “New York Times” report. “The role of Poles in this criminal act was decisive,” Ignatiew said, presenting a two-year study that rejects the previous “official” Polish version of German guilt. The new study confirms the findings of the Polish-born American historian, Jan T. Gross, whose book, “Neighbors,” raised furious reactions among many Poles, especially historians and church leaders, who charged Gross with slandering the Polish nation and insisted that Poles were the victims and not the collaborators of the Nazis.

Ignatiew’s team of researchers interviewed close to a hundred witnesses and collected evidence such as bones and bullets, “The Times” reported. The facts they established was that a local mob carried out “a planned crime of murdering Jewish residents." Germans helped herd Jews to the marketplace, Ignatiew said, "but that was the extent of their active role." At least 40 Poles carried out the attack, though their number might have been larger, Ignatiew said. On the other hand, he cautioned that Gross's estimate of 1,600 Jews burned alive in a barn was too high.

Northeast of Poland, in Latvia, between 300 and 500 Latvians took part in the murder of the country's Jews during the German occupation in World War II, and another 1,000 to 1,500 Latvians participated in activities such as “chasing people out of their homes, taking them to the ditches, undressing them before they were killed, and taking their personal property,” Latvian historian Aivars Stranga told the Riga newspaper “Neatkariga Rita Avize.” “That is very evil,” Stranga said, “but I do not think that it casts a shadow on the nation as a whole.”

Asked where “murderous humans” come from, the historian said that ideology has nothing to do with it, as many of those who killed the Jews had never read books such as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and they might have joined Nazi militias because of the food they received. “History cannot answer the question of the origin of monsters,” Stranga said, or explain why some people risk their own lives by rescuing the persecuted. “Why do the same conditions create heroes and murderers?” he asked rhetorically. “Alas, it happens in unequal proportions. There is no symmetry, because apparently it is easier to kill.”

Stranga felt on more solid grounds when defining his role as a historian: “We want to preserve our memories about a community of people who lived alongside us and who were murdered in such a terrible way. Hitler's goal was not just to destroy the Jews. They were the only people who, before being killed, were stripped of their clothing and humiliated in all kinds of ways in an attempt to demonstrate that they were not even human. Our duty is to learn about all of the Latvian Jews who were killed, to restore the names that the Nazis wanted to erase from human memory.”
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