Hate crime in Russia, including 114 deaths, has more than doubled since last year, writes Philip P Panin Moscow
THE E-MAIL that arrived in the inboxes of two organisations tracking hate crimes in Russia carried a disturbing message and an even more disturbing photo - that of a man's severed head on a wooden chopping block.
"This surprise was prepared for Moscow officials by concerned Russian people who can no longer tolerate the invasion of foreigners in their native city," the message declared, accusing darker-skinned migrant workers from the Caucasus and Asia of "an unprecedented wave of criminality that has swamped our capital".
"If officials continue to populate Russia with foreigners, we will have to start annihilating officials! Because there is no worse enemy than a traitor with the authorities who has betrayed his Russian origin," it continued.
"Officials, if you do not start evicting the blacks, we will begin taking revenge on you for their crimes! And it will be your turn to pay with your heads."
The e-mail was no hoax. Earlier in the day, a street cleaner had found a man's head wrapped in a plastic bag outside a government building in western Moscow.
An autopsy confirmed it belonged to a native of Tajikistan whose decapitated body was discovered last week in woods south of the city.
Although hate crimes, often by young neo-Nazi skinheads, are increasingly common in Russia, analysts say this is the first racially motivated killing to be accompanied by a political demand and a public claim of responsibility.
The e-mail was signed by a group calling itself the Militant Organisation of Russian Nationalists, which neither police nor human rights groups had heard of previously.
"It's an outrageous crime and very worrying," said Natalia Rykova, executive director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, one of the groups that received the e-mail. "It shows how cruel and inhuman the neo-Nazis can be and that their ideology is becoming more popular."
In the first 10 months of the year, Rykova's group recorded 269 hate crimes in Russia involving the deaths of 114 people, more than twice as many as last year. Most victims were migrant labourers from the impoverished former Soviet republics of central Asia, as many as 10 million of whom work in Russia and are a critical source of cheap labour in a country with a shrinking native workforce.
Police named the man who was decapitated as Salahetdin Azizov (20), a Tajik migrant employed at a fruit-and-vegetable warehouse. He and another Tajik worker were walking home on Friday night when 10 unidentified men attacked them. Azizov was stabbed six times before he was beheaded. His co-worker escaped but remains in hospital in a critical condition.
The Tajik government has lodged a formal protest with the Kremlin over the case and complains that police are slow to investigate hate crimes against Tajik citizens, including 80 murders in Russia this year.
Azizov's head was discovered near a government building in Mozhaisky, a neighbourhood that has been a focus of nationalist outrage since the October rape and strangulation of a 15-year-old Russian girl there, allegedly by a city maintenance worker from Uzbekistan.
Prime minister Vladimir Putin has condemned racist violence but has also called for new limits on the number of work permits given to migrant labourers - a position critics say is impractical and inflames xenophobic sentiment.
Last month, a Kremlin- controlled youth group staged a rally calling on officials to close the borders to migrants so more jobs would be available for Russians during the economic crisis.
A police spokesman said they were examining "various theories" in the killing and had "no proof of the suggestion that skinheads might have been involved".
Rykova however said the authorities were denying the obvious. She warned that violence could get worse if the economic crisis intensified and politicians continued to use xenophobic rhetoric. "We're sitting on a mine that can blow up at any moment," she said. - (Los Angeles Times- Washington Post service)