Volume One, Number 2
Friday, July 6, 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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ANTI-CHECHEN BIAS AND VIOLENCE RISE. Throughout Russia, the war in Chechnya has prompted a sharp rise in racist bias against all dark-skinned people from the Caucasus, especially Chechens, but also Georgians, Azeris, Armenians and numerous other ethnic groups, according to an 18-page report issued on July 3 by UCSJ: Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union. The report, which compiled evidence from 26 of Russia's regions, finds that calls for the expulsion of all Chechens have become common and notes a high level of anti-Moslem prejudice, as evidenced by the opposition to the construction of mosques in several Russian cities. "The defamation of the Chechen people in the official and non-official media, large-scale discriminatory police actions against Chechens in Moscow and other cities, and government tolerance of grassroots violence against Chechens have been greeted with joy by Russia's hate groups, who thrive on the sense of impunity that the government's anti-Chechen witch hunt has created," said Micah H. Naftalin, UCSJ's national director. He pointed out dangerous implications for other ethnic and religious minorities who may face similar persecution in the future. He added, "This is yet another example of how democracy and civil society in Russia have been undermined by the war in Chechnya." The report documents instances of officials encouraging negative stereotyping of Chechens most notably in Moscow, but also in other cities and regions. A typical incident occurred in March 2001 in Moscow Oblast where law enforcement officers took part in harassing and beating Chechens. In other instances, officials did little or nothing to prevent grassroots violence, and at times government officials themselves incited hatred against Chechens through racist statements in the media that demonized the entire Chechen people as enemies of the state.

FAR RIGHT AND LEFT JOIN TO PROTEST MURDER TRIAL OF RUSSIAN COLONEL. The trial of Col. Yuri Budanov, accused of the rape and murder of an 18-year-old Chechen woman, is still in progress in Rostov. After the trial opened, on February 28, local extremists, including members of the neo-Nazi group Russian National Unity (RNU), the National Bolshevik Party and a number of Cossacks joined Communist demonstrators outside the courthouse to protest the trial. Their chants of
"Freedom for Budanov!" were so loud at times that they drowned out the court proceedings. Some demonstrators broke through the triple cordon of security surrounding the courthouse and burst into the court room shouting "Freedom!" Since then, the demonstrations in Rostov have shrunk. However, in Kamchatka a recent RNU rally in support of Budanov was attended by the region’s governor, Mikhail Mashkovtsev, and RNU activities on Budanov's behalf have been reported in Krasnodar and Novgorod.   

LAST BIG RUSSIAN RADIO STATION LOSES ITS INDEPENDENCE. The end is fast approaching for Russia’s most prominent independent radio station, "Echo of Moscow." On July 5, most of the top management resigned after a court put the station under the authority of the government-controlled natural gas monopoly Gazprom. "As of today, we are a state-run company," said deputy chief editor Irina Tsvei, one of the four deputy chief editors who resigned in protest. Chief editor Alexei Venediktov stayed on to fight for the station's independence, Tsvei added. Gazprom insists that its media takeovers - which included NTV television network, the newspaper "Segodnya" and the magazine "Itogi" - are strictly business decisions stemming from huge loans to tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky. While Russian authorities have accused Gusinsky of fraud and money laundering, his supporters charge political persecution. Gusinsky has been living abroad, and a Spanish court rejected Moscow's request for extradition. Since the takeover, NTV's critical reporting on President Vladimir Putin and the war in Chechnya declined sharply, "Segodnya" closed down and "Itogi's" editorial staff was fired.

HOLOCAUST MONUMENT DESECRATED. A monument to 3,000 Jews from the Smolensk ghetto murdered by the Nazis in 1942 was recently desecrated multiple times, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Unidentified individuals painted swastikas and antisemitic slogans on the monument, located in Vyazovenki, Smolensk Oblast. The ADL called on law enforcement agencies to find and arrest the culprits.

ESTONIAN PRESIDENT MERI REFUSES TO SIGN RELIGION LAW. President Lennart Meri has refused to sign a new law on churches and congregations, citing
"disproportionate restrictions" on the exercise of religious freedom, his office told Keston News Service. Opposition to the law from a variety of religious groups in Estonia had focused on a provision banning foreign-led religious communities. Meri described this as "an intrusion into the sphere of autonomy of religious unions," guaranteed by the constitution. Among the religious communities welcoming Meri's refusal to sign the law was the Russian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate, which does not have registration in Estonia. 

CHARGES DROPPED AGAINST NINE BAPTISTS BUT PASTOR FACES PRISON. Administrative charges against nine Baptists in Tashkent were dropped on June 29, following the intervention of the Uzbek government's Committee for Religious Affairs (CRA), Keston News Service learned. It had been expected that the nine Baptists interrogated by the police following a raid on church services on June 24 would be fined
between ten and fifty times the minimum monthly wage. But a few days later, Pastor Nikolai Shevchenko was told that he faces an eight-year prison term, three more than the maximum penalty set by Article 216 of the criminal code for the offense of leading an unregistered church. For the past five years, "bureaucratic obstruction" has prevented the church from gaining registration, Shevchenko said.

CZECH REPUBLIC SCORED ON VIOLENCE AND BIAS AGAINST ROMA. In comments submitted on June 29 to the United Nations Human Rights Committee (HRC) in Geneva, the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) charged that Roma (Gypsies)
in the Czech Republic continue to be "the victims of racially-motivated violence and pervasive racial discrimination." In its submission, ERRC documented how the Czech government has failed to comply with its obligations to prevent, punish and remedy the widespread abuse systematically perpetrated against Roma both by state authorities and
private individuals. The comments were presented on the occasion of HRC's first examination, scheduled for this month, of Czech compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Budapest-based ERRC is a public interest law organization monitoring the rights of Roma and providing legal defense for victims of human rights violations

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * *
Asked by Judge Richard May of The Hague international court if he wanted to have the indictment read to him, Slobodan Milosevic shot back: "That's your problem." Judge May responded: "Mr. Milosevic, you are now before this tribunal and you're within the jurisdiction of it. You will be tried by the tribunal."

THE END OF IMMUNITY
ANALYSIS
For much of his 13 years of ruling Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic seemed to
be the European leader who came closest to qualify as an understudy of Hitler. Though many a South Slav has wagered a bottle of slivovitz that Milosevic too would kill himself before he would face a trial, he is no longer in a Belgrade prison, preparing his defense against charges of theft and corruption, but in the custody of The Hague international court accused of crimes against humanity. Human rights activists cite the overriding principle of his 1999 indictment as a war criminal and dismiss his supporters' cry of "abduction" and a ruling by a Belgrade court, packed by his appointees, against his extradition.

Regardless of his refusal to recognize the international court's jurisdiction, the prosecution is setting a critical precedent that a person is legally responsible for crimes against humanity even if he served as head of state at the time - or precisely because of that. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the trial "one of the most significant events in postwar European history" because a nation turned over to an international tribunal "one of the most dangerous and maniacal European leaders since Hitler." Though the precedent may not deter other dictators bent on a rampage, it may prompt underlings to stop being blind followers of their "Fuhrer" and dare acts of disobedience. Didn't Hitler's security chief Heinrich Himmler, dubbed by
his American biographer Richard Breitman "the architect of genocide," try
to strike a deal with the Allies during the last year of World War II, even suggesting a backroom bargain to free some Jews?

It is still a puzzle how Milosevic, a colorless, opportunistic communist apparatchik lacking charisma, morphed into a Serbian ultra-nationalist. According to his critics in Yugoslavia, he began by cynically choosing "the nationalist card" to gain popularity, and he became increasingly "drunk" once he saw that his rhetoric could sway masses of Serbs. Did he still playact in Kosovo, the site of the historic Serb defeat by the Turks in
1389, when he fired up close to a million Serbs by pledging to go to war to make sure that no Serb would need to fear for his life? As fighting raged with breakaway Croatia, he warned Serbs about "dark, conservative forces" aimed at the Serbian nation. "We have no choice... but to stop them." Did his intransigence and cruelty in trying to crush Slovenes, Croatians, Bosnian Moslems and Kosovo Albanians come from a gambler's desperation, or did he deliberately set himself on a suicidal course?

No Serb will accept as mere coincidence that Milosevic was flown to The Hague exactly 10 years after the outbreak of war in Slovenia and Croatia, which declared independence on the fated Serbian holiday of St. Vitus, the date of Serbian defeat in Kosovo 600 years agoThroughout the wars of Yugoslavia's destruction, Milosevic maintained that Serbs were only victims- of Croatian "fascism," Islamic "fundamentalism" in Bosnia and "NATO imperialism." He called the high Albanian birthrate "demographic genocide." According to the AP, 20,000 died in the Croatian war of independence that ended in 1995. In Bosnia, fighting between 1992 and 1995 killed over 200,000. In Kosovo in 1998-99 an estimated 10,000 died in Serbian ethnic cleansing. The massacres ended only after a 78-day NATO bombing campaign in 1999 led to the withdrawal of all Yugoslav forces. As Serbian police bundled Milosevic into a helicopter in Belgrade on June 28, 2001, he was quoted as saying: "The Hague tribunal … is a political circus set up to destroy the Serbian nation completely."

In The Hague, the prosecution intends to demonstrate that, in the words of the indictment, Milosevic "planned, instigated, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted in a campaign of terror and violence directed at Kosovo Albanian civilians." The indictment argues that the acts of Yugoslav and Serbian military and police forces in Kosovo constituted the planned murder of men, women and children, slaughtered on account of their Albanian ethnicity. For example, the indictment says that on March 25, 1999, Serbian forces entered Belka Crkva. As villagers huddled under a bridge, "a Serbian police patrol opened fire on them, killing 12 persons, including 10 women and children." The men were then ordered to strip and gathered in a stream bed. After they complied, the police opened fire on the men, killing 65 Kosovo Albanians.

Serbs must own up to some responsibility. In the middle of the ethnic Albanian exodus from Kosovo, Serbs who had enjoyed the reputation of being Westernized liberals, such as for instance Aleksa Djilas, condemned reports of Serbian atrocities as vicious NATO propaganda to justify the bombings. Though Djilas said he had no use for Milosevic, he defended the head of state as a nationalist with a heavy burden to save his country. Human rights advocates felt that they were in a small minority despised for thinking that Milosevic was "a mad dog" and that many of the people they grew up with had "gone rabid."

Russian leaders encouraged Milosevic, using the argument of Slavic brotherhood. But Western diplomacy is not guiltless, either. European reactions were dilatory and evasive, and up to the Serbian crackdown on Kosovo, American leaders looked to the Europeans to initiate action. When desperate cries for help reached American officials, they were sympathetic but argued that patient diplomacy could resolve the issues and reduce the
bloodshed, just as they believed earlier that Yugoslav unity could be maintained. American judgments were wide of the mark. At least one key Belgrade expert in the first Bush administration privately maintained that Milosevic was "a businessman interested in making money, the more the merrier," and that he was "a good man learning to exploit Serbian nationalism." Yes, Milosevic was "troublesome," but also "a man we can deal with." As time went on, with each new war more destructive than the previous one and news of one massacre following another, the assessment of Milosevic's character changed, especially after Bill Clinton entered the White House. But the Clinton team, led by Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, focused on driving a hard bargain while relying on Milosevic's cooperation as the keystone of U.S. policy.

Though scheduled for solitary confinement for at least 30 days, Milosevic may eventually face in the prison courtyard fellow detainees who represent the ethnic mosaic of old Yugoslavia. "Solidarity among Serb, Croat and Moslems is unreserved. We never had an argument of any kind," Bosnian Serb indictee Simo Zaric, a veteran of 26 months of detention in The Hague prison, told Reuters. "Milosevic will need a few days to realize where he is and to accept it. But I am convinced he will know how to adapt."

It is one thing for people of good will to adjust to the fact that members of one ethnic group can murder members of another group despite a lifetime of living together as compatriots, neighbors, even relatives. But it is even harder to get over a laconic news report that suggests that convicted perpetrators of ethnic cleansing fraternize in the prison yard.

Zaric is probably right. Milosevic too will chat and mingle among the convicts who murdered Serbs. Killers do belong to a group apart, and at least in this case there is solidarity among them. They are united in their contempt for their prosecutors and the rest of humanity that refuse to understand that they are innocent, and that they were all patriots doing their duty in killing the enemy, a treacherous lot who deserved its fate.

***POSTSCRIPT*** The day after Milosevic's arraigment, Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic of the Bosnian Serb republic arrived in The Hague and said that his government was ready to extradite suspects on the tribunal's wanted list. Up to that announcement, the Serbian republic refused to accept the authority of the court. A few hours earlier, the tribunal's prosecutor called the Bosnian Serb republic the "last safe haven" for indicted war crimes fugitives such as the two most wanted Serbs, wartime political leader Dr. Radovan Karadjic and his top military officer, Gen. Ratko Mladic.