Volume 2, Number 46
Friday, November 22, 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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RACIST INCIDENTS SPREAD ACROSS RUSSIA. In the wake of the Moscow hostage crisis, incidents of racist violence and discrimination are reported with alarming regularity throughout Russia.

On November 15, the official RIA-Novosti news agency reported the arrest of a ninth grader and his 16-year-old friend in connection with a November 8 assault on a Vietnamese man. The youths, who confessed the crime, were not able to explain their motive to the police. The victim suffered a broken rib and numerous bruises, and ended up in a hospital. On November 14, Interfax reported that three youths, including a 14-year-old girl, were arrested in Moscow after they allegedly battered a man from the Caucasus until he was dead. The unidentified man's body was found on Trofimov Street, in the southern part of the city. The teenagers were arrested shortly afterwards. They had blood on their clothes when they foolishly revisited the scene of the crime. On November 13, Interfax reported that an Israeli artist in Moscow for the celebration of Chief Rabbi of Russia Adolf Shaevich's 65th birthday was beaten in the metro, along with his wife. The attackers robbed Boris Khaimov's documents after they beat him, thus allowing for the possibility that the attack was an ordinary robbery rather than an antisemitic assault.

On November 15, "Moscow Times" carried an article on the previous day's State Duma hearing on violence and discrimination against Chechens both inside and outside Chechnya. According to the article, State Duma deputy Fandas Safiullin from the Republic of Tatarstan, told the Duma that he knew of ten Tatars who have been refused jobs in the wake of the hostage crisis because of their ethnicity. "A mopping-up operation against my people has already started," he said. "What will be next?" Up until now, Tatars, despite their generally Asiatic appearance, have not been typical targets for discrimination or attacks by neo-Nazi groups, probably due to the fact that after centuries of coexistence, most Russians consider them less "alien" than people from the Caucasus.

Similar reports have come in from the provinces. On November 6, the Lipetsk newspaper "Provintsialny Reporter" carried an article which began by citing the head of the region's migration service claiming that no racist attacks have taken place in the region in recent weeks. However, the article added that on October 25, a group of youths beat a 25-year-old man with an oriental appearance on a tram. The next day, several dozen drunken youths with closely shaved haircuts and wearing swastika armbands started a fight with Azeris who work in a private auto repair shop at the Technical School #21. The youths turned over trashcans, then approached cars parked near the shop and shouted nationalistic slogans. A teacher stopped the youths by calling the police. Several of them were taken to the Oktyarbsky police station, but were let go because they are minors.

On November 8, UCSJ's Voronezh monitor Roman Zholud reported that local police have "begun hunting for people from the Caucasus." According to a student at Voronezh State University, on Sunday, November 3, OMON troops showed up in her dormitory with a list of all the Chechen students who live there. They gathered them in one room, supposedly to check their registration, and then savagely beat them. That same evening, according to another student interviewed by Zholud, police detained several Ingush students at the "Fanat" night club. They were taken to the Northern District police station where they were beaten.

In contrast, in Sverdlovsk Oblast, officials have been showing concern for local Chechens. According to a November 13 report by "Ekho Moskvy" radio, the region's education department has announced that Chechen parents should report to the department any incidents of discrimination against their children in local schools. The announcement came, the report noted, after "several incidents of teachers groundlessly punishing and humiliating Chechen school children." The department threatened to fire any teacher who engages in such behavior.

PRO-MOSCOW CHECHEN LEADERS URGE PUTIN TO STOP ARMY MISCONDUCT. On November 19, pro-Moscow Chechen leaders appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin to put a stop to "illegal activities" by Russian troops that they said have intensified in the wake of the hostage crisis in Moscow, Interfax reported. The signatories, including the highest-ranking Chechens in the republic's government, contended that the great majority of Chechens opposed the hostage-taking in Moscow. Nevertheless, the statement continued, since that attack federal troops have used armored vehicles "on a massive scale to abduct civilians in the dead of night" and their excesses have led to "a drastic deterioration of the political situation in the republic." Numerous complaints have been filed but remain unanswered, which plays into the hands of separatists. "If night time abductions and killings of civilians continue," the appeal warned, "a social upheaval may occur and every positive achievement of the recent years may be lost."

Col. Boris Podoprigora, deputy commander of the Combined Force in the North Caucasus, issued a stiff response. He told Interfax that the Russian military "faithfully abides by the principles of legitimacy in carrying out activities aimed at timely and effective prevention of unconstitutional manifestation and offences against law and order."

FIVE SENTENCED TO JAIL FOR 2001 MOSCOW RIOT. On November 20, the Moscow City Court announced prison sentences for an organizer of the mass disturbances in the market in the Moscow suburb Tsaritsyno on October 30, 2001 and for four of its participants, Interfax reported. The court found Mikhail Volkov guilty of organizing the attack that led to three murders and sentenced him to nine years in a high-security penal colony. Four others who took part in the attacks were sentenced to three-year terms in a regular penal colony.

INDEFINITE POSTPONEMENT FOR MURDER TRIAL. The trial of Russian Army Colonel Yuri Budanov, which was scheduled to resume in Rostov-na-Donu on November 19, has been postponed indefinitely following the Health Ministry's recall of the findings of a second psychiatric examination, according to Interfax. Budanov is charged with the rape and murder of a young Chechen woman in March 2000. He pleaded temporary insanity, and now it appears that the case, which galvanized nationalists in his defense, may be dropped quietly.

U.S. OFFICIALS STUDY PLIGHT OF MESKHETIAN TURKS. A delegation of six U.S. officials responsible for refugee and population issues and a representative from the Russian office of the International Organization for Migration traveled to Krasnodar Kray last month to investigate the plight of the Meskhetian Turks, the Novorossiisk Human Rights Committee reported on November 11. The Meskhetians are a Turkic Muslim minority deported to Uzbekistan in 1944, from which they fled pogroms in 1989. They are suffering persecution at the hands of Governor Aleksandr Tkachyov, who refuses to grant them citizenship and other basic civil rights in violation of the Russian Constitution, human rights monitors say. Vadim Karastelyov, head of the local Novorossiisk Human Rights Committee, says some 13,000 Meskhetians have been forced off their land and denied social services due to lack of official documentation, and face deportation.

Russian media reports claiming that the United States has already decided to grant the Meskhetians refugee status and transport them to America are exaggerated, Karastelyov told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He said that the U.S. delegation was only studying various options to handle the population in crisis. "Izvestiya" declared: "The Meskhetians' lives have become truly unbearable."

FSB QUESTIONS EASTERN-RITE CATHOLIC PRIEST ON CHURCH ACTIVITIES. For the first time since the end of the Soviet regime, an officer of the local FSB (the former KGB) regularly questions an Eastern-rite Catholic priest in the Omsk region of western Siberia, writes Geraldine Fagan, Moscow correspondent for the Keston News Service. According to Father Sergi Golovanov, an FSB officer first contacted him this spring "in order to discuss the prevention of religious extremism." During a subsequent meeting at the FSB's Omsk city premises, the officer inquired about the activities of the Catholic Church. The officer also asked for the names of teachers in higher educational institutions frequenting Omsk's Catholic parish and questioned him about the German Catholic charitable foundation Renovabis. He invited Father Sergi to contact him in case he receives "threats from extremists."

The same FSB officer subsequently telephoned every month to inquire about the church's activities, Father Sergi told Keston. The officer asked whether there were any protesters outside the Eastern-rite parish during the nationwide anti-Catholic demonstration in Russia on April 28. On September 5, the officer appeared at the parish and asked about the Catholic Church's missionary plans in the Omsk region. "From this I understood that the era of freedom is over," Father Sergi said. "Again someone looking over my shoulder."

Father Sergi mentioned that reports in "Omskaya Gazeta" on October 1 and "Novaya Gazeta" on October 7 cited Justice Department and law enforcement agency officials to the effect that the state has "the right to control everything." Father Sergi has also been told: "Control is not interference in your activity. There are, have always been, and will be controllers. The state must know. Absence of control means anarchy."

FOREIGN STUDENTS ATTACKED IN UKRAINE. Foreign students in the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil blocked a road in the city earlier this month in protest against attacks targeting them, according to UCSJ's Kyiv monitor Maksim Baryshnikov. On October 27, five foreign students enrolled at the Ternopil Medical Academy were shot at from a passing car as they walked along Bandera Prospekt. Nobody was injured though the attackers used an automatic rifle. More attacks have been reported since then, about one a week. Local police say they are investigating the assaults, but they refuse to acknowledge that racism is a factor and are treating the incidents as ordinary hooliganism. While attacks against foreign students are common in Russia, such incidents have been rare in Ukraine.

BELARUSSIAN LAWMAKERS PROTEST RAZING OF JEWISH LANDMARKS. Seventy-five lawmakers of the 109-member Belarusian parliament have appealed to President Aleksandr Lukashenko to stop the destruction of Jewish cultural landmarks in the capital Minsk, the Associated Press reported. In what the AP called "a rare show of dissent" in a parliament subservient to Lukashenko, the appeal demanded the immediate end to construction on the site of a 19th century synagogue and over the foundation of a ruined 16th century synagogue. The lawmakers said they would form a joint commission with Jewish organizations to investigate "the actions of top officials in the barbaric destruction of the historic center of Minsk." The AP quoted Yakov Gutman, head of the World Association of Belarusian Jews, as saying: "Belarusian lawmakers are making the first attempt to stop antisemitism at government level." The report also cited a remark by top lawmaker Sergei Kostyan, deputy chairman of the international affairs committee: "We live in a Slavic country, not a Jewish-Masonic one."

'DER SPIEGEL' REVEALS GERMAN FAR-RIGHT SUPPORT FOR HIZB UT-TAHRIR. The fundamentalist group Hizb ut-Tahrir is intensifying its work in Germany, and its aim is to set up "a transcontinental theocracy" and "to eliminate Israel," the left-of-center "Der Spiegel" reported on November 18. The German magazine noted the emergence of "a strange alliance" between Islamic fundamentalists and German extremists such as Udo Voigt, chairman of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany, and Horst Mahler, the party's legal counsel, who is a former member of the Red Army Faction and used to be a friend of Palestinian terrorists. The two were present at a recent meeting at Berlin's Technical University addressed by Islamist Shaker Assem. "Hatred for the United States and Israel is the connecting link between Islamists and rightist forces," the magazine wrote, "which is why Voigt promised the assembled Muslims at the end of the meeting that 'In case of any major conflicts, national-minded Germans will not side with the Americans.'"

Though most Muslim countries, including several in former Soviet Central Asia, have banned Hizb ut-Tahrir, it is legal in Germany. German police recently searched 27 apartments of suspected Hizb ut-Tahrir members. For more than a year, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has been observing the group, "Der Spiegel" reported, and it quoted Heino Vahldieck, head of the Hamburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution, as saying that they are a "dangerous organization working conspiratorially on a high intellectual level."

FRENCH COURT DROPS SUIT TO BAN ORIANA FALLACI'S BOOK ON ISLAM. On November 20, a Paris court dismissed a suit to ban "The Rage and the Pride,"' the best-selling book by noted Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that critics charge incites hatred of Muslims, news agencies reported. The dismissal was based on the improper filing of the suit. One of the human rights groups asking for the ban, the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, said it would resubmit the case. The plaintiffs, which included two other human rights groups, objected to passages such as the one saying that Muslims "multiply like rats." The Movement Against Racism charged that the "book deliberately makes all the world's Muslims accountable and guilty for the September 11 attacks.'' Fallaci's lawyer, Gilles Goldnadel, told the court that "my client is aware of being scandalous" and argued that the book has the right to exist in the name of freedom of expression.

* * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * * "The situation of the Islamic states today has much to do with the world wars and Cold War, Zionism, imperialism, and U.S. and British oil politics," commented columnist William Pfaff of "The International Herald Tribune" on November 21. "It has even more to do with the Islamic peoples themselves: the failure of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Islamic civilization to develop effective self-government to replace the Ottoman Turkish system that collapsed in World War I."

EDUCATION MINISTRY TO INTRODUCE RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY AS A SCHOOL SUBJECT
Despite Protests from Many Quarters, the Orthodox Church Is Likely to Get Its Way

Now that President Vladimir Putin has got religion, Russian children may soon be studying Orthodox culture in school. Russia's Ministry of Education is proposing as a school subject over the entire eleven years "The Story of the Orthodox Religion" and "Orthodox Literature and the Moral Culture of Orthodoxy," TVS reported on November 19. The ministry envisages the subject as optional, and the curriculum would be up to local authorities and school administrations. Many teachers have already expressed reservations about the wisdom of introducing this subject.

Last week, Education Minister Vladimir Filippov released a 30-page description of an optional course called "Orthodox Culture," the "Moscow Times" reported. Filippov said that he was submitting the course, developed by Orthodox educators, only for "consideration." According to the "Moscow Times," the document is a catalogue of themes, including the Bible, Orthodox tradition, asceticism, liturgy, literature, and art. By the end of the course, a student would be asked to write a paper on one of 64 topics, such as "Faith and Science," "Moscow as the Third Rome," and "Orthodox Understanding of Freedom."

The Education Ministry says that the course, which it recommends teaching once a week in primary school and twice a week in secondary school, is to be part of the main curriculum, but attendance should be voluntary. "Russia is a multinational country, and even within one subject of the federation there are places where there are practically no Orthodox," Interfax quoted Filippov as saying. On the other hand, he said, Orthodox culture has existed in Russia for more than a thousand years, and "an objective need" exists for its study in school.

"It means the ministry does not mind if such courses are introduced," Hierodeacon Kiprian Yashchenko, dean of the pedagogical department at St. Tikhon Orthodox Theological Institute and one of the authors of the course, told the "Moscow Times." "You know our bureaucrats -- they use their offices according to their worldview. Most of them are atheists and they say it is impossible because the school is separate from the church. Yes, we are separate from the state, but we can cooperate, can't we?"

Yashchenko, who has a doctorate in pedagogy, said he led the group of educators who put together the program from what is already being tested in the Noginsk district of the Moscow region, Smolensk, Kursk, Belgorod, and elsewhere in Russia. While the intention is to immerse children in the Orthodox worldview, he explained, the course is taught by regular teachers and does not include any church ritual. He added: "Priests may be consultants."

In its November 19 report, TVS cited one headmaster who emphasized that "the interests of all the children" must be considered. He expressed concern with "contradictions" that may emerge as children come from various religious backgrounds. Countering that view were officials from the Ministry of Education who maintained that the subject, called "the Principles of the Orthodox Culture," "is exclusively secular -- and not religious teaching." Boris Kosinskiy, press secretary of the Yekaterinburg eparchy, argued that before 1917, presenting the Orthodox way of life "used to be an ordinary thing." He said that when Orthodox divinity was taught, followers of the Muslim, Jewish, and other religions "were never made to attend these lessons," but were led to another room where teachers of their respective faiths offered instruction.

Lev Ponomaryov's group, For Human Rights, has analyzed the textbook and found numerous antisemitic and racist elements. On November 15, UCSJ's Moscow bureau reported that a court hearing initiated by Ponomaryov to block the distribution of the book in schools was disrupted when the judge got up and left, and later sent in bailiffs to clear the court.

"The textbook's authors help the growth of xenophobia and nationalism in our society," Interfax quoted Ponomaryov as saying. "This textbook, which is already used in state schools, imposes the views of one confession on school children and thus violates the principle of a secular state." Ponomaryov singled out a passage that presents the principle of freedom of speech and religious conviction solely as "terror against the Russian Orthodox Church, its priests, and parishioners." According to Ponomaryov, the textbook takes a "primitive antisemitic position" on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, arguing that the crucifixion happened because the Jews were obsessed with "earthly well-being and power over other peoples" rather than spiritual values. Ponomaryov compares this claim to Nazi propaganda, which also attributed "amoral qualities to a defined ethnic group." Another passage defines a "sect" as a group that separates itself from the "ruling church" -- presumably the Russian Orthodox Church -- and blames "sects" for the "many misfortunes and the suffering of Russians." Elsewhere, non-Russians are referred to as "new residents" who "don't always behave as positively as Russians do on the territory of a traditionally Orthodox state."

Opponents of religious education in public schools -- who at various times have included State Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov, Deputy Speaker Irina Khakamada, and the Yabloko party -- argue that it will divide people and spread xenophobia. "This document smacks of the Middle Ages and obscurantism," government spokesman Alexei Volin was quoted in "Gazeta" as saying. "If the Education Ministry considers it necessary to introduce studies in religion, the course should include the basics of all religious world views and the history of atheism in addition."

There is strong opposition to the program within the Education Ministry. "We have not produced, ordered, reviewed or issued any such program! We have a [secular] religion studies program, but no 'Orthodox Culture!'" Tamara Tyulyaeva, an official with the Educational Ministry's department of general education, said angrily in a telephone interview with the "Moscow Times." "There were such attempts, but we have a simple answer: We are a secular school system and will never introduce any confessional program -- neither Moslem, nor Jewish, nor our dear Orthodox. Otherwise we'll get such a mess!"

The Orthodox Church has long argued that secular religion classes do not offer students a choice of worldview, because religion is taught from a nonreligious perspective. An Orthodox class, however, would add "a moral dimension" otherwise missing in the post-Soviet school system and would help reverse the proliferation of crime, drug-addiction, and alcoholism, the church said, and Putin has expressed his agreement with that view. "The moral disorientation of many young people, their loss of a meaning in life, becomes the soil for various vices and threatens Russia's future," Patriarch Alexi II wrote in an address to a state-church conference on education in October. "That is why all of us -- religious leaders, [state] authorities, and society -- have to realize that school should give not only a sum of knowledge, but also an upbringing."* * * *

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