Posted: Fri 05 May 2006 02:21 Post subject: Russian racism 'out of control' - Amnesty International
Quote:
Russian racism 'out of control'
Racist killings in Russia are "out of control", according to a report by international human rights watchdog Amnesty International.
The report into violent racism shows that at least 28 people were killed and 366 were assaulted in 2005.
This year there have already been a number of high-profile cases, including the death of a Senegalese student.
Amnesty condemns discrimination by the authorities and a failure to properly record or investigate racist crimes.
Russia's police and prosecutors need to tackle head-on the growing scourge of violent racism in Russia
Kate Allen
Amnesty International
The Amnesty report, entitled "Russian Federation: Violent racism out of control", includes examples of police and prosecutors routinely classifying murders and serious assaults by skinhead extremists as lesser crimes of "hooliganism".
Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said racist killings and violent attacks against foreigners, visible ethnic minorities and anti-racist campaigners in Russia were out of control.
"Some Russian authorities are turning a blind eye," she said. "Instead of seeing only 'hooliganism' in vicious organised attacks on students from African, south-east Asian countries and non-Slavic Russians from Chechnya, Russia's police and prosecutors need to tackle head-on the growing scourge of violent racism in Russia."
She said President Vladimir Putin's government should adopt a comprehensive "plan of action" to combat racism and anti-Semitism.
Protests
Cases highlighted in the Amnesty report include the killing of nine-year-old Tajik girl Khursheda Sultonov.
She was attacked with other members of her family in St Petersburg in February 2004 by a gang. Khursheda was stabbed nine times in the chest, stomach and arms and died at the scene.
Another victim was Vu Anh Tuan, a 20-year-old Vietnamese student, stabbed to death in October 2004 by a gang of 18 skinheads near a metro station in St Petersburg.
Dmitri Krayukhin, head of anti-racist organisation United Europe, told Amnesty he had received threats to "cut off your head".
He has repeatedly been denied protection from the authorities in Orel, western Russia.
The report also heard from members of the Roma community who have stopped travelling into St Petersburg city centre, having been the victims of attacks.
Russian citizens and foreigners living in the big cities have led demonstrations against the attacks and the authorities' failure to tackle the problem.
A nine-year-old girl of mixed Russian and Malian parentage has been seriously injured in a stabbing in St Petersburg.
Prosecutors said they were considering "xenophobia" as the motive for the attack, in which nothing was stolen.
The attack in the hallway of a block of flats on Saturday evening is the latest assault in the city on foreigners and members of ethnic minorities.
A teenager was acquitted last week of stabbing a Tajik girl aged nine to death in the city two years ago.
Human rights groups were outraged when he and seven others were found guilty of the lesser charge of hooliganism.
People with similar nationalist attitudes could now feel that they have nothing to fear in committing such actions
Aliu Tunkara, activist
In the latest incident, two attackers apparently followed the girl into the entrance hall of her block of flats and stabbed her in the neck and head.
She is said to be in a satisfactory condition in hospital.
Aliu Tunkara, who heads a civic group for Africans in the city, said last week's acquittal in the case of the Tajik girl could lead to more violence.
"Since nobody was punished for the murder of the girl, people with similar nationalist attitudes could now feel that they have nothing to fear in committing such actions," he said.
Racist attacks that stain Russia
By James Rodgers
BBC News, St Petersburg, Russia
"It was because of my colour. They don't like us. They didn't like my skin."
Yunus Sultonov, a market trader from Tajikistan, was explaining why a gang had killed Khursheda, his nine year old daughter.
Yunus had taken Khursheda skating. They were on their way home when the attackers struck.
We were talking in a cold, damp storeroom where Yunus rests when he is not looking after his stall.
His wife Maljuda was there too, but she did not say anything. She just looked at a picture of her daughter, then wept.
'A lost generation'
Russians are fed up with being humiliated in their own country
Yuri Belyaev
The streets of St Petersburg are dangerous for outsiders.
After dark, bands of skinheads will attack anyone who is not white.
They are so proud of their murderous acts that they have even filmed some of them.
The skinheads are a lost generation whose childhood disappeared in the chaos of Russia in the 1990s.
Now in their teens and early twenties, they have embraced a twisted creed of hatred and violence.
Yuri Belyaev is one of its authors. He describes himself as a racist. He claims widespread public support for his views.
"Russians are fed up with being humiliated in their own country. Negroes have more rights here and immigrants own all the property," he told me.
He makes light of the current wave of attacks saying, "The resistance you see for now is of the most innocent kind."
Unsafe streets
Alexander Sungurov has been active in liberal politics in St Petersburg since the last days of the Soviet Union.
With the certainties of communism and cold war gone, he says, the racists' simple message appeals to youth without prospects or purpose.
"They try to have their identity through killing - looking for some enemy. Who is the enemy? Not Americans, but people with other colour of skin."
That seems to have been the simple, brutal motive for one of the most recent killings.
Sall Samba Lampsar, a student from Senegal, was shot dead on his way home from a nightclub.
Africans and others are scared. They feel that not enough is being done to protect them.
Earlier this month, they demonstrated to demand better protection from the police.
We asked the St Petersburg authorities for an interview, but no-one would talk to us.
Their critics say that they have no clear plan to deal with the violence - and this in a city which is a magnet for business people, students and tourists from abroad.
Ali Nassor came here from Zanzibar 20 years ago.
He has lived in the city through all the upheavals and uncertainty of the last two decades. He says life for outsiders has never been as bad.
"We are just being killed openly," he told me. "I mean, it's just no more under control."
Reputation
Yunus Sultonov echoes that feeling of defencelessness. The jury at the trial of his daughter's killers found them guilty of "hooliganism", not murder. As a result, they received lighter sentences.
"They weren't sorry for the girl they killed, they were sorry for them," he says of the verdict which was reached last month.
"They were 15 or 16 years old so they were sorry for them. They weren't sorry for my daughter."
In July, St Petersburg - the home town of President Vladimir Putin - will host the G8 summit of the world's richest and most powerful countries. They are already smartening up the city's streets and buildings.
For the visit of presidents and prime ministers, St Petersburg will shine.
The stain that racist murders have left on its reputation will be harder to remove.
Living with race hate in Russia
By Patrick Jackson
BBC News website, Moscow
Juldas Okie Etoumbi, a postgraduate international relations student at Moscow's RUDN university, remembers well his first encounter with a Russian.
Standing in a Moscow Metro carriage for the first time, the young Gabonese man was thrown forward when the train started with a jolt and he grabbed a pole to keep his balance, brushing the Russian man's hand.
Without a word, the Russian withdrew his hand, produced a handkerchief and proceeded to wipe it demonstratively in front of the other passengers.
Christian, a former electrical engineering student from Cameroon now working in Moscow, was recently assaulted by a group of about 10 teenagers on a Metro train in the city centre.
Struck by a bottle on the head, he fell in a pool of blood. The driver kept the carriage doors shut at the next station and police caught three of the gang, but Christian thinks no action was taken.
He hit me and I tried to hit him back, but another one struck me from behind
Mukhtar Ahmed Osman
When Somali civil engineering student Mukhtar Ahmed Osman was beaten unconscious in the snow by a gang of teenagers in a Moscow suburb, nobody came to his aid.
While much of the violence seems to be purely racist, some believe Africans are also targeted as scapegoats for Russian society's ills and the media is often accused of fostering an image of African students as drug-dealers.
The attacks have turned murderous in recent years. In St Petersburg, three Africans have been killed in suspected race attacks since September.
Non-African foreign students have also been murdered, but it is the black students who attract most attention from the racists.
Juldas, now leader of the African students at RUDN, says "monkey" insults and actual assaults are so frequent that students have ceased reporting them.
"We see it as normal now because that's how we live."
Education intact
Gabriel Anicet Kotchofa, head of the Foreign Students' Association in Russia, offers fellow Africans considering an education in Russia two pieces of advice: "Consider your personal safety" and "Make sure your parents can pay your living costs".
Such considerations did not exist when he arrived in Moscow a quarter of a century ago from Benin.
No Soviet citizen, he recalls, would have dared raise their hand against a foreigner, and the USSR bore all the costs of its student "guests" from the developing world.
Benin was then "building communism", he says, and an education in the Soviet Bloc was a vital chance for poor students without the connections to net a French grant, for instance.
After the USSR collapsed, Russia paid no grants to foreign students for five years. A fraction of the system was restored in 1997, and today the number of foreign students in Russia from outside the ex-USSR is barely half the 1991 figure.
Some 1,000 African students from 43 states now study at RUDN, Moscow's purpose-built university for foreign students.
Communism may have gone, but the quality of Russian education is apparently still high.
"If you are prepared to study, you can get an education here you would not get even in the West," says Juldas.
'Pointless to complain'
As a professor at Moscow's Gubkin Oil and Gas University, training cadres for such giants of the market-driven economy as Gazprom and Lukoil, Mr Kotchofa is very much at home in the new Russia but is bitter about some post-Soviet "liberties".
Sadly... the stereotype of the drug dealer in the media here is the black student
Juldas Okie Etoumbi
"One thing democracy brought Russia was the freedom to insult and attack people and be sure of not being punished," he says.
He can, he adds, count on his fingers the number of criminals punished for hate crimes and "even the murders are immediately treated as cases of hooliganism".
"Because nobody is arrested, it has become pointless to complain to the police."
What worries him especially is that organised groups appear to be inciting the violence with impunity, with slogans like "Russia for the Russians".
RUDN students attending faculties off the campus, which has its own police station and security guards, have found the three days around Hitler's birthday in April particularly stressful, with neo-Nazis often turning up to taunt them with Hitler salutes and abuse.
Inna Svyatenko, chairwoman of Moscow City Council's Security Commission, accepts that Moscow has a problem with "groups of hooligans who have in common only a taste for public disorder", and that Africans are particularly at risk.
Better protection for foreign students is being discussed, she says, along with the idea of a new city police force to specifically protect foreigners.
Student leaders report that the worst of the racist violence is now in the provinces, but believe this is largely because of new anti-terrorism measures in the capital.
Stereotype
Ms Svyatenko attributes some of the problem to a common misconception that foreign students are taking college places away from Russians.
RUSSIA'S FOREIGN STUDENTS
Total about 103,000, including 43,000 from other ex-Soviet states
About 15,000 are African
Some 15,000 former students are staying on illegally, including about 5,000 Africans
Source: Foreign Students' Association in Russia
Some suggest violence against foreigners may also be a sublimation of aggression towards Caucasian ethnic groups such as Chechens and Azerbaijanis, regarded as harder targets.
Moscow sociologist Nikolai Fyodorov sees a deep-rooted psychological need for an "enemy figure" dating back to the Cold War.
And he says irresponsible Russian journalism adds to the dangerous mix, with television crime reports regularly identifying the ethnic background of suspects.
A decade ago, when foreign students were struggling to survive without Russian state funding, African student drug dealers were in the spotlight.
"Back then Africans were in a desperate social situation, and when a person needs money that badly they may agree to do anything," says Juldas.
Even today, one in 10 Africans at RUDN has to live on a daily budget of 15 roubles ($0.50, £0.30), the price of a loaf and two eggs or a single ticket on the Metro.
But speaking as a student rep, Juldas says the drug problem appears to have all but disappeared, and new students are warned about the dangers of being recruited by dealers.
"Sadly, however, the stereotype of the drug dealer in the media here is the black student," he adds.
Explaining Africa
Some students have simply abandoned their studies and left. The Foreign Students' Association knows of Vietnamese, South Koreans and Africans who "went home in fear of their lives".
But some have reacted by challenging racial stereotypes through an educational programme.
With the support of Nashi, a youth movement set up by supporters of President Vladimir Putin, and funding from African embassies, 20 groups of black students have been visiting Moscow schools since September to explain about African culture.
"We give free classes on subjects like daily life in Africa, or African weddings, and the schoolchildren are very receptive," says Juldas.
"We get letters from schools to come and see them. It is fun for us and it teaches people about our culture. This should influence the mentality of the young."
Many believe that the existence of unique institutions like RUDN is a cause worth defending.
"For a prospective diplomat, what other university brings together 132 countries?" asks Juldas.
"We have students here from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti - countries with territorial conflicts. But when students come to RUDN, they form a single homeland. It is like a mini-United Nations. Such an experience is priceless."
Are you a former or current foreign student studying in Russia? Did you encounter local hostility because of your nationality? If so, did you feel adequately protected by the authorities?
Send us your experiences using the form below.
Your comments
Having studied in St Petersburg, Russia as from 1998 to 2003, I have learned a lot about racism, discrimination, hatred and all bad things. Russia is one of the lawlessness countries on earth. In '99 a group of so-called Militsia (police) came into our hostel asking for Namibian students. Some of them had guns. We were quiet a number of us but two per room on different floors. They asked for documents which I provided then started searching all over looking for narcotics according to them. It was a pay day for us when everybody received US$1000, so we had a lot of money. As I was alone in the room they confused me and made away with US$250. I reported the case to the dean of foreign students who promised to have them arrested but to no avail. It's very bad and pathetic that we let Russians wandering freely in our countries while our people in their country are just on run. There is no protection whatsoever in Russia. I think is time they take examples from countries like UK, where I studied after Russia but life there is so smooth and people respect the law. Everybody has got equal right as long as not violating the country's laws.
Nepaya Rex, Windhoek, Namibia
I am a Kenya who completed my bachelors programme at RUDN about 7 years ago. I am shocked that since then nothing has changed as far as racism is concerned. Back then, brutal encounters with skin heads in the subway and suburbs was the norm of the day. The common man too did nothing to defend foreigners from these vicious attacks while the police would stand by and watch but would intervene the moment the neo-Nazis were losing the fight. I applaud the efforts of the current foreign student body in sanitise the Russian youth about cultures alien to there own.
Oliver Anduru, Minnesota
I am an African that studied in the former Soviet Union between the early eighties and mid eighties. I experienced racist feelings among a sizable group of Soviets. What was different then and now is that the law had real tooth. The Soviet authorities made sure that any culprit was punished to fullest extent of the law. They also had to show the Americans that they were more humane and tolerant to their black population. Communism has been defeated and nobody takes the responsibility of protecting the foreign guest. Black African students are unfortunate to be in Russia today, their governments have too much on their hands to protest these senseless killings. God help us!
Momoh-Fonigay Lavahun, USA
It made me very sad when I read your article because I have met very wonderful people from Russia while they were fellow students here in London. At the same time what your article reports is exactly what a cousin of mine experienced in St Petersburg and later on in Moscow before he decided that his life was worthy more than what he was getting and decided to travel back home. At the time I was of the opinion that he should stay and complete his studies. However having read and talked to a number of people, his was the best decision. It is a pity for the Russian people that this is happening. Russia has over the decades invested a lot in building a very strong bridge with the (third world) people, and rightly so. It has many friends, some of them very powerful in their respective countries and professions, thanks to knowledge attained in the Soviet Union/Russia. World powers do not only depend on military might but on friendly influence (cultural, language and academic). It is the duty of all Russians not to walk the path of Hitler and others before and after him, it has no address in this global village.
Kayongo Mutumba, London, UK
I am a British Phd student doing research in St Petersburg. I think the experience of most students here is very positive. Russians are in general very grateful to foreigners who show an interest in their language and culture. However, I am white and from the west. And I'm afraid the experience of non-white students here is very different. The stories of attacks on blacks are not exaggerated, unfortunately. And, as the article suggested, the image of non-whites in the popular Russian media is not helpful. I've also been appalled at the level of racism that I've encountered in private with many Russian friends - even highly educated Russians. In large part, I think the absence of prominent non-whites in Russian culture and media can be blamed. But the government's apparent lack of interest in the issue of race relations is also a factor.
Derek, London, UK
I had many Palestinian and Arab friends when studying and teaching in Russia and Ukraine. Not only were there throngs of racist "hooligans" but the Police, either the Omon or the Berkut were constantly hassling them. I saw one get beaten by the cops for nothing other than having asked why they were always bothering them. I heard stories of students being thrown off roofs and from what I saw. I believe the stories. These are pretty lawless places for someone visibly foreign.
Pat, Atlanta, USA
I have not experienced mistreatment as a student but I know from the description of facts of it done mostly against African students. There is definitely and hardly any protection from the authorities, both in Russia and from their home-countries. Rarely do you hear of an African country complaining about the discrimination and persecution done to their own people aboard. So, the racist criminals take that advantage to perpetuate the hostility.
Makurei Abdul, Morocco
This all so horrible. Just sickening... My husband and I are aquaintances with a young couple consisting of a black American wife and a Russian (his mother is Tartar) husband. Ruslan has mentioned discrimination he and his sister faced because they were not considered "full" white Russians. Not the fair type. They have Tartar blood so he and his siter consider themselves half white/half Asian. Eurasian I guess. I saw a photograph of his family once and his mother showed only slightly Asiatic features. ie high cheek bones, almond shaped eyes (though not slanted with the epicanthal fold), and black hair. In America she would definitely be considered white still. As are Ruslan and his sister.
Anyway, I THANK GOD Ruslan and his wife are living here in America. They've talked about starting a family soon and obviously Russia is no place for them to be.
It's so sad what immigrants - specifically Africans - are going through in certain countries. Just Godawful.
I was reading a story on-line about Armenians being targeted as well. Tartars not being "full white Russians" is difficult for me to grasp. Aren't some of them indistinguishable from other Russians? Dancer Rudolph Nuryev was a Tartar and he didn't look all that different from Russians I've come across.
Anyway, this appears to be the work of people associated with facist groups in that country.
Tartars not being "full white Russians" is difficult for me to grasp. Aren't some of them indistinguishable from other Russians?
It was hard for me to grasp as well. Some indeed are indistinguishable from other Russians, but others look a little "different". I think it depends on region.
Due to the vast movements and intermingling of peoples along with the very loose utilization of the name Tatar, current day Tatars include ethnic groups that look Mongoloid at one end and Caucasoid at the other. As to the original Tatars from Mongolia, they most likely shared characteristics with the Mongol invaders from Central Asia.
Joined: 04 May 2005 {Posts: 2021 } Location: santiago, chile
Posted: Fri 05 May 2006 13:58 Post subject: Skinheads
Hi,
Racist attacks are growing worldwide. Even in Southern South America we notice than Nazis and skinhead attacks are growing against anyone who looks "out of place".
I have hear the situation in Germany, France, England and other parts of Europe are not different from Russia either.
This is bizarre IMO. These Tartars look like many Russians, and many Russians appear to have some Asiatic influence. Lenin, Breznev (sp), and Boris Yelstin appear to have some. Also, many Russians I've come across in New York who are not Jews are a little swarthy. Isn't Russia, a non-western country to begin with, at the crossroads of Asia and Europe?
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