Volume One, Number 12
Friday, September 28, 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

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PUTIN PLEDGES 'DYNAMIC PARTNERSHIP' IN WAR ON TERRORISM. President Vladimir Putin and the predominantly Muslim countries of the formerly Soviet Central Asia have moved closer to participation in America's riposte to terrorism. Given the imperative of the hour - to crush the organization that planned the September 11 attack on America - efforts to discourage human rights violations in the countries recruited for the alliance are widely expected to be downgraded on the diplomatic agenda. The question is how far down. In a televised address on September 24 translated into English by RIA Novosty, Putin announced Russia's readiness to open "its territory to be crossed by aircraft delivering humanitarian cargos to the anti-terrorist operation area." He said that Russia "coordinated" that offer with its "Central Asian allies, who approve it and do not rule out" the use of their airfields." He pledged that Russia's secret services will engage in a "dynamic international partnership" in providing information "about "terrorist infrastructure, whereabouts and training bases." He declared: "Russia will eagerly join international search-and-rescue efforts." Finally, he promised additional military assistance to and closer cooperation with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

The second part of Putin's speech dealt with Chechnya. With a careful understatement, he first declared that "Chechen developments ought not to be regarded outside the context of efforts against international terrorism." Noting that "the entire civilized world has determined its stance on the anti-terror cause," Putin then called on "the Chechen fighters who have not surrendered" to follow suit. He urged them to sever contacts with "international terrorists" and to contact Russian authorities within 72 hours to discuss how to lay down their arms. With rare unanimity, Russian commentators dismissed as an empty gesture Putin's call for surrender that also happened to coincide with the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Chechnya. "This offer is unreal and unachievable," said Tatyana Kasatkina of the human rights organization Memorial. Independent military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer suggested that the Kremlin might well use the diversion created by U.S. operations in Afghanistan to launch another series of round-ups and search-and-destroy operations in Chechnya. Putin "thinks he can now talk tough in Chechnya," the respected analyst added. "Politically, internationally, he's in a stronger position than before, but actually it doesn't change much on the ground."

A KGB operative in East Germany from 1984 to 1990, Putin has scored a public relations triumph in Germany. Addressing the Bundestag on September 25, Putin described Russia, along with some other countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States, as forming "the real barrier to drug trafficking, organized crime and fundamentalism crossing over from Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Caucasus to Europe. Terrorism, national hatred, separatism and religious extremism have the same roots everywhere and bear the same poisonous fruit. That is why the methods to fight these problems should also be universal. However, first we should agree on fundamental issues… It is very important to understand that criminal acts cannot be used to pursue political objectives, regardless of how good these objectives may be." Applause followed Putin's words, delivered in flawless German. The German press hailed Putin as the first foreign leader and non-native speaker of German who chose to address the Bundestag in what he called "the language of Kant and Schopenhauer."

U.S. SHOULD OPPOSE ALLIES' MISUSE OF WAR ON TERRORISM, SAYS HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH. The Bush administration should signal its allies not to use the fight against terrorism as cover for their own domestic campaigns against political opponents, Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged on September 25 in a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell. The letter noted that in recent days, a number of governments have taken advantage of the attacks of September 11 to justify internal crackdowns against those they deem to be terrorists and "separatists." HRW singled out three countries: Russia for its linkage of the U.S. war on terrorism to its war in Chechnya; China for its repressive policies in Tibet and the mostly Muslim region of Xinjiang; and Egypt for its poor human rights record. "If an American-led counter-terrorism effort becomes associated with attacks on peaceful dissent and religious expression, it will undermine everything the United States is trying to achieve," wrote Kenneth Roth, HRW executive director. "Many countries are sensing that the United States will condone actions committed in the name of anti-terrorism that it would have condemned a short time ago." The danger of this kind of opportunism is particularly acute in Central Asia, the letter continued. Uzbekistan, which U.S. military forces may use as a staging ground for operations, has in recent years imprisoned thousands of non-violent Muslims for worshiping outside state controls or joining unregistered religious organizations. HRW called on the Bush administration to continue denying security assistance to those countries that might use it to commit human rights abuses, to avoid cooperative activities that will be read by abusive governments as condoning their practices and to publicly condemn efforts by repressive governments to take advantage of the recent attack.

ANTISEMITES COMMEMORATING 15TH CENTURY BATTLE FOCUS HATRED ON MUSLIMS AND AMERICA. Representatives of several antisemitic groups claiming Orthodox Church support led a religious procession in Moscow on September 21 to commemorate the Battle of Kulikovo Field, according to a report by the Blagovest news agency. The 15th century battle represented Muscovy's first victory against the Mongol-Tatar Golden Horde that had dominated most of Russia for 200 years. Plans by the government to officially commemorate the anniversary of the battle were vigorously protested by Tatars and other minority groups descended from the Golden Horde. Leading the procession were Vladimir Osipov of the Union of Christian Rebirth and Leonid Simonovich of the Union of Russian Orthodox Religious Banner Bearers. While both men usually engage in viciously antisemitic rhetoric, this time they focused their hatred on Russian Muslims and the United States. After calling the Battle of Kulikovo Field a victory over "various filth from the steppe," Osipov switched gears and called on the Russian government not to join the American efforts to fight terrorism, since it is America that "spreads the seeds all over the world of sensual corruption and Satanism." He concluded: "Russia will not help the globalizers, the servants of the anti-Christ who are starting a third world war." Leonid Simonovich added that the September 11 terrorist attacks were "the revenge of the Lord Jesus Christ for the bombardment of Orthodox Serbia." Also participating in the procession were the ataman of the Moscow Cossack Union, Vyacheslav Demin, known for his close ties to the Black Hundreds and other antisemitic groups, as well as smaller groups from the Moscow region and Nizhny Novgorod. The procession ended in front of St.Basil's Cathedral, within sight of the Kremlin. There were no reports of arrests, Blagovest's report ends, despite Osipov's clear violation of laws prohibiting the incitement of ethnic hatred

IN THREE DAYS, SIX ANTISEMITIC INCIDENTS ACROSS RUSSIA. On September 24, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) expressed strong concern over a string of antisemitic incidents during three preceding days in various parts of Russia. The statement cited six separate attacks: a dozen skinhead youths beating up four yeshiva students in Moscow; an attack on a group of Orthodox Jewish schoolboys in the city of Orenburg in eastern Russia and another group of antisemitic youths pushing off a rabbi's hat and kipah while shouting Nazi slogans; an attack on an Israeli rabbi and three other visiting Israelis on the street of the Siberian city of Omsk; vandals spray-painting swastikas and antisemitic graffiti on the front columns of the main entrance to the Moscow's Central Choral Synagogue; and a swastika and the word "kikes" carved on the front door of the Moscow office of the Congress of Jewish Religious Organizations and Communities of Russia. ADL's Moscow office called for a swift investigation and urged the authorities to ensure that police presence is increased during the Yom Kippur holiday, which begins on September 26. ADL stressed that the incidents came at a time of heightened tensions in Russia in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, which some leading Russian nationalists blamed on Jews, Zionists and the "world government."

UZBEK LAWS ON FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE USED TO RESTRICT RELIGIOUS ACTIVITY. The Uzbek government uses laws on freedom of religion to control the activities of religious believers and as a means of persecuting them, reports the Keston News Service. The basic document on believers' rights is the law on freedom of conscience and religious organizations, adopted on May 1, 1998. Article 3, "The right to freedom of conscience," includes a provision that "the enticement of minors into religious organizations is not permitted, nor are they to be given religious instruction against their will or the will of their parents or guardians." On the basis of this article the authorities forbid religious instruction of children in places of worship. "When we want to start Sunday schools, the authorities declare that we are enticing minors into religious organizations, which is forbidden by law," the chairman of the Union of Evangelical Christians/Baptists, Pavel Peychev, told Keston. Article 5, "Separation of religion from the state," prohibits activities intended to convert believers of one faith to another. In practice, this article has led to a ban on religious believers' preaching in public, in violation of the basic concept of freedom of speech in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 5 also states that "the establishment or continued activity of any political party on a religious basis is forbidden, as are branches of such parties established outside the republic." Keston found that this provision allowed the government to initiate a campaign of repression against underground Islamic parties. Talib Yakubov, chairman of the unregistered Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, puts the number of political prisoners at 10,000, with the majority accused of belonging to various Islamic parties. "The authorities almost always regard assemblies of religious believers in unregistered places of worship as violations of the law," Keston reports. "The ban on religious believers assembling in unregistered places of worship is contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights." The number of unregistered mosques shut down by the authorities is large. In almost every neighborhood in Fergana valley, Keston was shown unregistered mosques closed by the authorities, where believers were categorically forbidden to assemble. The authorities acknowledge that they decide how many active mosques there will be. "In the mid-1990s the number of mosques in the Fergana valley of Uzbekistan grew to the point where there were twice as many of them as there were regular schools and, naturally, we could not accept such a situation," said Shoazim Minovarov, deputy chairman of the government's Committee for Religious Affairs.

DEFROCKED GEORGIAN PRIEST ANNOUNCES CRUSADE AGAINST NON-ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS. Father Basil Mzekalashvili, the defrocked Georgian Orthodox priest whose followers have assaulted Jehovah's Witnesses across the country, staged a march in Tbilisi on 24 September, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported the following day. The march was intended to mark the beginning of a new campaign against all non-Orthodox religious groups in Georgia, Caucasus Press reported. On September 23, Mzekalashvili and his followers attacked a meeting of evangelists in Tbilisi.

PROSECUTORS TO CHARGE 76 LITHUANIANS GUILTY OF GENOCIDAL CRIMES. Lithuanian prosecutors announced on September 21 that on the basis of new evidence, they will soon name 76 Lithuanians who should not have been cleared of war crimes as Nazi collaborators, according to Reuters. The mistake, the prosecutors acknowledged, had occurred after Lithuania regained its independence in 1990 and passed a law offering blanket exoneration to all Lithuanians convicted by Soviet courts, most of them for resisting Soviet rule. Since that time, there have been charges that the hasty exoneration also sheltered war criminals in Lithuania where more than 90 percent of the 220,000-strong Jewish population were exterminated, the highest percentage of any country in Nazi-occupied Europe. Of the 50,000 people seeking exoneration, Reuters reported, the Lithuanian prosecutors' office has thus far turned down more than 500.

APPELLATE COURT REDUCES SENTENCES OF SKINHEADS. A Czech regional appellate court has reduced the sentences of several youths convicted of a racially motivated attack on a group of Roma (Gypsies) in the town of Podebrady, the daily "Mlada Fronta Dnes" reported on September 12. The Central Bohemian Regional Court commuted the prison sentences to suspended sentences. The attack occurred last April after the youths shouted insults at a group of Roma children and forced them to leave a public playground.

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * * "There is almost nothing that will suit the Russians better than to join an international coalition against terrorism," writes journalist Anne Applebaum for the Internet magazine slate.com. "They have long claimed that their war in Chechnya is an anti-terrorist war and that the Chechens are backed by none other than Osama Bin Laden. …Best of all, they can continue to prosecute the Chechen war without much fear of any further international criticism. The Clinton administration labored and labored to integrate Russia into international institutions, with mixed success. Now, with a minimum of fuss, it may happen - and on Russia's terms, not ours."

PUTIN'S POLICIES CONFRONT HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS WITH A DILEMMA
notes on the third comprehensive report on human rights in Russia

The greatest danger Russia's human rights movement faces is the growing power of the central government that brings about "greater bureaucratization" in all spheres and across the entire country, Ludmilla Alekseeya told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on September 21 and other Washington audiences. A human rights activist since the 1960s and head of the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), Alekseeva presented her organization's third annual report on human rights developments in all 89 regions of the Russian Federation - the most comprehensive picture of the human rights situation in Russia.

The project leading to the creation of the MHG report, which was produced in association with UCSJ through grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy, built for the first time an integrated human rights NGO movement across every region of Russia.

The report begins with the following bleak assessment: "While most of the populace rather enthusiastically welcomed the first months of Putin's presidency, domestic human rights activists viewed [Boris] Yeltsin's successor with a measure of caution and distrust. The federal policies of the late 1999-2000 period, as a matter of fact, came to confirm those reservations." The report cites "efforts to shape a governable democracy, constraints on freedoms of mass media and expression, inability to find a solution to the Chechen problem, and maintenance of the FSB-inspired 'spy-mania'" as the most troubling negative trends.

The report also warns of further possible restrictions on media and religious freedom: "In the course of 2000, President Putin signed the newly-drafted 'Concept of National Security' and 'Concept of Information Security' of Russia, these documents containing, inter alia, provisions on maintaining a single information source and countering the expansions of religious groups. Given the current practices of constraining the endeavors of the so-called non-traditional religions and of stifling independent regional mass media, these Concepts seem to be providing an ideological basis for further restraints on the freedoms of expression and conscience."

The report is sharply critical of regional authorities' general passivity towards the activities of hate groups: "The level of aggressiveness and xenophobia in Russian society is currently quite high… It seems that those in power in Russia have not yet realized that serious dangers to society come not only from direct appeals to violence but also from pronouncements designed to indirectly promote violent feelings [towards ethnic minorities]… Overall, the number of subjects of the Russian Federation where nationalist and extremist groups operate without constraint appears to be larger than that of regions where local authorities have somehow sought to place limits on their activities." Antisemitism is characterized in the report as "still deeply rooted in society" and going "hand in hand with nationalism and great power chauvinism."

Daniil Meshcheryakov, who oversaw the production of the report, told the RFE/RL audience that President Vladimir Putin's efforts to reestablish central control had changed the nature of human rights violations: Increasingly, violations take the form of ostensibly legal actions against individuals, groups and the news media, a symptom of the "manipulated" form of democracy that in Alekseeva's judgment is "no democracy at all."

She said that government efforts to restrict the free flow of information, sometimes by pressure on news outlets and often by charging scholars with espionage, are now among the most widespread human rights problems.

On the other hand, Alekseeva pointed out, local leaders tend to be tyrants, and she welcomed Putin's decision to undercut them. Nevertheless, Putin is in the habit of using KGB tactics to achieve his objective, which is more and more control. For example, while the Russian human rights community cannot but support Putin's push for reform of the judicial system, which is still based on the procedures of the 1960s with extended pretrial detention among its worst features, the motive behind these reforms appears to have less to do with establishing rule of law than reducing the independence of the Prosecutor General's Office.

"At the moment we are on the same side on the issue of judicial reform," she said with a sigh. She suggested that the human rights community can work together with the government, as long as it recognizes that Putin is uninterested in the rule of law and that democrats ought to strive for balancing the power of the center and the regions and for asserting the independence of the judiciary.

At another talk, at the SAIS Refugee Policy Forum, Alekseeva focused on the plight of Chechen refugees. A tough, no-nonsense human rights activist, Alekseeya fought back tears when talking about her trip to Chechnya and Ingushetiya in April. Deliberately not informing the government, she visited refugee camps, including those that are closed to international monitors. She said that Chechen refugees in the "model" camps open to visitors live in fairly comfortable tents and have food and sanitation facilities. But the refugees hidden from outsiders are crowded into barn-like structures without sanitation, many of them are ill, and all of them are undernourished.

She added that she saw no end in sight to the conflict. While some Russian politicians would like to stop the war, she noted, the military is staunchly opposed because the officers are bent on revenge and, perhaps more importantly, soldiers on all levels make a profit. Largely shielded from the scrutiny of the press, high ranking officers illegally export oil from the region, while ordinary soldiers regularly extort money from the families and friends of their prisoners, sometimes in exchange for their freedom, and on other occasions for their corpses. In an effort to cope with what she called "the country's most intractable human rights problem," Alekseeva said that along with other European human rights activists she plans to create a permanent human rights monitoring station in the north Caucasus and that entity will help the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to call attention to violations.
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