Volume 2, Number 44
Friday, November 8, 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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BOLSHEVIK ANNIVERSARY RALLY FEATURES ANTISEMITISM. The Communist Party, Working Russia, and other leftist parties rallied in Moscow on November 7 to celebrate the 85th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and once again the rally featured antisemitic slogans and publications. According to ”Utro.ru” news agency, the demonstrators numbered 4,000. UCSJ's Moscow Bureau Chief Aleksandr Brod reported that book vendors hawked more than 30 blatantly antisemitic titles such as "Kike-Masons" and "What the Jews Want From Us." Vendors said that this year they were afraid to sell openly "Mein Kampf" and "Racial Theories of the SS" because of a crackdown on the sale of those books launched this summer. However, the police did not interfere as demonstrators bought books whose titles proved their illegality under laws banning the incitement of ethnic hatred. Brod overheard numerous antisemitic conversations among book buyers about how "the Jews have destroyed Russia," "killed Stalin," and "drink the blood of the working people." About 20 antisemitic newspapers were on sale, including "Nashe Otechestvo," "Russkaya Pravda," and "Era Rossii" which recently received warnings from the Ministry of the Press for inciting ethnic hatred.

Rally leaders led participants in a song about "the kike kagal" which has "put Russia on its knees." Participants held up signs reading "Rise up from your knees deceived people, down with the Jewish yoke," "Bring the kike Putin to court," "Down with the Israeli occupiers," "Down with the power of Jewish fascism and bandit capitalism," and "Bring the lying Russophobic and pro-Zionist television to justice." Demonstrators carried a mock coffin draped with the American, British, and Israeli flags.

Members of the National Great Power Party, which was recently registered by the Justice Ministry, handed out antisemitic cartoons and lists of "the Jewish Revolutionary Government" and held signs that read: "If you take away the money of the 50 richest Jewish families, wars and revolutions would stop."

SKINHEADS STORM MARKET; POLICE DENY ETHNIC VIOLENCE. A wave of racist violence continues in Russia in the wake of the Moscow hostage crisis. According to "Moskovsky Komsomolets" of October 26, an organized skinhead attack took place in the market of the Moscow Oblast city of Chekhov on October 25. At around 11 a.m., a dozen masked men armed with baseball bats and dressed in black with combat boots stormed the market, yelling, "Everybody get on the ground!" At first, the traders wondered if the attackers were terrorists or police. But their motive became clear when the masked men started beating the dozen or so non-Russian traders while leaving alone anybody who looked Russian. One Azeri woman had her arm broken; others were also injured. The attackers then smashed stalls belonging to non-Russians. A lone guard managed to detain two of the attackers and handed them over to the police.

Local police, however, offered a different story: Three teenagers broke a video game at the market, and there was no fight with non-Russian market traders. The "Moskovsky Komsomolets" reporter was skeptical of the official version. "Chekhov is literally at the boiling point," he wrote. "City residents are furious at the actions of the provocateurs and the inaction of the police. They have complained more than once that the nationalists feel impunity in the city. The local administration needs to immediately put into place a serious system of security at the market places, like in Moscow… Otherwise, any provocative action of youths could become the detonator of a real war on ethnic grounds. And who knows what that could lead to?"

The reporter quoted an anonymous resident of Chekhov as saying that skinheads paint their swastikas around the city, gather in the evenings at the Druzhba House of Culture where they make speeches calling for local youth to join their movement, and post announcements of the time and place of their meetings in train stations.

POLICE AND SKINHEADS TARGET AZERIS IN MOSCOW. An Azerbaijani worker was killed and about 15 injured when a riot police squad raided a fruit and vegetable storage warehouse outside Moscow, the Associated Press reported on November 1. Gasym Ajdarli, 19, suffocated after the police severely beat him and then dumped several beaten Azeri workers on top of him, Azerbaijan Embassy official Farkhad Agamaliev told the AP. Of the other Azeri workers beaten, two of them were in serious condition, Agamaliev said. According to him, the police arrived at the warehouse in Mytishchi, a Moscow suburb, and demanded money from the workers, seized the workers' cell phones, money, and wedding rings, then beat them. Mytishchi authorities have issued a denial.

Interfax reported a similar death, but with several discrepancies. The dispatch said that an Azeri national -- identified as Gasym, 22 -- died after a beating by intoxicated police officers in the Moscow suburb of Dolgoprudny. A police source told Interfax that Gasym was among 83 people detained for not having Moscow registration papers on them. He died of heart failure in the police station, the police source said.

During his two-day stay in Moscow after the hostage crisis, Arif Yunus, identified as an Azerbaijani expert on conflict resolution, told the Baku newspaper "525 Qazet" that he had witnessed four inter-ethnic conflicts instigated by Russian skinheads in the metro. On three occasions, Azeris were beaten, and on one occasion, Tajiks. He also heard about similar incidents in markets and elsewhere, with Georgians, Armenians, and other people from the Caucasus as victims. He called the situation in Moscow "tense." He charged that Azeris arriving in Moscow are told to present an identification card, in Russian, from a notary, in addition to their passports, and that allegedly the two governments had agreed on this procedure that he protested as discriminatory. He found that the border control officers make such demands only on people coming from the Caucasus.

CHECHENS BEING EXPELLED FROM MOSCOW, HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS SAY. Since the terrorist seizure of a theater on Dubrovskaya street on October 23, police are detaining Chechens in Moscow and taking their photos and fingerprints, without producing documents authorizing these activities, charged Svetlana Gannushkina of the Memorial Human Rights Center and Yelena Burtina of the Civilian Assistance Committee at a press conference on November 5. They said that ignoring regulations and official promises, the law enforcement agencies are in fact expelling Chechens from the Russian capital. Ganushkina added that some of her colleagues who registered families of Chechen refugees in their apartments are unable to extend their residency registration. The police claim that people from the Caucasus cannot be registered in Moscow, and if they are registered for some reason, this residency registration can be valid for no more than ten days. The human rights activists warned that the post-Dubrovskaya reprisal "breeds ethnic enmity" and "discredits official statements that reprisals against Chechens cannot be allowed."

MOSCOW OBLAST IS DEPORTING UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS. On October 31, Russia deported a group of 13 Iraqis by plane, with the Iraqi embassy paying their fare, according to Channel 3 TV. Correspondent Olesya Shakhbazova said that the Iraqis had been detained several days earlier on the Moscow-Minsk highway. They had no IDs and could speak little Russian and English. Later, with the help of a translator, it emerged that they were in the region illegally, victims of swindlers who had offered them jobs but took away their identity documents. For the next two weeks, the Iraqis lived at the detention center of the town of Serpukhov near Moscow where policemen claim that the conditions are better than in some Moscow hotels. The head of the center said that the illegals cost the state dearly, each of them 150 rubles a day, including meals. Back in Iraq, their punishment for leaving the country illegally can be as severe as life imprisonment.

According to the television correspondent, an illegal channel taking Arabs to developed countries has existed for some time. They enter Russia through one of the Central Asian republics such as Kazakhstan that do not require visas. The price is $6,000, and the "guides" promise them jobs with high salaries, in Russia or further west.

The TV station said that following the seizure of the theater on Dubrovskaya street on October 23, law-enforcement agencies of Moscow city and the region started a wide-scale operation and deported more than 279 people who had no passports or registration papers on them.

RUSSIAN MEMORIALS GLORIFY STATE, DIMINISH INDIVIDUALS, WRITER NOTES. In an essay on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Konstanty Gebert, a writer for the leading Polish daily "Gazeta Wyborcza," predicted in "USA Today" that a memorial will be built at the site of the predawn raid by Russian commandos on Chechen terrorists holding many hundreds of hostages in a theater in Moscow. Like the monuments erected to commemorate the Red Army emerging victorious over the Nazis in Leningrad and Stalingrad, and the memorial to the sailors lost when the Kursk submarine sank, Gebert argued, the Dubrovskaya "memorial will not commemorate the horrible deaths of Russians sacrificed by their state. Rather, it will glorify the state that sent them to their end." In Russia, secrets trump lives, and Gebert recalls: "In the Kursk's case, the survivors of the explosion of an unsafe experimental torpedo were left to die under the sea two years ago because foreign rescuers might have gleaned some military secrets while saving lives. In the Moscow theater, hostages were knocked out by an overdose of gas intended to incapacitate their captors. Many died because officials refused to tell medical staff what gas had been used, or the antidote." Gebert acknowledges that information about the gas might be useful to other terrorists, but he noted, the release of that information "was indispensable if lives were to be saved, there and then. Given a choice between the lives of its citizens and the protection of its interests, the Russian state once again did not hesitate." The essay's conclusion: "It is the consistency over time and over regimes that makes Russian policy scary. Indeed, it reflects how far Russia remains from the notion of a democracy."

SKINHEADS SUSPECTED OF VANDALIZING JEWISH TOMBS AND RUSSIAN CHURCH NABBED. Two 16-year-old youths arrested in Krasnoyarsk over last weekend for vandalizing a Russian Orthodox church are suspected by police as having been also involved in an August 2001 attack on the city's Jewish cemetery, according to local media reports. One of the youths was found to be in possession of a large quantity of skinhead literature and the newspaper of the neo-Nazi movement Russian National Unity. According to the national newspaper "Gazeta" on November 5, Krasnoyarsk police officials stated in connection with the case that there are no nationalistic groups in the city.

SURVEY SAYS SPAIN TOPS ANTI-JEWISH FEELING IN WESTERN EUROPE. Antisemitism in Spain is worse than in other European countries, according to a survey of five West European countries presented last week at a conference organized by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in New York. Some 34 percent of the people interviewed in Spain expressed antisemitic sentiments, followed by 23 percent in Italy, 22 percent in Switzerland, 19 percent in Austria, and 7 percent in the Netherlands. The survey was carried out over two weeks in September, and it included 500 respondents in each of the five countries. "The results of the survey are very disturbing and worrying," ADL Director Abraham Foxman told the Tel Aviv daily "Ha'aretz." "The survey proves that versions of prejudices against Jews and classic forms of antisemitism that we were convinced had disappeared from Europe still exist and may even become stronger."

FRANCE TO SHUT DOWN REFUGEE CAMP NEAR CHANNEL. As part of its new understanding with Britain on stemming the tide of Third World migrants to the UK, the French government no longer accepts new arrivals at the Sangatte refugee camp and will soon phase out the camp, which is near the entrance to the train tunnel linking the two countries. Refugees have complained about conditions in the overcrowded camp, and many of them, mostly Afghans and Iraqi Kurds, have died as they hid themselves in various parts of the trains that travel through the tunnel. In the past, Britain charged that the camp serves as a staging area for migrants attempting to enter England, and France countered that "soft" British policies attract migrants. As part of the new entente, Britain is tightening its immigration rules.

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * * After criticizing the Duma's adoption of an "anti-terrorism" bill curtailing the freedom of the press and the Duma's rejection of a proposal to set up a commission to study the police's behavior during the hostage crisis, "The Wall Street Journal" noted in an editorial on November 4: "Such tactics might conceal problems, as similar repression did in the old Soviet days, but they won't solve it. It would be a shame if Russia's struggle to create a viable civil society becomes another casualty of the senseless war in Chechnya."

BELARUS PENTECOSTALS DEFY REGIME, RUSSIAN PATRIARCH BLESSES ANTISEMITES

In the lands of the former Soviet Union as well as elsewhere, leaders of organized religion have opportunities to influence people and events. They may act courageously to protest wrongdoing or they may endorse it, deviously or otherwise. Two recent cases dramatize their choices.

1. New Belarus Law Denies Freedom of Conscience, Church Leader Says
In Belarus, the Full Gospel Union of Pentecostal Churches declared on November 1 that it will defy the repressive new religion law signed by President Aleksandr Lukashenko the day earlier. "The entry of this law into force will be a blow to freedom of conscience, one of the fundamental freedoms given to individuals by God and on which basic democratic institutions are founded," said Pastor Aleksandr Sakovich, the head of the group, which unites 64 registered Pentecostal churches in Belarus, according to the Oxford-based Keston News Service, which received the text of the statement. "We believe that in this case the authorities have exceeded the powers given by God… The newly-adopted law forces us to violate the basic law on which our faith is based: the Law of God. As believers, we have the full right not to obey laws and decrees that go against our faith and conscience."

Two days later, Dmitry Zelensky, assistant pastor of the Jesus Christ Full Gospel Church in Minsk, voiced his agreement: "If the provisions of the law seriously complicate and in time make impossible the holding of services, communal prayers and preaching of the Gospel, we retain the right not to submit to its provisions." He expressed his concern about the new censorship requirements introduced by the law that requires all publications imported or distributed within Belarus to undergo compulsory prior censorship by the State Committee for Religious and Ethnic Affairs. He continued: "We are against the division of denominations into 'right' and 'wrong' denominations."

It remains to be seen how Lukashenko will react to the challenge by the Full Gospel Union. But it appears that the Union is prepared to face the arrests and kangaroo courts, the beatings and the mysterious disappearances of dissident personalities that the Lukashenko regime has applied in the past, which may in turn give a fresh impetus to the widespread popular opposition to the last remaining dictatorship on the European continent.

2. Patriarch Alexi Congratulates Antisemitic Television Program/Magazine
The head of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexi II, warmly congratulated the television show "Russian House" -- and the magazine by the same name -- on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of its founding, according to an October 16 report by the Blagovest News Agency. The show has featured virulently antisemitic material, conducted interviews with extremist elements within the Orthodox Church, and hosted representatives of the neo-Nazi group Russian National Unity. Nevertheless, Patriarch Alexi declared in his letter that "Russian House" "has earned its reputation as a fighter against any sort of untruth and a champion of the high ideals of Holy Russia. ["Russian House"] gathers under its hospitable firmament all of those who love Russia."

UCSJ has reported that a typical example of "Russian House" broadcast material was a June 1999 show hosting an "expert" who claimed that the Holocaust never took place. In shows broadcast earlier that year, Jews were accused of being part of a conspiracy to take over the world. During the summer of 1999, a program focused on what its host Aleksandr Krutov called the "ancient cabbalistic" murder of Tsar Nicholas II. Krutov asked: "In the murder of Nicholas II did the two thousand-year-old struggle that has been conducted against Christianity since the crucifixion of Christ find its logical culmination?"

The newspaper "Russian House" follows the same editorial policies as the television program. Its August 1999 issue carried an article that defended the pre-Revolutionary Black Hundreds, responsible for the worst pogroms of the period, and blamed the Jews for provoking the 1903 Kishinev pogrom.

While the patriarch himself may refrain from voicing antisemitic sentiments, his endorsement of a notorious television program as "the champion of the high ideals of holy Russia" makes one question what his own ideas may be.
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