Union of Councils for Soviet Jews: Bigotry Monitor: Volume One, Number 8

News

Bigotry Monitor: Volume One, Number 8

(August 17, 2001)

Volume One, Number 8
Friday, August 17, 2001

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

DEBATE ON RACISM UNRESOLVED BEFORE WORLD CONFERENCE MEETS IN DURBAN. As we go to press, it is still unclear under what conditions and on what level the United States may attend the UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, to be held between August 31 and September 7 in Durban, South Africa. It looks as though Secretary of State Colin Powell might absent himself. (See Bigotry Monitor #6, August 3.) On August 14, the State Department said that it was "disappointed" with the outcome of the Geneva preparatory talks and that a decision about going to Durban would be made "within the next week." The same day, Sipho Pityana, director general of the South African Foreign Ministry, told at a news conference in Pretoria: "Zionism equating racism will not be on the agenda." News agencies suggested that the remark represents progress, following the intense talks in Geneva, much of it over the issue of Israel's policy toward the Palestinians. Last week, the United States said that it would not attend the conference unless Arab countries dropped their demands for statements that would single out Israel as a "racist" occupying power depriving Palestinians of their basic rights. American Jewish groups will be among the 1,000 NGOs expected in Durban, but they are split on the wisdom of their government's attendance. The Geneva talks also failed to reach agreement on a call for compensation for the trans-Atlantic trade in African slaves up to the end of the 19th century. The governments of the United States and other developed countries fear litigation if they formally apologize for centuries of slavery, and they consider the reparations issue a nonstarter.

ORTHODOX PARISHIONERS WRECK PENTECOSTAL TENT CHURCH. At the beginning of July, the itinerant mission of the local society of the "Light of the World" Christians of the Evangelical Faith Pentecostals pitched their tent in the southern Russian city of Azov in Rostov province, begins the story in the Moscow newspaper "Kommersant-Daily" of August 13. The missionaries, including foreigners, had been invited by the organization "Mothers Against Drugs," headed by Tatiana Riabinkina, the mother of two drug addicts. The townspeople would not have paid much attention to a couple of dozen people singing prayers set to pop music, the newspaper continues. But local Cossacks and several Orthodox believers got angry because, they said, the Pentecostals held their "witches' Sabbath" in Yunost park, the site of an Orthodox cemetery some 200 years ago. The Cossacks even wrote an open letter of protest to Mayor Evgeny Lesniak. Andrei Beshentsev, hetman (chief) of the Cossack Society of the Azov Cossack settlement, told "Kommersant-Daily: "To be non-Orthodox means to be non-Russian. Non-Russian means non-Orthodox."

On Sunday July 22, parishioners, numbering about 400 according to one report, from three Orthodox churches marched to the park, ripped up the tent and set the chairs on fire. The Pentecostals did not resist. Witnesses saw Mayor Lesniak stop by. He ascertained the facts and expressed regret over the incident but pronounced the authorities helpless in face of the destruction, since it happened over the weekend. According to a report in the local paper "Vremia Novostei" on August 10, the missionaries filed a complaint, but the police did not view the Orthodox citizens' action as criminal and refused to investigate. Letters to the Moscow Patriarchate did not help either. After the complaints were filed, unidentified individuals crept into the missionaries' camp during the night and scribbled threats and obscenities, including swastikas, on their cars. "Vremia Novostei" learned that the mission plans action in a Russian court to recover $40,000 in damages but, if necessary, will seek justice in Western Europe.

MOSCOW OBLAST FILES SUIT TO BAN NATIONAL BOLSHEVIKS. The main administration of the Justice Ministry for Moscow Oblast has filed a suit in the oblast court to ban the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), Itar-Tass reported on August 9. Registered in the oblast four years ago, the extreme left party has not registered at the national level. Best known for its loud, often racist demonstrations - in April NBP members chanted "Send the Chechens to Auschwitz!" outside the Nizhny Novgorod office of the Society for Russian-Chechen Friendship - the NBP was founded by the eccentric writer Eduard Limonov, currently in jail facing weapons charges. Several lower ranking members have been detained in a number of regions for attempting to buy large quantities of automatic weapons, ammunition and explosive materials.

JEWISH GRAVES DESECRATED IN ARZAMAS AND PERM. Unidentified individuals desecrated 53 graves in the Jewish section of the Tikhvinsky Cemetery in the city of Arzamas in Russia's Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, according the August 14 issue of the local newspaper "Prospekt." The culprits knocked down gravestones, covered others with paint and scratched out portraits of the deceased on the headstones. Only Jewish graves were singled out for attack.

According to the local newspaper "Zvezda" of August 9 cited by the All Russia news agency, Jewish graves were also desecrated in the Egorshikhinsky Cemetery of the Urals city of Perm Gravestones were smashed and covered with swastikas, obscene words and drawings, and with the extremist slogan "Russia for Russians!" Empty beer bottles were discovered nearby.

POLL SHOWS DISCONTENT WITH RUSSIA'S WAR IN CHECHNYA. Fifty-three percent of respondents believe that peace talks are needed to resolve the crisis in Chechnya, and 40 percent think that the situation has not improved over the past years, according to a poll conducted by the VTsIOM research center about Russia's foreign policy priorities. The survey, reported in "Profil" on July 30, found that while 31 percent said that Russia should recover the superpower status once held by the Soviet Union, 16 percent were for giving up superpower ambitions and called for a focus on resolving domestic problems.

KYRGYZ POLICE HARASS BAHAIS. The chairman of the Bahai religious assembly in the town of Tash-Kumyr in Kyrgyzstan faces police demands for a list of the community's members, with names, home addresses and places of work, Keston News Service reported on August 16. Lyutfulo Sobirov told Keston that the police also demand that Bahai services take place only in the presence of a law-enforcement officer and that he inform the police whenever the congregation receives guests. Sobirov says that such actions by the police intimidate Bahais, many of whom fear that after their registration with the police they will lose their jobs. According to Sobirov, only a month ago some of the 30 community members preached the Bahai faith on the streets of the town, population 40,000, but now they are afraid to do that. Kyrgyz law does not require the registration of members of religious communities with the police; nor is there a requirement for the presence of police officers at services. The deputy police chief of Tash-Kumyr, Ulugbek Sultanalayev, told Keston on August 15 that the registration of community members was for their own safety, as "Muslim fanatics" are "very active, and they may take action against the Bahais." Sobirov says that Bahais do not think they require police protection.

SOCCER MATCH TURNS INTO ANTISEMITIC HORROR SHOW. Like a nightmare that does not end, a string of antisemitic incidents erupted in the Ulloi street sports stadium in Budapest on July 29. Fans of the soccer team Ujpest mocked its opponent, Ferencvaros, which had recently been purchased by Fotex, a company headed by a Hungarian Jew, Gabor Varszegi. (The sale was denounced as "anti-Hungarian" by the far right party known by the abbreviation MIEP, now under criminal investigation for inciting race hatred. See Bigotry Monitor #6, August 3.) Fans of the two teams competed in imitating Nazi slogans. Ujpest fans waved Israeli flags in a disrespectful fashion and lifted above their heads poster-size caricatures of Jewish faces. When one of their several antisemitic banners unfurled asked the question: "Where is the train going?" a chorus of Ferencvaros fans answered, "To Auschwitz!" and some sang the antisemitic jingle, "The train is going to Auschwitz," familiar from a similar soccer-match incident last year. "We face a few dozen fans per team - and more in the case of Ferencvaros - whose souls have been poisoned," Hungary's ambassador in Washington, Geza Jeszenszky, told this newsletter. "I am devastated and outraged. What happened in that stadium was not only directed against Hungarian Jews but against the Hungarian nation, of which Jews form a part. A small group of people stained the nation's honor."

MEDIA CAMPAIGN LAUNCHED AGAINST RACISM IN CZECH REPUBLIC... On August 9 in Prague, the League of Ethnic Minorities launched a nation-wide media campaign against racial prejudice and xenophobia, reports the Czech news agency CTK. Obonete Ubam, the league's chairman, said the campaign will go on for two months, using TV and radio spots as well as leaflets. Its slogan is: "We live here together with you. Why do you mind?" "We do not imagine that the thinking of the majority society will change in such a short time," Ubam told the press. "But we will consider it successful if the campaign sparks off a public discussion on intolerance and xenophobia." The spots feature a black man who proposes marriage to a Czech girl, a Romany (Gypsy) woman who donates her blood to save another woman's life and a Vietnamese who moved next door to Czechs.

...AS POLL FINDS GAINS FOR TOLERANCE BUT ALSO MORE RACE CRIMES. On the same day, the Prague daily "Mlada fronta Dnes" wrote that while in 1991 one half of Czechs said they felt personal hatred toward people of a different ethnic group, two-thirds fewer people felt the same way in 2000 - a significant drop. The newspaper analyzed the results of a survey by the polling agency IVVM that found that in 1991, three out of five respondents said that brute force was the way to handle the Romanies, but eight years later, only two out of five people were of that opinion. The poll suggests that Czech society's support for the skinhead movement has decreased. While in 1991, 34 percent agreed with the statement "It is good that skinheads bring Romanies into line," in 1999 only 15 percent felt that way. On the other hand, the survey noted a rise in the number of extremist and racially motivated crimes: In 1990, 14 people were accused of defamation of a nation or a race; in 2000 the same charges were brought against 150 people. In 1991, only 10 people were accused of "supporting and spreading a movement aimed at suppressing the rights and freedoms of a group of people"; in 1999, a total of 159 people were accused of that crime.

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * * Writing in the daily Moscow Times on August 16, independent defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer remembers the putsch that attempted to topple President Mikhail Gorbachev ten years ago: "The military brass apparently believed that just showing armor was enough to quell all opposition. When this did not happen, they did not know what to do. This was a sad preview of the disastrous march into Grozny in 1995: Tanks sometimes with only a driver, without ammo, not ready for any action. Of course, the Muscovites in 1991did not have [the Chechens'] RPG-7 launchers to slaughter the armor, but they began to mass-produce Molotov cocktails, drinking up to free up the bottles."

FROM STALINGRAD TO VOLGOGRAD TO STALINGRAD
commentary on a lie that does not die

The southern Russian city of Volgograd may soon be called by its more familiar previous name, Stalingrad, Reuters reported laconically on August 14. The news agency quoted the regional governor and Communist Party member Nikolai Maksyuta as saying: "The Battle of Stalingrad, which has gone down in world history as extraordinary, was fought on the Volga in 1943, and I, as governor, am being flooded with letters and requests to return to the city its historical name." A supporting statement came from Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov: "There is history, there is reality, there is the memory of our fathers and grandfathers who were defending that city and were fighting in the name of Stalin…. Let us be accurate about history."

But what's in a name? Plenty. Sometimes, almost too much.

History tells us that the town, originally called Tsaritsyn, existed as early as 1589. Stalin named it after himself early on in his reign, in 1925, because he had allegedly played a key role in a battle the Reds won there against the Whites during the civil war. What exactly Stalin did in that battle remains murky, but people have long been aware that all claims to Stalin's military genius are laughable. In 1961, Nikita Khrushchev decision to rename the city Volgograd became a symbol of his destalinization campaign, intended to signal an end to "the cult of personality."

Now the city authorities claim that Stalingrad has more name recognition than Volgograd, and in today's image-conscious world a name is a trademark, and national - and international - recognition is worth big bucks. But Zyuganov, the usually stolid and tongue-tied heir to Stalin as the leader of the Communist Party, plumbed rhetorical depths when offering another explanation. He invoked "history" and "reality," but then concluded that the soldiers "were fighting in the name of Stalin" - which recalled what the party's propagandists in Stalin's days used to say, invariably raising their voices for emphasis, "that the heroes died with Stalin's name on their lips."

The truth is that soldiers of the Red Army who repulsed the German invaders were more likely to tell themselves that they fought for the Motherland, rather than for Stalin. It was their political officers who, in the relative safety of their headquarters, parroted a shameless propaganda version about each martyr's devotion to the Father of the Country and the Great Teacher of Humanity, which was echoed in the enemy camp by their counterparts who repeated Josef Goebbels' lie that the German martyrs whispered the Fuhrer's name in their dying breath.

The Reuters dispatch quoted Maksyuta as saying that the next step is for the regional assembly to vote whether to hold a referendum on the name change. He added that he expected that the city will be Stalingrad in time for the 60th anniversary of the great World War II battle, in 2003.

Reuters referred to other cities renaming themselves over the past few years, then concluded: "Bombay became Mumbai, Calcutta became Kolkata and Madras became Chennai." But none of those cities was named after a dictator whose program of massacring his political opposition and targeting entire ethnic groups for extermination entered him in a competition for the title of History's Greatest Mass Murderer. The rival claimant to that title is the leader whose name was allegedly on the lips of the men who died on the other side of the battle. To perpetuate the memory of either leader is to give new life to a lie that does not seem to die, which will only please and encourage their new followers, disguised under new symbols and slogans, or marching under the old ones, and on occasion shocking students of history by combining both sets of symbols and slogans.
* * * *

Send letters to the editor to: cfenyvesi@aol.com

How to Subscribe
Send an email to bigotrymonitor@ucsj.com with the word "subscribe" as the subject of the message.

How to Unsubscribe
Send an email to bigotrymonitor@ucsj.com with the word "unsubscribe" as the subject of the message.

All issues available at http://www.fsumonitor.com

UCSJ:Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union www.fsumonitor.com for daily human rights and news in the Former Soviet Union Located in Washington, DC