A Love of Hatred

Friday, May 3, 2002
A recent wave of hate crimes in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia are prompting concerns that violent ultra-nationalism and anti-semitism are on the rise. Moscow media has been intensively reporting on the activity of Russian skinheads, particularly around 20 April — the birthday of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. Foreign embassies in the Russian capital received e-mail messages threatening to kill foreigners to commemorate the anniversary, and several recent attacks lent credence to the warning.

An Afghan interpreter died after being beaten by a group of skinheads on 15 April, The Associated Press reported. In early April, a group of skinheads in the center of Moscow attacked two black U.S. Marines who were on protective detail for a visiting U.S. official. Only a week earlier, five skinheads allegedly beat an ethnic Azeri to death in a pedestrian underpass on the Dmitrovskoye highway, the Russian NTV television website reported on 28 March. Also in March, skinheads attacked the wife of the South African ambassador, burning her with a cigarette during the assault. The following day, an official delegation from South Africa was also attacked.

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The Moscow Prosecutor's Office is concluding its investigation into a case involving teenagers who allegedly murdered 10 people, choosing their victims based on ethnicity, the Russian daily Gazeta reported on 26 April. Most of the victims were originally from the Caucasus or Vietnam. Victims were beaten with "scraps of [steel] armature and metal tubes," the daily reported.

The perceived threat against foreigners in Russia had grown so much in anticipation of the Hitler anniversary that universities sent their foreign students home, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported, citing izvestia.ru. The day ultimately passed without large-scale demonstrations or new attacks.

The Russian government has been criticized for its lack of clear action against the problem. Seven countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) sent formal letters to the Russian Foreign Ministry to express concern about potential attacks. The Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uzbek, Tajik, Georgian, Armenian, and Azeri consuls indicated that they had already received complaints from their citizens about skinhead violence and intimidation.

In Slovakia, the damage allegedly tied to the Hitler remembrance was limited to property destruction, but it set off alarm bells all the same. An old Jewish orthodox cemetery in the city of Kosice in eastern Slovakia was attacked during the night of 21 April. More than 100 historic gravestones were destroyed or severely damaged. Police estimate that the damage will exceed three million Slovak crowns ($64,000). "It is very unexpected to find out something like this can happen in the new Slovakia. It is a great disappointment for us," Kosice Rabbi Jossi Steiner told the Slovak daily Pravda on 22 April.

City representatives condemned the act. "Kosice is well known in Slovakia and worldwide as a city of peace and tolerance. The destruction of the graves casts a shadow on us," city spokesperson Zuzana Bobrikova told the Czech CTK press agency. Slovak Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda also condemned the attacks, which are still under investigation.

In Ukraine, a rock was hurled through the office window of Shlomo Gottlieb, the rabbi of the Mykolaiv synagogue on 19 April, the daily Vecherny Nikolayev reported on 23 April. The stone narrowly missed Gottlied, who was sitting at his desk. It was the second attack on the only synagogue in Mykolaiv since the beginning of the year, Gottlieb said. On 27 January, windowpanes were smashed and anti-semitic signs were left on the synagogue's walls. No one has been charged in the case, Vecherny Nikolayev reported.

Just a week before the attack in Mykolaiv, on 13 April, a gang of youth — identified by witnesses as skinheads leaving a football match — attacked the central synagogue in Kiev. They smashed windowpanes and attacked worshippers, including the synagogue's rabbi and his 14-year-old son, Komsomolskaya Pravda Na Ukraine and RFE/RL reported. Ukraine's Interior Minister Jury Smirnov said that the attack had not been "a planned action." "They were football fans. There was no criminal design to destroy a synagogue," he said, in the 17 April issue of Komsomolskaya Pravda Na Ukraine.

Also on 17 April, the daily Segodnyaquoted a Kiev skinhead who gave only his nickname, Krivonos, as saying the synagogue attackers were "simply football fans and hooligans," not skinheads from his organization. He claimed that there are approximately 300 skinheads in Kiev but that only 100 of them "actively stand for the rights of the white race."

A longer version of this article is available at: www.tol.cz