Caucasians hated most among ethnic minorities

"Our monitoring shows that there were around 25 killings and more than 200 assaults on an ethnic basis last year. Thirteen were killed and 99 suffered in the second half of the year alone. Racist crimes have already been committed this year too. A citizen of Uzbekistan, an ethnic Armenian, was beaten on 7 January and an Armenian citizen was killed on 9 January in Moscow," Mr Alexander Brod, Director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, said at a press conference organised by the Bureau at the RIA Novosti press club earlier today.

Mr Emil Pain, a well-known political scientist and leader of the Centre for Studies in Xenophobia and Extremism, says that xenophobia with regard to migrants and natives of North Caucasus, Caucasus in general, and Middle Asia currently prevails in Russia.

"Just two persons in the Moscow prosecutor's office work on ethnically motivated crimes. They certainly cannot embrace the whole wave of such crimes which take place practically every day. Another problem is poor qualification of prosecutors who do not know authors and xenophobic publications, etc. It is therefore easier for them to deny opening a criminal case with regard to an ethnically motivated crime or to qualify it as hooliganism," Alexander Brod says. As an example, he mentioned an incident in Rostov when a young man came to a synagogue holding the neck of a broken glass bottle and threatened those present. In spite that in doing so he was crying out anti-Semitic slogans, a criminal case under the article "hooliganism" was opened against him. "No expert institution which would help both the investigation and the court evaluate such crimes has been set up to date. Discussions have been under way for five years already," Mr Brod resents.

Speaking about the denial of opening a criminal case against the organisers of the nationalistic march in the centre of Moscow on 4 November 2004 with slogans against natives of the Caucasus and other ethnic minorities, Mr Yevgeny Proshechkin, chairman of the Moscow Antifascist Centre, said: "The prosecutor's office fails to see Nazism yet another time... But the worst is — look at what slogans the prosecutor's office believes good, lawful: 'Russia for Russians,' 'Moscow for Muscovites,' 'Russian Power in Russia,' — this is in a multiethnic state where the Constitution reads that the only source of power is the multiethnic nation."

Ms Alla Gerber, President of the Holocaust foundation, believes that the Russian government is building a "fence" around the nation. The law tightening government control over nongovernmental organisations which took effect yesterday is an important element in this construction, in her view. "All this leads to this country becoming a sort of island again where some country-specific disgraces of local importance will be happening. I think we are not going to be saved this way, it will lead to very grave consequences," says the writer.