Volume One, Number 13
Friday, October 5, 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 SWAYS WEST ON CHECHEN WAR; SURGE IN FIGHTING AND RIGHTS ABUSE FEARED. As Russia enters the third year of its war in Chechnya, human rights activists are apprehensive that President Vladimir Putin is winning his diplomatic campaign to have the United States, the European Union (EU), and NATO add the Chechen rebels to the Western watch list of terrorists. The war in Chechnya was relegated to the bottom of the agenda at last week's parliamentary session of the Council of Europe, which adopted a "more measured position on Chechnya," according to the Kremlin's human rights envoy Vladimir Kalamanov, as quoted by Agence France Presse (AFP). On October 3 the Baltimore Sun reported that "Russia is already counting the benefits of its solidarity with the United States against the Taliban." The same day Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty noted that Russia's joining NATO is now "openly discussed by Putin" and is receiving "cautious support from some Western leaders."

On October 2, Russia's presidential spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembsky stated that at least four of the kamikaze bombers in the attacks in New York and Washington had "passed through Chechnya." He also rejected an offer by Georgian President (and former Soviet foreign minister) Eduard Shevardnadze to mediate in the Chechen conflict. Russia "would appreciate Georgian efforts contributing to the world campaign against international terrorism, in particular ... by taking measures to bar Chechen terrorists and mercenaries on its territory," he told AFP. The same day, Leonid Radzikhovsky wrote in "Itogi" magazine that "Europe has no business teaching Russia to pacify bandits, but rather Russia should teach the West to destroy bandits."

On October 1 - the second anniversary of Russia's attack on Chechnya - Eliza Musayeva of the Russian human rights group Memorial warned of a possible upsurge in human rights abuses in Chechnya if Russia launched a new offensive in the guise of joining the global coalition against terrorism. "Since the attacks in the United States, the Chechens fear more than anything that the Western countries will ease up in their pressure on Russia," she said. "If the Americans launch an anti-terrorist operation against Afghanistan, Russia could exploit the fact that the rest of the world is looking elsewhere to deliver a killer blow to the rebels." In a letter dated October 1, Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on EU leaders to tell Putin that the common struggle against terrorism will not mean condoning abuse in Chechnya. Putin tries to use the September 11 attack "to get carte blanche" for the Russian forces in Chechnya, said Elizabeth Andersen, executive director of HRW's Europe and Central Asia division. "The EU can't allow this to happen." HRW has documented serious Russian violations of human rights in Chechnya, including summary executions, torture, forced disappearances, and indiscriminate bombing. The abuses continue, HRW says, noting that in the past the EU has been a principled critic of rights abuses, sponsoring resolutions two years in a row at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights calling for the Russian government to investigate and punish the perpetrators of abuses. In a letter to NATO Secretary-General Lord George Robertson, HRW urged that any discussion of Russia's membership in NATO make clear that Russia would have to comply with the alliance's standards. "NATO has to ask itself: Is it prepared to have among its members a country whose armed forces are implicated in such serious abuse?" Andersen said. "Russia would have to clean up its armed forces before it could meet NATO standards." On October 3, Aaron Rhodes, director of the International Helsinki Federation, told Reuters: "It's extremely disturbing that Western governments are now going to be silent about the methods of the Russian forces in Chechnya as they incorporate Russia into this coalition against terrorism." He said the United States and the EU were already "accommodating" their relationship with a number of former Soviet republics in Central Asia. "Uzbekistan is the most glaring example," he said. "It has never received very strong criticism for its policies in respect to Islamic believers and political dissidents." Rhodes said that Uzbekistan faces a genuine terrorist problem but the authorities have "grossly exaggerated the threat as a pretext for repression" and keep thousands of people in gulag-like camps without legal grounds. "Now of course those excuses for violations of human rights are accepted more than ever," Rhodes told Reuters.

AFP quoted Chechen lawyer Abdollah Khamzayev as saying that, "The number of criminal investigations is ridiculous in comparison with the number of crimes that have been committed. Chechens cannot count on anything or anybody, least of all the Russian legal system." AFP notes that only eleven Russian soldiers have been convicted of crimes against Chechen civilians, though more than a thousand complaints have been registered with the authorities. International observers point to the prolonged misery of about 140,000 Chechens who are preparing to spend their third winter in makeshift camps in the neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia. "Their situation is all the more difficult as they do not have any hope of an end to the hostilities in the near future," said Jean Tissot, the head of the Danish Refugee Council in Ingushetia.

BOTH SIDES IN CHECHNYA USE ANTISEMITISM AS A PROPAGANDA WEAPON. Both sides in the Chechnya conflict employ antisemitism as a propaganda weapon. On October 1, the Moscow daily "Kommersant" quoted pro-Russian Chechen administrator Akhmad Kadyrov asserting that rebel commander Khattab is not a Jordanian Arab, but a Yemeni Jew. As proof, Kadyrov stated that Khattab named his daughter Sarah. Last year, the Chechen rebel web site "Kavkaz-Tsentr" claimed that Kadyrov is a Mountain Jew from Dagestan. Another Chechen news outlet, the Tbilisi-based Chechenpress news agency, chose not to repeat that allegation. Instead, it criticized Kadyrov for "expressing antisemitic views." Last month, four Chechen gunmen captured a private television station in the village of Avtury and forced the broadcast of a video that denounced "the international Zionist conspiracy" against Moslems, according to "Kommersant" on September 29.

MOSCOW OBLAST COURT REFUSES TO BAN NATIONAL BOLSHEVIKS. On September 27 the Moscow Oblast court turned down an appeal by the Justice Ministry to disband the blatantly racist National Bolshevik Party (NBP) headed by writer Eduard Limonov, Interfax reported. Last spring Limonov and another five members of his party were arrested on charges of trying to purchase a large consignment of assault rifles. Limonov was accused of terrorism and the creation of an illegal armed group, and he is still in prison. His supporters gained some prominence on September 17 in the southern Urals city of Magnitogorsk. According to the government daily "Rossiyskaya Gazeta," at 4:30 a.m. police arrested a 27-year-old philosophy lecturer from the local Pedagogical Institute and four college students. They had with them 70 leaflets that declared their "support of the terrorist acts against the United States," and they had already posted 20. The leaflet was a sheet of standard writing paper stamped with the NBP's coat of arms and portraying two warplanes against the background of a megalopolis and the inscription, "Ramming is the Weapon of Heroes." Also printed on the leaflet were the ancient Roman slogan, "Carthage Must Be Destroyed," and a new Russian slogan, "For Belgrade! For Baghdad! For Our Great Motherland!" "The FSB [the former KGB] took an interest," police officer Viktor Tokarev told "Rossiyskaya Gazeta," "so that it is they who will give a legal assessment. I think that it will be fairly difficult to prove the subversive nature of this action, and most likely the ill-starred quintet will get away with an administrative punishment for breaching public order. No restraining measures have been used against them -- they are already 'out and about' and, it would appear, feel like heroes."

DEFROCKED ORTHODOX PRIEST ATTACKS PENTECOSTALS; OSCE, HRW PROTEST. On September 23, defrocked Georgian Orthodox priest Basil Mkalavishvili and his supporters wielded truncheons when attacking a Sunday choir practice of a Pentecostal church in the Gldani district of the capital Tbilisi, Pastor Zaal Tkeshelashvili told Keston News Service. Twelve church members sustained serious injuries. The Tbilisi office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has condemned the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of the violence. Human rights activists say that over the past few years about a hundred violent attacks on religious minority meetings have taken place. On October 2, Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote to President Bush urging him to raise Georgia's deteriorating human rights situation with Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, who began a visit to the United States that day. HRW cited "the escalating violence" against Christian worshipers of non-Orthodox faiths in Georgia, charging that "the attacks are growing in frequency and ferocity due to police complicity and the government's failure to prosecute those responsible." Last week alone, HRW received reports of three mob assaults.

KAZAKH NEWSPAPER CALLS FOR IMMEDIATE BAN ON SECTS. Religious sects, including the Bahai faith, have emerged recently in Kazakhstan, representing "alien spirits" that could cause dissension in society, the "Almaty Aqshamy" newspaper asserted on September 18. One is known as "Ilintsy-Jehovists," founded in the 1840s by a Russian captain named Nikolay Ilin and spreading in the western Caucasus. According to the newspaper, sect members are distributing publications that "may split our society," by putting the sect "before other religions." Another "extremist sect" spreading in Kazakhstan is the Falun Gong, banned in China because it supposedly "takes total possession of the property and the souls of its members, as a result of which the latter end up committing suicide." The newspaper estimated that the sects in Almaty alone number 200, each between 20 and 80 members. The article concluded by calling for an immediate ban "before it is too late" and "the alien spirits" take hold and "sorrow results."

CIVIC GROUP URGES LAWS AGAINST INTOLERANCE. The Popular Resistance Movement (Otpor) which helped topple the Milosevic dictatorship charged on September 24 that the state encourages antisemitic actions "by conveying the wrong message," according to a report by the independent Serbian news agency FoNet. Addressing a press conference in Belgrade, Otpor activist Ivan Marovic called on the state to penalize the propagation of racial, religious, and national intolerance. He announced that his movement is placing flowers on the monument to Holocaust victims in Dorcol, as a symbolic measure of "society's collective resistance to antisemitism." During the night of September 30, unknown individuals daubed hate graffiti on walls throughout the ethnically-mixed town of Sombor in Serbia's northern province of Vojvodina, Belgrade Radio reported. According to the Hungarian-language newspaper "Magyar Szo," the slogans included "Hungarians Out!", "Croats Out!", "Death to the Jews!" "Death to the Albanians!", and "We shall storm over the River Drava and set Croatia ablaze!" Mayor Jovan Vujicic said it was high time for the authorities to take decisive action and demanded that the townspeople name the perpetrators. In neighboring Croatia, Jewish communities in Zagreb and Osijek have been receiving hate letters telling Jews to leave the country or be "cleansed," according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. "You Jews should know that as Zionists and CIA spies, you are not welcome in Croatia," a typical message said, "so you should leave."

SLOVAK POLICE HALTS NEO-NAZI CONCERT. On September 29 in Popradno, 150 Slovak policemen stopped an illegal neo-Nazi concert and dispersed its participants - about 500 skinheads coming from seven countries - according to the Slovak news agency Tasr. No one was injured, said the police, who took 90 skinheads to police headquarters and released them the following morning. The skinheads' propaganda material was confiscated. Two of the bands had come from the United States, two from Slovakia, and one from the Czech Republic. Local citizens told Tasr that the neo-Nazi event shocked them, and the mayor claimed he had no advance knowledge of the concert, scheduled to be held in the town's Culture House. According to the civic group People Against Racism, the concert was one of the biggest skinhead actions in Central Europe, drawing "the elite of the elite" in the skinhead movement. The civic group praised the police for shutting down the event, and recommended that as a follow-up the police search the houses of the main activists and find out where the propaganda materials were produced.

BRITAIN PLANS TO BROADEN LAW PUNISHING INCITEMENT OF GROUP HATRED. United Kingdom Home Secretary David Blunkett plans to make incitement to religious hatred an offense. On September 30 he told the daily Independent that he is preparing a change in the laws to stop both Moslem fanatics and white racists from whipping up hatred in the wake of the terror attacks on the United States. According to the London paper, at meetings with Blunkett and Prime Minister Tony Blair, Moslem leaders called for tougher laws to prevent racists side-stepping the existing anti-racist legislation. "I promised them that we would look at whether we should include religion along with race in terms of incitement and inflammatory language," Blunkett said. According to the Independent, the new law would be "a double-edged sword" aimed at racist groups who have exploited the law to heap abuse on Moslems as well as at Moslem extremists fomenting anti-Jewish and anti-Christian hatred. Including religion will be the biggest change for years in race relations law, the paper wrote, noting that cabinet members had been reluctant to act, but are now persuaded that extremists are using loopholes in the existing race law and that it must be changed. Since September 11, Moslem organizations have recorded dozens of cases of Moslems, particularly women wearing traditional headscarves, being verbally abused, ignored in shops, and ostracized at work.

* * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * * "Mr. Putin would like the world to believe that the U.S. steps are equivalent to his own support for a U.S. offensive against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan," a Washington Post editorial argued on October 4. "But they are not.… Chechnya is not a terrorist syndicate or an Islamic movement but a nation that was conquered by Russia in the 19th century and that for more than a decade has been seeking to regain self-rule. Its leader, Aslan Maskhadov, is not an Islamic extremist or even a man of arms but a pro-Western politician who was democratically elected in 1997, two years before Mr. Putin chose to reverse a peace accord by sending 80,000 Russian troops to invade the republic."

WARPED MINDS, ABSURD THEORIES
reports and reflections on a big lie

Of all the manifestations of the warped state of mind known as bigotry, none is as warped as the charges that a bigot levels against the object of his hatred when individuals belonging to his own ethnic or religious group are accused of a crime. At a news conference on September 18 in Moscow called by the Eurasian Party of Russia, two leaders claiming to represent Russia's Moslems charged that Israel's "special services" supported by Jews in America and elsewhere perpetrated the September 11 attack on America.

According to the Moscow daily "Kommersant" of September 19, the news conference began with the distribution of a statement which condemned the terrorist acts and expressed sorrow for those who had died, noting that this "crime, which took the lives of thousands of completely innocent people runs counter to the universally accepted principles of humaneness that are laid down in Islam." But then the statement shifted to "speculation on the part of Israeli politicians and circles in the Russian Federation that are close to them" that the terrorist acts may help to "unleash anti-Islamic hysteria on a world scale."

Discussion followed, and Abdul-Vakhed Niyazov, chairman of the Eurasian Party of Russia Political Council Presidium, posed the following rhetorical question: "Who stands to gain from this [terrorist attack on America]? Who was the first to exploit the situation to their own advantage?" Someone answered by claiming that the first to comment "were not the Americans or the Russians, but the same [Israeli cabinet member Natan] Sharansky and [Israeli Minister Avigdor] Lieberman, who seemed to be constantly standing in front of the NTV [Independent Television] cameras." Next, Niyazov unveiled his theory, based on his judgment that neither Osama bin Laden nor any of the Arab countries have the technical resources to organize a terrorist act as spectacular as the attacks in New York and Washington. Shaykh Nafigulla Ashirov, cochairman of the Council of Muftis of Russia and supreme mufti of the Asiatic part of Russia, agreed and added: "We know which country has an extensive network of special services. These are the Zionist special services. Bin Laden does not have these resources. This was done not by the Arabs or the Moslems but by those who have the resources and who stand to gain from this."

One can only hope that not all the Moslems the two speakers claimed to represent agree with such a perverse, monstrous, and absurd line of speculation. In the United States, where the public has no reason to doubt the FBI's identification of 19 alleged hijackers, Moslem leaders condemned the perpetrators as Moslems who violated the rules of the Koran.

But the rumor did not end with the press conference in Moscow. Nor did it start there. On September 29 Athens' center-left newspaper "Elevtherotipia" carried a 1,500-word report under the title: "The Vicious Global Network of Rumor-Mongers." Its primary target was a rabidly antisemitic tirade in the Greek Parliament by Deputy Yeoryios Karatzaferis claiming that Jews had advance knowledge of the September 11 attack. The newspaper dismissed Karatzaferis allegations as "ridiculous." "Very simply", the newspaper wrote, "he took it upon himself to further promote a rumor already circulating within the Arab media" which claimed that 4,000 Jews employed at the World Trade Center had not shown up for work on September 11. The Athens paper then tracked down the rumor and reported that it first saw public print in the Kuwaiti newspaper "Al Watan" and Pakistan's "Nawai Wakat," followed by Lebanon's "Manar TV" on September 17. It appears that no matter how unsupported by facts and reason, the rumor is finding audiences sympathetic to its political message. It may also be turning into what Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda wizard, used to call a "big lie" that must be repeated often so that people eventually believe it.

In Latvia, the lie has generated perplexity. The national security agency has announced that it will investigate "the reasons why" a local Moslem "publicly offended the Jewish people" by blaming them for the terror acts in the United States. According to a September 26 report by the Baltic News Agency (BNS), the deputy director of the Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution (SAB), Uldis Dzenitis, said the Religious Affairs Department had asked SAB to "assess" the article titled "The sign of Allah to Americans" and published by the newspaper "Jauna Avize" on September 15. In the article, a Latvian Moslem named Omar accused "Jewish security services" of having perpetrated the terror acts in the United States and declared that Jews "aim to turn people of other nationalities into slaves." Dzenitis told BNS that SAB will investigate the reasons and circumstances behind Omar's views but most likely it will not open a criminal case because censorship is not its task. Latvia's chief rabbi Natans Barkans disagreed, arguing that the article qualifies as a crime because it "incites hatred."

For bigots sworn to their cult of unreason, it may be futile to point out that any cursory examination of the lists of terror victims shows plenty of easily identifiable Jewish names and that New York rabbis are working overtime counseling family members of their congregants whose bodies lie underneath the rubble of the twin towers. But the facts emerging out of the investigation must persuade at least some Moslems outside the United States that they ought to dissociate themselves from the killers regardless of their shared faith. Acknowledging a harsh truth is a lot healthier than repeating a big lie.

* * * *

_____________________________________________________________ Copyright (c) 2001. UCSJ. All rights reserved.

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