Volume 2, Number 35
Friday, September 6, 2002

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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RUSSIA'S SURVIVAL HINGES ON ETHNIC HARMONY, PUTIN SAYS. On August 30, Russian President Vladimir Putin told delegates to the third World Congress of Tatars in Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, that the survival of Russia as a multinational state was at risk if people from various ethnic groups failed to feel at home in Russia. Russian TV covering the presidential address also featured a representative of the Tatar community in the Republic of Bashkortostan charging that Tatar children were unable to learn their mother tongue there and that it was difficult for a Tatar to live in Bashkortostan, known in the Soviet era as Bashkiria. In his reply, Putin showed some skill: "It is no easy matter to be a Tatar in Bashkiria. But what of Russians in Tatarstan? What of Chechens in Moscow? What of Mordvins in other parts of the Russian Federation? Various people have various feelings in various places…. If a representative of any national group, perhaps not so big as the Tatars, but representing any group, be it ever so small, representing the tiniest ethnic minority fails to feel at home here, we will not be able to preserve our multinational state."

Moscow's ORT television reported that delegates "took their fears directly to the head of state." They said that they did not feel comfortable in some regions, that their rights were being infringed on, and that they were not allowed to learn their own language. Putin reassured them that he "would make no distinction on account of nationality. Everybody needs the protection of the law and justice, everybody without exception." He received loud applause when he declared: "It would be utterly foolish, utterly foolish and harmful, if somebody somewhere were to prohibit the study of one's native language in a multiethnic country."

Other concerns reported on television included the creation of federal districts in order to restrict the power of the regions and pressure put on Tatars living outside Tatarstan to declare another nationality for the current census. Putin promised that there will be no such pressure. But he showed astonishment when delegates said that Tatars, the second most numerous nationality in the country, were insufficiently represented in the Russian leadership. He said that a person's nationality should have nothing to do with appointments to state posts. "If we want equality of nations and peoples to be observed in our country, then we need promote people according to their professional, personal and moral qualities." He then mentioned he had just visited the country's Far East where "two of the strongest governors" are Chita Region's Ravil Geniatulin and Sakhalin Region's Igor Farkhutdinov. "I don't think these are Slavic surnames," he noted, and the audience laughed.

Putin also emphasized that the state may not interfere in religious affairs, according to Interfax: "We must not tell religious figures what to do, whom to choose and how to form associations. We must create favorable conditions for their activities and do our best to prevent the building of barriers between them and citizens." Just as he has done at events organized by the Orthodox Church, Putin went out of his way to praise the role of religion. "It is religious faiths that instill human values in people's minds now," he said. "I've become increasingly convinced that now that we have no work collectives or party organizations, such as those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or educators at places of work, nothing but religion can make human values known to people."

WAVE OF VIOLENCE IN MOSCOW. The Russian capital has been the scene of a series of violent incidents that prompted the press to recall that recently President Putin proposed that Russia's parliament amend the criminal code, allowing for sterner punishments for those convicted of race-driven hate crimes.

1. Zhirinovsky Gang Lays Siege to School.
A violent incident that attracted much interest was an alleged attack on August 26 against one of the schools of the All-Russian Education Fund by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party, and some of his followers. On September 2, State Duma Speaker Gennadiy Seleznev told the press that the president of that fund, Sergey Komkov, had approached him, charging that Zhirinovsky accompanied by more than 20 supporters besieged the building of the secondary school, overcame the staff that resisted, and occupied the premises. Komkov said that Zhirinovsky hit him in the face and that doctors later diagnosed him as suffering from "brain trauma." Selezhnev added that "the scandalous escapade" indicates that Zhirinovsky must have forgotten that he is not just a member of parliament and party leader, but also a deputy speaker of the State Duma.

The daily newspaper “Kommersant” speculated that the attack may have been motivated by a property dispute. A criminal case has been opened "against unidentified persons who, contrary to law and order, seized the building of the All-Russian Education fund," the press service of the Moscow Prosecutor's Office told Interfax.

2. Skinheads Target Foreigners.
During the night of August 30, a diplomat from Mali was set upon by a group of youths and beaten up in a metro station in the capital, Interfax reported, citing police sources. The police found Abdoullah Ndoure with a cut lip at Marxistskaya metro station after they had been called out to deal with a fight between a group of Africans and Russian youths. By the time police arrived, only Ndoure was still at the scene.

On August 31, two skinheads approached Lucas Murdoch, a 23-year-old African-American librarian employed by the U.S. embassy, and punched him in the face several times. The attack took place on a busy metro line in central Moscow. Police classified the attack as hooliganism, refusing to accept it as race-driven.

The 18-year-old son of the first secretary of the Yemeni embassy was beaten up in southwest Moscow. Police arrested a suspect, an unemployed man.

A gang of teens attacked a Turkish businessman in downtown Moscow. They beat him until he lost consciousness, and stole his wallet and mobile telephone. Two of the attackers, aged 16 and 17, were later arrested, as well a 15-year-old from another gang that attacked another businessman on the same street.

An Iraqi embassy employee, missing for almost two weeks, was found at a Moscow hospital. Avad Karim was attacked and robbed, police said. Hospitalized with serious head injuries, he had been unable to identify himself until recently. Karim told the police that he met a woman in a bar who turned out to be a member of a gang that beat him up, robbed him of $2,500, and threw him out of a moving car. Police detained a 27-year-old woman suspect. During interrogation at a police station, she jumped out from a fifth-floor window and was critically injured.

3. Skinheads and "Rappers" Clash, Leaving One Dead.
On August 31, a public holiday festivity deteriorated into a mass brawl involving several hundred young people near the Universitet metro station in southwestern Moscow. One person was killed. The fight broke out around 7:30 pm "after its participants consumed a fair amount of alcohol," Interfax noted. One report claimed that the clash was between skinheads and "rappers." According to Interfax, a police squad arrived half an hour after the brawl began and arrested 15 participants. Among those injured were several policemen.

4. Another Fake Bomb Found Attached to an Antisemitic Poster.
On September 2, an antisemitic poster was discovered near a synagogue in Moscow's northern Otradnoye district on September 2, officials from the Russian Jewish Congress told Interfax. Fearing that it was booby-trapped, security guards cordoned off the area around the poster and called the police who found a can filled with harmless white powder and destroyed it. No one was injured.

OMSK NEO-NAZIS MAY FACE BAN. In what appears to be the latest step in the central government's anti-extremism campaign, the Omsk branch of the violent neo-Nazi group Russian National Unity (RNU) is facing "liquidation," according to a September 2 report by the local news agency Do-Info. The report says that regional prosecutor Sergey Kazakov sent an official request to the Omsk Oblast Court to strip the RNU of its registration and to disband it. Kazakov justified his request by the group's use of a swastika as its symbol and its distribution of literature that incites ethnic hatred. According to the news agency, up until now the Omsk authorities had "a very lax attitude" toward the RNU whose representatives for several years took part in round tables of political discussions chaired by the governor of Omsk Oblast.

GERMAN COURT CONVICTS CLUB OWNER FOR ANTISEMITISM. On September 4, Munich club owner Rudolf Fischer was convicted of incitement to hate and antisemitism because he had canceled a Jewish charity event involving the granddaughter of late Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin, the Associated Press reports. He was sentenced to six months' probation. In March 2001, Fischer refused to allow a gathering of 400 people at his club called Y Julieta. At the time, he told the press that he did not want to host political events. But Claus Peter Zistl, an attorney for the charity, charged that Fischer told someone that he had canceled because "he wanted nothing to do" with Jews and would sooner host a far-right rally. The charity held its event at another Munich club, and the city's mayor apologized to Rabin's granddaughter.

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * * Russia "has turned into a third-world country" because it "does not have the culture of fighting for constitutional rights, and there are no political parties which would lead this fight," wrote sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Globalization Issues Institute, in the "Literaturnaya Gazeta" on August 28. "The opposition is ineffective, unconstructive, and unable to help people. The right wing protects the present state of affairs. The party of power does not have its own ideology and is realizing the politics of the right wing."

FOCUSING ON IMMIGRATION
Four Countries, Four Sets of Problems

1. Putin Calls for Stimulating the Right Kind of Immigration.At the beginning of his visit to Vladivostok earlier this week, President Vladimir Putin mentioned the "threat" of Chinese migration and cited statistics showing that Russia's population continues to shrink by around 900,000 a year. In meetings that followed, he called for government stimulation of carefully controlled immigration.

In a get-together on September 2, Siberian journalists pointed out to Putin that some of the best brains are leaving Russia while Russia receives immigrants whose reliability leaves much to be desired. Putin responded by holding out the example of Canada where desirable migrants are being attracted "in a targeted way." The Canadians, he said, "don't just take anyone" and "have an intelligent migration and immigration policy… What is required is a high-quality workforce with a future. And they know exactly where this workforce ought to be put to use." Unfortunately, he added, Russia has "never had an immigration policy. And I don't think that this huge uncontrolled flow of immigrants has always been to our country's benefit."

As reported by RTR TV, Putin expressed regret that the immigration issue is "very politicized" as "25 million former fellow countrymen, people who are Russian in their culture, not necessarily even Russian by passport, but native speakers of the Russian language, suddenly find themselves outside the borders of their homeland. Certain political forces have speculated on this."

Putin suggested that "we should stimulate the flow of immigrants to this country, but should know which kind of immigrants we want, where, and in what numbers. And as a far as criminal elements are concerned, they need to be caught, put in prison, and thrown out of the country. In the civilized world, this kind of procedure was developed a long time ago, and it simply needs to be implemented."

2. Minister Pledges that Dutch Hospitality Will No Longer Be Abused.The peaceful land of tulips and windmills is in the midst of a raging debate on immigration since Minister of Immigration Hilbrand Nawijn told the daily “de Gelderlander” last month that he intends to deport criminals from Moroccan and other immigrant families even if they are Dutch citizens. "The Netherlands will have the tightest immigration policy of the European Union," he was quoted as saying. "Dutch society cannot take any more large groups of new immigrants…. The times for talking and being nice are over. Dutch hospitality should no longer be abused. We must see if this [deportation] is legally possible."

Nawijn is from the Pim Fortuyn List (LPF), which recently joined the Christian Democrats (CDA) and VVD liberals in a government coalition that has pledged to get serious about crime and immigration. LPF takes its name from the slain populist leader who called for zero immigration. Nawijn's remarks took his coalition partners by surprise and stirred speculation about an imminent breakup of the coalition. Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende's CDA promptly distanced itself from Nawijn. CDA declared that it rejects any plan to deport Dutch citizens irrespective of their background but it supports deporting foreign criminals charged with serious crimes. The opposition attacked Nawijn's remarks as xenophobic.

Moroccans, who number about 300,000 in the country, dismissed Nawijn's statement as "nonsense." Together with Afro-Caribbeans and Turks, non-Western immigrants now make up 10 percent of the population. According to Reuters, there were 32,579 asylum applications last year in the Netherlands, which had a reputation as one of the EU's most liberal havens.

As for emigration from the Netherlands, the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics said its half-year data suggested 82,000 people would leave the country in 2002 compared to 77,000 in 2001. The bureau cited a rise in the number of Dutch-born people settling abroad, as well as an increase in the number of immigrants returning to their countries of birth in the EU and in the Antilles, Aruba, and the former Dutch colony of Suriname.

In an interview published in London's "Financial Times" on August 31, Nawijn said that the Netherlands will reject 80 percent of the asylum applications and may force immigrants from the EU to study Dutch. "We have been too liberal," he was quoted as saying. "We have forgotten that we are one nation and if immigrants come here, they must behave like Dutch people."

3. German Rightwinger Slams Government for Helping Refugees.Seeking to boost the chances of his right-wing Law and Order Party in the September 22 German elections, Ronald Schill, Hamburg's minister of interior, told parliament on September 3 that there was no money to help victims of the floods that ravaged the country in August because the government spent too much on refugees. According to Reuters, when Schill was warned that his allotted time - 15 minutes - ran out, he refused to stop his speech, his first in the Bundestag's lower house. He threatened to file a complaint with the Constitutional Court - the country's highest court - against deputy parliamentary speaker Anke Fuchs for cutting off his microphone.

While some left-wing deputies boycotted Schill's speech, others heckled him. Several deputies, even other members of the Hamburg government, condemned his statements as xenophobic. Christian Democrat Hamburg Mayor Ole von Beust said the city's ruling parties agreed that future speeches by Hamburg politicians in the national parliament must reflect the position of the entire government, not just that of one party in the coalition. "Schill expressed regret over the situation and promised that something like that would not be repeated," von Beust told the press. The reformed communists’ Party of Democratic Socialism said it will sue Schill on charges of inciting violence against foreigners.

Reuters described Schill as a controversial former judge who earned the epithet "Judge Merciless" for the tough sentences he handed down. "He came from nowhere to capture almost 20 percent in regional elections in Hamburg a year ago and enter the city state's government," the dispatch said, adding that while Schill's victory in Hamburg was seen as "fitting into a Europe-wide pattern of rising support for the far-right and right-wing populists, pollsters do not expect that trend to be reflected in the German national vote in three weeks." According to the Reuters analysis, Schill's party may steal votes from Edmund Stoiber's Christian Democrats but is unlikely to garner the 5 percent needed to enter parliament.

4. France Takes Stern View of the Exodus from Romania.
France demands that Romania crack down on its citizens, most of them Roma (also known as Gypsies), who have been migrating to the European Union in increasing numbers, with some of them earning a living as beggars and prostitutes, Reuters reported from Bucharest on August 30. The Bucharest government has been criticized for failing to stop emigration following the EU's lifting of visa requirements for Romanian nationals in January. Romania is expected to join the EU later in the decade.

In recent months, the French public has been in an uproar over the influx of an estimated 3,000 Romanian Roma who charge racial discrimination at home. However, many of them have engaged in illegal activities in France. French police have been arresting traffickers who import and control children to beg or steal. Over the past six months, the EU has deported 3,500 Romanian citizens, more than 300 of them from France.

"France is determined to help Romania control its borders," French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters after his talks in Bucharest with Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase. Romanian government sources disclosed that France would soon send police officers to Bucharest on long-term assignments to help local officials stop criminals migrating to Western Europe. Nastase said the problem is damaging the image of his nation now trying to join NATO and the EU. He urged the local police, who say they stop an average of 1,000 people daily from crossing the border to Hungary, to step up their efforts, and he pledged to create social programs to improve the conditions of life for the Roma.

Sarkozy said French police would continue to hunt down gangs of thieves and beggars in a campaign to deport them to Romania. "We fully understand Romania's concern about its image which shouldn't be stained by a minority group," he was quoted as saying. "There is significant willingness by Prime Minister Adrian Nastase to develop a project for the Roma community." According to Romania's Ministry of the Interior, the Roma make up 2.5 percent of the country's population of 21.6 million.
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