#10
Moscow Times
September 5, 2002
Activists Say Anti-Racism Campaign Is a PR Stunt
By Nabi Abdullaev
Staff Writer

Civil rights activists on Wednesday accused the government of paying lip service to the struggle against racism to deflect criticism from the West without having any intention of backing up its words with actions.

In reality, federal bodies give free rein to growing instances of racially motivated crime in Russian cities and to racist initiatives by regional authorities, they said.

"A sham is the best way to describe the government's policy of strong-worded declarations combined with mild actions or total permissiveness," said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights watchdog.

"A lot is done solely to create a good image of Russia abroad: For example, when skinheads beat up the son of a diplomat, we see a flurry of activity by the authorities, but when a common Azeri falls victim, they don't care," she said.

Yury Dzhibladze, head of the nongovernmental Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, said only the Foreign Ministry recognized racially motivated crimes as a violation of human rights and cooperated with the civil rights movement in fighting them.

Since the Kremlin-sponsored Civic Forum in November last year, the Foreign Ministry has invited nongovernmental organizations to work on some of its documents, such as the state policy on fighting racism, which is presented annually to international organizations, Dzhibladze said.

This year, NGOs were also invited by the ministry to help it work out legal definitions for racial discrimination to be introduced eventually into federal legislation, he said.

Tatyana Lokshina, an expert from the Moscow Helsinki Group, said the widely discussed law on combating extremism signed by President Vladimir Putin in July, which many officials claimed would give them a legal basis to prosecute racially motivated crime, was designed largely to persuade the West that Russia had become more civilized.

"It was the same as the recently adopted law on alternative civil service or the order for federal troops to conduct searches in Chechnya together with local police," Lokshina said.

"We thought it would be a victory for human rights but it all turned out to be a sham."

The government and law enforcement agencies do not recognize hate crimes as racially motivated. Instead they tend to see them as a manifestation of uncontrolled migration, inter-ethnic tensions or just common violence by urban youths, the activists said.

They said this approach allows officials to ignore the human rights abuses involved in the violence.

In almost all criminal cases opened by federal prosecutors into skinhead attacks, which have surged over the past two years, the charges do not mention racial motives.

"It is very difficult to prove these motives in the investigations we conduct," Natalia Veshnyakova, a spokeswoman for the Prosecutor General's Office, said by telephone Wednesday.

"And, after all, please show us where in Russian law it is written that we must call on civil activists to help us investigate crimes," Veshnyakova said.

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