Volume One, Number 3

Volume One, Number 3
Friday, July 13, 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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WILL RUSSIAN TROOPS REBUILD HOUSES THEY DESTROYED IN CHECHNYA? In what may be a public relations gambit or the beginning of a reappraisal, both Russia's top military commander in Chechnya and President Vladimir Putin's spokesman on the war issued unprecedented acknowledgements of responsibility on July 11 for "large-scale crimes" by the Russian military. Gen. Vladimir Moltenskoi surprised his nation by expressing regret over "the lawless acts" of his troops against civilians in house-to-house searches last week. According to Itar-Tass news agency, Moltenskoi pledged that Russian soldiers will compensate Chechen civilians by rebuilding destroyed houses and providing food. He even compared his troops to the Tatar invaders who ravaged Russia in the 13^th century. Appearing on Russian television, Putin spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembsky said: ''The practice of mopping-up raids should be revised, and, maybe, become a thing of the past.'' However, human rights activists are skeptical. They also do not believe the pledge by Chechnya's Deputy Prosecutor Alexander Nikitin, also made on July 11, that a special investigation already in progress will track down the Russian military units responsible for atrocities. Diederik Lohman, director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, told AP that in the past, similar investigations served as "window-dressing to silence critics."

COMMEMORATION OF MASSACRE JOLTS POLES. Sixty years after Poles killed as many as 1,600 Jews in the village of Jedwabne, President Aleksander Kwasniewski asked for forgiveness "in the name of those Polish people whose consciences are shocked by this crime" and laid a wreath at a new monument to the victims. The Catholic Church was not officially represented, The New York Times reported, adding that the nation's highest-ranking prelate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, was quoted as saying that Jews should apologize for collaborating with the Soviets in Poland from 1939 to 1941. Many Jedwabne residents, including parish priest Edward Orlowski, boycotted the ceremony. "Germans are responsible," Orlowski said, "so why should we apologize?" According to a recent book by Polish-American scholar Jan Gross, German soldiers only encouraged the massacre that was planned and carried out by the villagers. The Times noted: "The new evidence has come as a blow to Poles' sense of themselves during the war and now as one of the Eastern European nations that has made the most progress since the fall of Communism." Some 3,000 people from all over the world witnessed the unveiling of a six-foot-high stone monument. The inscription, in Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish, reads: "To the memory of Jews from Jedwabne and the surrounding area, men, women and children, inhabitants of this land, who were murdered and burned alive on this spot on July 10, 1941." Jewish leaders have protested that the inscription did not identify the killers.

EXTRADITION OF CROAT GENERALS MAY TOPPLE GOVERNMENT. Another nation divided in its willingness to face its past is Croatia. Four days after the Bosnian Serb Republic's agreement to hand over its indicted war criminals to the Hague international court – which came a few hours after Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic's arraignment on July 3 - Croatia followed suit. But four members of the Zagreb cabinet promptly quit, threatening the collapse of the coalition and new elections. Endorsing Prime Minister Ivica Racan's decision, President Stjepan Mesic told his nation that Croatians too had committed war crimes and that the Hague tribunal did not try "nations, but suspects." Both leaders now face the likelihood of large-scale street protests by nationalists. While Hague's sealed indictment of two as yet unnamed Croatian generals charges genocide and ethnic cleansing, many Croatians admire them as heroes of the 1995 offensive that drove out 200,000 Serbs and "cleansed" the territory held by them since 1991. According to Balkan and West European opinion, the United States supported that offensive.

A RAY OF HOPE GLIMMERS… On an issue reflecting the uncertain status of Central European minorities, a ray of hope for an agreement is turned on and off. Returning from a visit to Bucharest on June 29, Istvan Szentivanyi, chairman of the Hungarian parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, said the two governments agreed to resolve their differences on new Hungarian legislation, known as the Status Law, that grants various privileges to ethnic Hungarians who are citizens of neighboring countries. According to the Hungarian news agency MTI, Szentivanyi said that the new agreement pledges to end "mutual harsh recriminations." But on July 2, Romanian television reported that in Salzburg, Austria, Romanian President Ion Iliescu attacked Hungary's Status Law as "diversionist, provocative, anti-democratic and discriminatory." On July 6, the Council of Europe's Venice Commission for Democracy Through Law, composed of independent specialists in international law, approved a proposal by Hungarian Foreign Minister Janos Martonyi. He suggested commissioning a comparative analysis of legislation by which European countries seek to protect the cultural identity of their kinsfolk living abroad by granting them preferential treatment. Martonyi was fending off Romania's complaint about Hungary's Status Law. Eneko Landaburu, the European Commission's director for expansion, warned that Hungary, the leading candidate for membership in the European Union, must reach compromise agreements with both Slovakia and Romania before the Status Law becomes effective on January 1, 2002. (The Slovak coalition government, which includes ethnic Hungarians, has raised no objections to the law.) Landaburu said that although the Status Law "appeared to be in line with EU regulations," it is "very important that Hungary and its neighbors take normal diplomatic steps to solve their problems at a bilateral level."

… BUT MISUNDERSTANDINGS MAY FOLLOW. Alexander Patkolo, chairman of the group known as Romany Intelligentsia of Slovakia, told the daily "Novy Den" on June 29 that most Slovak Roma welcome Hungary's Status Law. He said that in anticipation that the law would help them, many Roma registered as ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia's May census. (American officials say that they have not received a clear answer from the Hungarian government how it would deal with Roma applications for status as ethnic Hungarians.) Patkolo's statement about Roma opting to register as belonging to another minority also suggests an explanation for the Czech Republic's new census figures that show a two-thirds drop in the number of Roma. While in 1991, 32,903 Czech citizens identified themselves as Roma, this year only 11,716 did. The Czech Republic's Human Rights Commissioner, Jan Jarab, estimates that the true figure for the Roma population is about 150,000.

ROMANIAN PRESIDENT ATTACKS RETURN TO SOVIET THEORIES OF MOLDOVA. On July 7, Romanian President Ion Iliescu said the theory claiming that Moldovan is a language different from Romanian and the two countries' peoples are different is Stalinist. Romanian television reported that Iliescu charged that the theory is "an artificial invention of those who serve the interests of the former Soviet Union," aimed at "de-nationalizing Romanians." He called Moldova "a second Romanian state" because 65 percent of its population is "of Romanian origin." His statement followed a demonstration on July 1 in the Moldovan capital Chisinau of some 500 teachers to protest the government's intention to have schools resume teaching the Soviet-era doctrine declaring that the peoples of the two countries are different, as are their languages.

HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST DIES IN DETENTION. On July 7, the family of Uzbek human rights activist and former member of parliament Shovriq Ruzimorodov was informed of his death in detention, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. Ruzimorodov was arrested by police at his home in Kashkadarya Oblast on June 15 and is believed to have been tortured. Police claimed that during a search of his home they found ammunition and leaflets propagating the banned Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir party. U.S. Helsinki Commission Co-Chairman Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-NJ) called Ruzimorodov's death "a preventable tragedy that shames the Uzbek government." Smith also expressed concern that another activist, Mamadali Makhmudov, may not survive his prison term and protested that opposition activist Elena Urlaeva's incarceration in a psychiatric institution recalls "the tactics of Soviet-era brutality." According to Uzbek human rights activists, Uzbekistan has under arrest some 7,000 political prisoners, most of them suspected of belonging to Islamic movements. According to UCSJ’s Central Asian Human Rights Information Network, over the past three years more than forty such prisoners died through torture.

* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK * * *

On July 6 Duma Speaker Gennadii Seleznev told Itar-Tass that a proposal by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe for a political dialogue between Moscow and Chechen leaders is unacceptable. Seleznev said: "There is no other way but for the militants to surrender arms, give themselves up to the court, repent for what they have done, and then await judgment."
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ANALYSIS
NEONAZI SKINHEADS NOW FACE "RED SKINS"

By Nickolai Butkevich , UCSJ’s Director of Research and Advocacy
Earlier this year, 150 neo-Nazi skinheads marked Hitler's birthday, April 20, by attacking the Yasnevo market in Moscow. They beat dark-skinned traders from the Caucasus and smashed their stalls. The assault topped off a weekend of skinhead violence in Moscow that resulted in a least one death - the stabbing of a young Chechen.

The violence put the spotlight on a problem that human rights activists have complained about for years: violent groups of neo-Nazi skinheads in Moscow and other cities regularly beat and occasionally kill dark-skinned minorities, foreign students, Jews, homeless people, anti-fascist activists and even Asian and African diplomats, with little if any reaction from the police. While President Vladimir Putin condemned the violence as "absolutely unacceptable" for the multi-ethnic state of Russia, little has changed since April. In Moscow, Tver, Voronezh and other cities, thousands of African and Asian students live almost like prisoners - rushing to get back to their dorms by nightfall, taking taxis to and from markets, and only venturing out in large numbers in order to protect themselves from skinhead attacks.

With few exceptions, Russian officials play down the problem, dismissing what are unmistakably hate crimes as acts of "ordinary hooliganism" or "games" by bored youth. According to a recent "Argumenty i Fakti" article, the Moscow police have recorded only three crimes attributed to skinheads, a statistic that prompted Irina Rukina, a deputy of the city legislature, to call on the NGO community to monitor skinhead violence, since the police's obviously bogus statistics "have been significantly lowered." To back up her assertion, Rukina brought to light the situation facing the Anglican Church in Moscow, whose mostly black parishioners have reported 196 attacks on members of their congregation this past year. The same day, the Moscow Department of Internal Affairs announced that there are over ten extremist nationalist groups in the capital with around 15,000 members.

Meeting with little sympathy from local police, many of whom are racist themselves and who at times beat and rob them, foreign students have begun to form self-defense units to protect their dorms from gangs of neo-Nazis. A June article in "Novye Izvestiya" reported that while in Russia "visible street-level opposition to Nazis and Communists has not been recorded," a handful of radical anti-fascist skinheads, who dub themselves "red skins" to differentiate themselves from neo-Nazi skinheads, have grown frustrated with the lack of police reaction to fascist skinhead violence and have taken the law into their own hands. Last month in Moscow, red skins pelted neo-Nazi demonstrators with eggs, and several pitched battles between "red" and "brown" skinheads were reported in Volgograd, Krasnodar and Novorossiysk.

Sergey Vladimirov, the head of Anti-Fascist Youth Action, told UCSJ that red skins are a small group of teenagers who see their mission as a struggle against fascists, "the bourgeoisie" and globalization. They have many potential targets for their violent actions, not just "browns." Rather than resorting to violence, mainstream anti-fascist groups like Anti-Fascist Youth Action concentrate on educational campaigns and rock concerts to discourage alienated youth from joining neo-Nazi groups.

In a sign that the government may begin to take the issue seriously, the official newspaper of the Russian government ran a story in June entitled "Is Hitler Kaput?" about an anti-fascist event in Vladimir, where neo-Nazi groups are particularly strong. In addition, the negative publicity following the recent wave of skinhead violence seems to have prompted the Moscow police to take action. (For related information and analysis, see "Ethnic Persecution of Chechens in the Russian Federation: A UCSJ Specail Report" on UCSJ’s website, www.fsumonitor.com) After months of doing nothing to stop antisemitic and racist demonstrations in Moscow by various groups of skinheads, Communists and fundamentalist Russian Orthodox splinter groups, on June 27 the Moscow police broke up a protest organized by the neo-Nazi rock singer Sergey Troytsky and the head of the extremist group "Russian Project" Andrey Arkhipov. The young extremists gathered at Moscow's Belorussian Station in what they called a "March to Defend Moscow." The goals of the demonstration were to protest Pope John Paul II's visit to Ukraine and to call for driving out all people from the Caucasus from the city's markets. Several busloads of police and OMON anti-riot troops mobilized to prevent the skinheads from meeting at the designated gathering place, arresting some of the would-be marchers and persuading many more to go home.

It is too early to tell if these new police tactics are more than just a one-time measure to improve the image of the Moscow police. One can only hope that this new focus is maintained in Moscow and replicated in other cities. In any event, the NGO community has an important role to play in keeping the pressure on by monitoring the actions of hate groups and keeping the Russian and international public informed.
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