*Please pardon the delay in delivery as UCSJ was dealing with after effects of Hurricane Isabel*

Volume 3, Number 37
Friday, September 19, 2003

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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ANTISEMITIC OUTBURSTS IN THE STATE DUMA. With the approaching December 7 parliamentary elections, politically motivated antisemitic outbursts are becoming more frequent. According to a September 10 article in "Novye Izvestiya," two incidents marred the opening of the State Duma's fall session on September 9. Liberal MP Sergey Vulf, who last year tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Duma to pass a resolution condemning antisemitism, was heckled during his speech in support of a bill that would lower the minimum age for joining a political party from 18 to 16. When Vulf proposed that the measure may draw young people away from extremist organizations, an unidentified Duma member yelled from the floor that Zionists as well as antisemites should be classified as "extremists." Later that day, Aleksey Mitrofanov, a member of the ultra-nationalist LDPR, was also giving a speech in support of the bill when he was interrupted by Communist MP Lyubov Shvets, who asked, "How many people are there in the LDPR whose ancestors, thanks to the [1917] Revolution were able to crawl to the center of Russia from the Pale of the Settlement?" (Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Jews were confined to the Pale of the Settlement, an area encompassing much of modern-day Belarus and Ukraine.)

On September 10, UCSJ's Moscow Bureau reported that a new antisemitic novel titled "The Nameless Beast" is on sale in the State Duma's bookstore, which in the recent past has openly sold such works as David Duke's "The Jewish Question Through the Eyes of an American" and an array of antisemitic newspapers. Published this year by the Veche publishing house in Moscow, Evgeny Chebalin's novel "The Nameless Beast" compares Jews and other non-Russians to "parasites" and warns: "Having been expelled by Him from the Temple, they have settled inside other peoples throughout the centuries, crawling inside them, changing their outward appearances. What Satanic mind let loose upon the world this viper hybrid?" Chebalin also mentions a favorite antisemitic canard, "the world financial-Kike"

MOTHERLAND BLOC DEFINES THE ENEMY – VAGUELY. In a report titled "Motherland Reveals Ugly Face," the influential Moscow newspaper “Kommersant" gave a negative report card to the new electoral bloc called Motherland (Rodina in Russian) founded in a congress on September 14. Having elected their three leaders to head the federal ticket in the Duma elections on December 7, some 150 conferees adopted the veiled, ominous-sounding recommendation of top leader Sergey Glazyev. The former special advisor to President Vladimir Putin spoke of "certain forces" that are appropriating natural rent and "spending billions of dollars in order to have a lobby in the State Duma."

The bloc’s Number Two, Dmitry Rogozin, characterized the “certain forces" as “crooks" who have no sense of patriotism. Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted Rogozin as having declared: “The oligarchs are our enemy." Rogozin heads the State Duma International Affairs Committee, and he also serves as the Russian Federation President's special representative for Kaliningrad Oblast. He is known for his angry defense of Russia’s war in Chechnya at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Retired Army General Valentin Varennikov, Number Three in the lineup, staunchly supports the restoration of the Soviet Union.

According to “Kommersant," Sergey Glazev started work on forming a leftist-patriotic coalition in May, and the creation of the bloc was officially announced on August 24. So far, 30 organizations have joined it. Until recently the bloc's core parties were believed to be the following: the Russian Regions Party, the Socialist Unity Party of Russia, and the Russian Labor Party. But, the newspaper noted, the Russian Labor Party split last week, and now it is the People's Will party of former Duma member Sergey Baburin is the third party in the bloc. People's Will is openly antisemitic. Baburin, Number Five on the ticket, focused on international problems and told the meeting that the war in Iraq has revealed to Russia “the ugly face of Atlantic civilization."

“Kommersant" noted that Glazev failed to define the bloc's place in the political spectrum. "People are constantly trying to put us somewhere," Glazyv complained. “Right-wingers, left-wingers -- the use of labels misleads voters." He argued that the confrontation is not between right and left but between advocates of the status quo and others who are prepared to make the authorities work in the interests of society.

“The Moscow Times" quoted analysts as saying that Homeland might attract voters from a wide political spectrum and has a good chance of winning the 5 percent of the vote needed to get into the Duma, or even more. "We expect to get a majority of votes together with the Communists," Glazev was quoted by AFP as saying.

Now both the hardline wing of Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and the wing by Glazyv, often called "more progressive," are officially allied with antisemitic forces. After all the speeches and a press conference, “Kommersant" noted, “In the end, the question of what kind of view the new patriotic bloc takes of President Putin remained open."

RUSSIAN ISLAMIC LEADER SEES COMPETING JEWISH CLANS RULING RUSSIA. The political forces in the Caucasus that would like make deals with Washington or Moscow are doomed because both Washington’s and Moscow’s time is over, said Geydar Dzhemal, chairman of Russia's Islamic Committee, in a wide-ranging interview with Rusudan Nikuradze of the Georgian newspaper “24 Saati" of September 15. “Russia does not exist any more," Dzhemal declared. “In reality, today Russia is ruled by several Jewish clans that also fight against each other. Russian statehood does not exist any more." Dzhemal claimed that the United States is trying to get control of Russia’s energy resources and is actively using Anatoliy Chubays head of the Unified Energy System of Russia, who is one of three members of former President Boris Yeltsin’s "family" linked to competing U.S. circles.

VANDALS DESECRATE JEWISH GRAVES IN LATVIAN CAPITAL. Unidentified individuals vandalized a Jewish cemetery in Latvia, the Latvian news media reported on September 13. They overturned more than 20 gravestones in the Bikernieki Forest Cemetery in Riga and defaced others with Nazi slogans and swastikas. The attacks, Latvian Jewish leaders say, are linked to the visit to Latvia by the speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, scheduled for September 17-19, as well as to a referendum on Latvia’s European Union membership, slated for September 20.

NEO-NAZI THREAT ESCALATING IN GERMANY, OFFICIALS SAY. During a routine helicopter inspection earlier this month, German police discovered a 230-foot swastika trampled into a corn field near Berlin, Reuters reported on September 15. There is as yet no explanation how the banned Nazi emblem got there, a police spokeswoman said. The police consulted the farmer and trampled around the swastika until it was unrecognizable, said a police spokeswoman in Koenigs Wusterhausen, in the eastern state of Brandenburg, an area once part of communist East Germany.

Last week, officials said the threat of neo-Nazi violence was “escalating" in Germany after police seized explosives and arrested several people suspected of planning to bomb a Jewish center in Munich. Neo-Nazis from Brandenburg were among those arrested, according to the German news media.

Germany's focus on finding Muslim militants since the September 11 attacks in the United States has depleted resources needed to fight violence by its own far right, the head of Germany's Police Trade Union said on September 15. "Thousands of police have been moved into terrorism prevention and they are missing elsewhere," union leader Konrad Freiberg told Reuters. "After September 11, priorities changed." Before the U.S. attacks there was widespread media coverage and political debate about neo-Nazi crimes and demonstrations said Freiberg. "Then September 11 happened and the public focus shifted." Germany launched a massive investigation into militants among its three-million-strong Muslim population after it emerged that an al Qaeda cell based in the northern city of Hamburg had led the attacks on New York and Washington. But the neo-Nazis have remained a threat, said Freiberg.

"This case has shown us that extreme right-wing crime has reached an entirely new level," Freiberg said. "We have 'brown' terrorism now," he said. Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein told Reuters that the suspected Munich plotters also discussed attacking mosques and a Greek school. German Interior Minister Otto Schily said the foiled plots were no reason for "widespread alarm" but Germany will keep a closer eye on the extreme right. Over the last decade, 100 people have been killed in far-right or racist violence in Germany.

*** QUOTE OF THE WEEK, A BAPTIST LESSON * * * A Baptist congregation in Moscow is meeting for Sunday worship in the city's increasingly chilly parks, just as it did during the Soviet years, because officials bar the congregation from renting a public building, wrote Lawrence A. Uzzell, president of International Religious Freedom Watch, in an op-ed article in “The Moscow Times" on September 15. “The Baptists’ experience reflects an unspoken rule of President Vladimir Putin's Russia: The less you collaborated with the old Soviet state, the more likely you will suffer repression today."

GERMANS EXPELLED FROM POSTWAR EASTERN EUROPE DEMAND MUSEUM
The Plight of Entire Communities Cannot Be Put on the Same Scale

Pressure is mounting on the German government to support the building of a museum in Berlin that would document the suffering of more than 12 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II. The ruling coalition of Social Democrats and Greens oppose the plan, arguing that it would distort history, a view that is expressed with far greater vehemence in two key neighboring states, Poland and the Czech Republic, where the expulsions took place.

On September 5, Erika Steinbach, president of the League of Expelled Germans, urged the federal government to join a number of conservative-run German states in backing the museum. "We have invited and asked the government to support us financially as a large part of what we want to show is the alteration of Germany," Steinbach told a news conference. "Germany dramatically changed in integrating the over 12.5 million expelled and four million later arrivals since 1988." According to Reuters, Steinbach’s group is “hoping to ride a recent trend in Germany to portray Germans as victims of the war." Steinbach is a member of parliament for the opposition Christian Democrats, whose leaders Angela Merkel and Edmund Stoiber have both backed the idea of a Center against Expulsions.

Many of the expellees – and their children who often identify themselves as expellees – have been affiliated with nationalist causes, some moderate and others extreme, which has prompted critics of the museum say that if built, the museum will ignore the fact that Germany started the war and was responsible for its worst atrocities. Or, as Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has said diplomatically: "Such a center in Berlin risks presenting a one-sided view of the injustices to befall Germans."

Last week Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla told Germany's “Die Zeit" newspaper that the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia could only be thought of as a consequence of the war. He argued that the expelled Germans were victims of fate, rather than of crimes, and he expressed his conviction that the proposed museum would not give a balanced account of events. In Poland, President Alexander Kwasniewski shied back from moralizing and simply cautioned that building such a museum in Berlin could harm bilateral relations. He suggested expanding the project to cover all forced migrations in Europe and to locate the museum in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, which in the 1990s saw some of the continent's worst atrocities and expulsions since World War II. Yet another argument for a comparative study of expulsions was published in "Die Zeit" where one editor recommended that "It would be better to locate a European monument to expulsions in Srebrenica or in Moscow. The Czechs and Poles were amateurs in comparison with Stalin who expelled and exterminated millions of victims."

Steinbach has promised that the museum would include references to the 80 to 100 million people forced from their homes across the world in the 20th century. But, Reuters coolly noted, “she has failed to placate her critics."

Promoters of the museum hope that the new generations born after World War II will place the suffering of entire communities on the same level and eventually equate them while stressing the virtues of reconciliation and blaming “the war." One memorable rejoinder came from Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, who has never called for revenge. “To label as victims the millions of ethnic Germans who were expelled from their homes in Eastern Europe after the defeat of the Nazis is to make a mockery of the Holocaust," Edelman wrote in the New York Jewish weekly “Forward" dated September 12. “Germans should not boast of their ill fortunes during World War II, for they do not deserve compassion. Their lot should be expiation, for many generations to come."
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