RUSSIA:Attacks by neo-Nazis rise as authorities are accused of underplaying the issue, writes PETER FINN
IT WAS Valentine's Day, work was over, and Uvaido Shirinbekov, a Tajik carpenter, headed out for a night in the city. With Amid Nasratshoyev, a co-worker, he took the Metro from the Moscow suburb where the two lived. But they were attacked by a gang of youths.
Nasratshoyev (27) was struck from behind on the head and fell. As he stumbled to his feet, he said, Shirinbekov fell into his arms. "I've been stabbed," Shirinbekov said.
Five youths fled in the darkness, and Shirinbekov (25) died on the street.
The killing, which remains under investigation, is part of a wave of racially-motivated murders in Moscow that has put the city's migrant communities on edge, particularly people from Central Asia, according to human rights groups. Easily singled out because of their non-Slavic appearance, Central Asians have borne the brunt of attacks by skinheads and neo-Nazis. "People are living in fear," said Gavkhar Dzhurayeva, of the support group the Tajikistan Foundation in Moscow. "We are advising people to be very careful. But they still have to travel to work in the morning and go home at night."
From January through March, 49 people have been killed in assaults by radical nationalists, 28 of them in Moscow, according to the Moscow Human Rights Bureau (MHRB). There were 27 racist killings in Moscow in 2006 and 45 in 2007, according to the group. Most remain unsolved.
Twenty-three of the victims this year were from Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan or Uzbekistan, former Soviet republics that supply many of the markets and construction sites with cheap labour. There are an estimated 850,000 migrants from Central Asia working in Moscow, according to officials.
Kyrgyz ambassador Raimkul Attakurov, in a letter to Russia's ombudsman this year, labelled the attacks the "savage outrages of fascist monsters" and called on Russian authorities "to pay the most serious attention to this vile phenomenon".
Local and federal officials, including president-elect Dmitry Medvedev, have begun to express alarm. "Law enforcement bodies should take a tough stand, should not keep silent or retreat into the bushes," Medvedev said recently.
But some officials question the scale of the problem. "I am sure there is no growing wave of extremism," Moscow prosecutor Yuri Syomin told Rossiiskaya Gazeta recently. He said hate crimes were falling "year by year".
There are no official figures. Organisations such as the MHRB and the Sova Centre, another group that tracks hate crimes, assemble statistics from media reports and by monitoring extremist websites and police reports. City officials say such methods are deeply flawed.
"Even if one person is killed, it's a problem," said Alexei Alexandrov, head of Moscow's Committee for Inter-Regional Ties and Nationalities Policy.
"But some human rights groups are counting killings of non-Russians by a Russian where the motive is unknown. It could be over a girl, over money." Vladilen Bokov, a colleague, said that since December only 10 killings in the greater Moscow area could be clearly identified as racist.
Human rights groups say the problem has grown unchecked because of the failure of police and prosecutors to acknowledge and confront racist violence.
According to Human Rights First, a US-based group that studies hate crimes across North America and Europe, racist attacks in Russia are often prosecuted as "hooliganism".
"Although adequate hate crime legislation exists, it has been ignored in the prosecution of the vast majority of hate crime cases," it reported this year. "Even when prosecuted, hate crime charges are not always vigorously pursued."
According to Semyon Charny of the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, Russia has 70,000 skinheads. With an overtly Nazi ideology, they espouse hatred for those who are not ethnic Russians, typically describing them as invaders stealing jobs and destroying Russian culture.
Also targeted are Russian citizens from the Far East and Caucasus, but attacks on groups such as Chechens have dropped because they began to arm themselves and fight back, according to Galina Kozhevnikova of the Sova Centre.
Violent nationalists have become more organised in recent years. "If before, attacks were spontaneous and chaotic, now skinheads are going on hunts for victims," Charny said.
Kozhevnikova said the attacks are the most extreme expression of rising nationalism in Russian society, arguing that denunciation of migrants has entered mainstream discourse.
The Sova Centre noted in a recent report that Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist Party candidate for president, expressed concern about the "lack of Russian faces" in some industries.
A poll by the Levada Centre in December found that 54 per cent of those surveyed believe Russia is a state for the Russian people, and that the influence of other ethnicities should be limited.
There are 168 different ethnic groups in Moscow. Radical nationalists blame the rise in murders on official harassment.
"They've driven large, legal movements underground," Dmitry Demushkin, leader of the Slavic Union, said in an interview with Newsweek'sRussian edition. "Now the guys have taken out their knives." -