Volume 9, Number 48
December 18, 2009
BIGOTRY MONITOR
A Weekly Human Rights Newsletter on Antisemitism, Xenophobia, and Religious Persecution in the Former Communist World and Western Europe
EDITOR: CHARLES FENYVESI
(News and Editorial Policy within the sole discretion of the editor)
Published by UCSJ: Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union
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The suspicious circumstances of a 37-year-old Moscow lawyer’s death in jail have prompted President Dmitry Medvedev to dismiss a slew of high-ranking prison officials. But the question is whether he will also go after the corrupt law enforcement officers who sent the lawyer to jail on spurious charges.
1. MEDVEDEV FIRES 20 PRISON OFFICIALS. On December 4, President Medvedev signed a decree dismissing 20 high-ranking prison officials, including the head of the Moscow branch of the Federal Prison Service (FSIN), Major General Alexander Davydov, and the head of the Butyrskaya jail, Dmitry Komnov, FSIN head Alexander Reimer disclosed on December 11. Speaking on Ekho Moskvy radio, Reimer said that his agency’s investigation found that detainee Sergei Magnitsky’s right to proper living conditions had been violated in Butyrskaya where he had spent the last weeks of his life and that Komnov was directly linked to Magnitsky’s death on November 16 in a prison hospital. The Interior Ministry claimed that the cause was heart failure. Magnitsky had complained of stomach ailments after his imprisonment a year ago. His supporters and human rights activists blame the inhumane prison system and some charge murder.
William Browder’s London-based Hermitage Capital, which had employed Magnitsky in a high-profile legal conflict with the Interior Ministry, said that prosecutors rejected his family’s request for an independent autopsy.
Magnitsky, a lawyer with the Firestone Duncan law firm, was jailed on charges of setting up a scheme with U.S.-British investor Browder to evade taxes. The Interior Ministry opened the case shortly after Magnitsky and Browder accused several senior ministry officials of stealing $230 million in federal funds.
Hermitage Capital, once the largest foreign investment fund in Russia, urged Medvedev to go after “far bigger fish” than the top prison officials. “The penal system employees are merely the bottom of the feeding chain of individuals who were responsible for the death of Sergei [Magnitsky],” a Hermitage Capital spokesman said. “There are many other far bigger fish involved in this tragedy. The corrupt Interior Ministry officials whom Sergei testified against for their involvement in the $230 million theft from the Russian state, and who retaliated against Sergei’s brave act by arresting him, bear direct responsibility for his death.”
2. MEDVEDEV URGED TO ZERO IN ON WHY MAGNITSKY WAS ARRESTED. Magnitsky’s boss Jamison Firestone, an attorney and managing partner of Firestone Duncan, which has offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg, praised Medvedev for acting against the prison officials. But he urged Medvedev to focus on why Magnitsky was arrested, saying “that a group of corrupt law enforcement officers imprisoned a man who they knew was innocent, and they purposely put him in awful conditions in an attempt to get him to change his story. This is how Magnitsky was killed,” Firestone wrote in a commentary published in “The Moscow Times.” “The officers who imprisoned Magnitsky wanted him to withdraw his testimony against Interior Ministry officers in the $230 million scheme and to change his story to incriminate himself and his client, William Browder. He was promised his freedom for doing this. When Magnitsky repeatedly refused to comply, his conditions were made worse until he died.”
Firestone protested that the prison officials fired “are not even being accused of the real crime allowing their institutions to be used as instruments of pressure by fellow law enforcement agencies. The 20 prison officials who were fired are simply being accused of negligence, not criminal negligence.”
Prominent defense lawyer Igor Trunov said prisoners needed to be granted the right to be examined by doctors independent of the FSIN. “Formally, only a doctor can decide whether a person can stay in detention, but a prison doctor will issue whatever diagnosis that the prison chief needs,” Trunov said.
The scandal prompted FSIN head Reimer to disclose a shocking statistic: 386 people died in Russian pretrial detentions between January and November this year, including 169 from injuries and suicides.
3. CANDID COMMENT: PRISON OFFICIALS DON’T THINK A PRISONER IS HUMAN. On December 11, Matvey Ganapolsky pointed out on Ekho Moskvy radio that following Magnitsky’s death, the prison’s experts investigated and found nothing wrong--and thought that this was the end of the matter. “However, human rights activists met President Medvedev and we learned an incredible thing: heads of officials and bosses are rolling because of the death of an inmate,” the commentator said. “You see, there was a link between the vile murder of a person, civil society's anger, and the president's decree on punishing those bastards... [who] personally did not kill Magnitsky. They simply sat in their offices adorned with wilted potted plants, drank tea with biscuits, and did nothing because those who are kept in remand centers are not human. And this is what they have been sacked for. President Medvedev, or somebody else who prepared this matter, admitted the following: a person in a remand center remains human. And if he dies there, this is a murder. And even if he dies of heart failure, this is not his failure but of those who are sitting with a cup of tea under the portrait of the current president but keep the portrait of the former president in their desk drawer because the official knows that this is the future president.”
4. HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS URGE OVERHAUL OF PENITENTIARY SYSTEM. Human rights activists believe that firings in FSIN are insufficient, Interfax reported on December 11. "We insisted on the dismissals but the system itself has to be changed," Lyudmila Alekseyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, said. "As far as I know, the new head of FSIN has ideas about fundamentally rebuilding the existing system of corrective institutions and I hope we will be working on that together. …The atmosphere of the penitentiary system must be changed. Now it is worse than in the last years of Soviet power. This system is working to crush and suppress the individual. And after serving one's sentence a person does not return as a regular member of society, he returns fully crushed."
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EUROPE’S PARLIAMENT GIVES MEMORIAL TOP HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD. On December 16, the European Parliament gave its top human rights award to the Russian nongovernmental organization Memorial, honoring three of its leaders, Sergei Kovalyov, Oleg Orlov, and Lyudmila Alekseyeva, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported from Strasbourg. In presenting the award, European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek also paid tribute to Natalya Estemirova, saying that the 2009 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought also was meant to recognize the work of other defenders of human rights in Russia. "With this prize, we members of the European Parliament honor those who still among us fight for human rights," Buzek said. "But we also honor those who lost their lives in this valiant struggle. Natalya Estemirova should have been among us today."
In his acceptance speech, Kovalyov told the European legislators that human rights activists in Russia face a "dramatic struggle" and dangers that often lead to tragedy. Memorial closed down its office in Chechnya after the still unsolved crime of abduction and murder of Estemirova in July. But Orlov announced the group would be resuming its work there "in full." He asked EU officials to put human rights issues on equal footing with energy, trade, and security during their talks with Russian leaders.
The timing of the award bolsters Memorial’s reputation at a time when criminal slander charges are being sought against Orlov for his criticism of Chechnya's Kremlin-backed president, Ramzan Kadyrov, RFE/RL commented. During the summer, Orlov accused Kadyrov of involvement in the killing of Estemirova—a charge President Medvedev dismissed as "primitive." In October, a Moscow court found both Orlov and Memorial guilty of slandering Kadyrov and ordered Orlov and Memorial to pay about $2,350 in damages to Kadyrov. The payment was far short of the $340,000 Kadyrov had sought. Memorial has appealed. Kadyrov's lawyers also appealed to prosecutors to initiate criminal charges of slander. If a criminal case is initiated and Orlov is convicted, he could face a maximum sentence of three years in prison.
REIGN OF FEAR GRIPS CHECHNYA. “Bearded police in camouflage clothes, carrying assault rifles and long daggers, stop cars with tinted windows in the rebuilt Chechen capital” represent the “latest ploy in the hunt for Islamist fighters,” Reuters reported from Grozny on December 12. The report described how a policeman jerks open the back door of a car he ordered to stop, slides in, and slashes the dark tinted film off the car windows with his 10-inch dagger. "If you don't like it, take it up with the president,” the policeman is quoted as saying to the passengers. “Militants could be hiding behind these [tinted films]."
“Many Chechens dread the appearance of law enforcement officers, whose black woolen hats bear the letters ‘K.R.A.,’ the initials of the president's names, Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov,” the news agency reported and found the "Kadyrovtsy"—many of them former fighters for independence who switched sides--“eager to prove they are defeating the Islamic insurgency across the North Caucasus that aims to create an independent Muslim state ruled by [the Islamic law] sharia.”
Human rights groups are quoted as saying that the "Kadyrovtsy" enforce decrees issued by Kadyrov, such as a ban on alcohol and making women cover their heads in state buildings, regardless of the constitutionality of such rules. According to the human rights groups, Chechnya is becoming a fear-crippled region where Kadyrov has amassed enormous power.
According to Memorial, at least 86 people were abducted in the first nine months of this year in the republic of one million, which is more than the double of the 2008 total and almost triple that of 2007, but significantly lower than 2002, at the height of the second Chechen war, when there were 544, most of them killed. Of those kidnapped in 2009, nine have been found dead but most have disappeared, Reuters quoted Memorial’s Alexander Cherkasov as saying.
Reuters concluded the item by quoting the head of the FSB, the heir to the KGB, Alexander Bortnikov, who said earlier in the week that security forces detained almost 800 militants in the North Caucasus this year and seized 1,600 firearms and 490 homemade bombs.
SLAIN OPPOSITIONIST’S RELATIVES KILLED IN CAR BLAST. Relatives of Maksharip Aushev, the slain Ingush opposition and human rights activist, were killed in a car that exploded outside Nazran after police opened fire on it on December 16, “The Moscow Times” reported. The explosion killed Aushev's mother-in-law and brother-in-law, said Kaloi Akhilgov, a spokesman for the Ingush president. Two other people, Aushev's widow and a brother of his, were injured, Akhilgov told ”The Times,” saying that the car was running on propane gas, which exploded when police fired at the car.
Ingush police said they opened fire after the car approached a checkpoint outside Nazran, made a U-turn, and sped away.
Aushev, 43, who campaigned against abductions by security forces in Ingushetia, died at the wheel of his car after unidentified assailants peppered it with bullets on October 25.
AZERBAIJAN: POLICE BEAT AND STRIP-SEARCH JEHOVAH'S WITNESS WOMAN, 71. Police in Azerbaijan's district of Zakatala have refused to explain whether, and if so why, they beat a 71-year-old Jehovah's Witness Lydia Suleimanova, Forum 18 News Service reported on December 15. She stated that a beating from police left her requiring medical attention, and that police questioned her for many hours at the police station, accused her of being a prostitute and stripped her naked for a drugs search. Deputy police chief Kamandar Hasanov asked the news service: "Why are you getting involved in things here that have nothing to do with you?" No police officer was prepared to discuss the case.
HUNGARY’S HIGHEST COURT UPHOLDS DISBANDING OF RACIST GROUP. Hungary's Supreme Court upheld an order disbanding the Hungarian Guard, the militia of the far-right Jobbik party, news agencies reported on December 16. The decision was the third judicial ruling in a year making the blatantly anti-Gypsy and antisemitic paramilitary organization illegal and closing off any further appeal in Hungary. Jobbik chairman Gabor Vona said that the Guard will continue to function pending an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The Supreme Court said that the Guard had abused its own charter, as well as the democratic right of assembly, by targeting and deliberately generating fear in racially defined minority groups.
* * * QUOTE OF THE WEEK, OBAMA’S ‘PRINCIPLED PRAGMATISM * * * Speaking at Georgetown University on December 14, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged that the Obama administration will continue to pursue the American goal of universal human rights using what she called "principled pragmatism." "Our human rights agenda for the 21st century is to make human rights a human reality. And the first step is to see human rights in a broad context," Clinton said. "Of course, people must be free from the oppression of tyranny, from torture, from discrimination, from the fear of leaders who will imprison or disappear them. But they also must be free from the oppression of want--want of food, want of health, want of education, and want of equality in law and in fact." She added that President Obama’s philosophy will be most evident in how the United States regards human rights problems in China and Russia.
RAGING RACISM
Xenophobia Sans Frontieres
1. ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS REMOVE MENORAH IN DOWNTOWN CHISINAU. Some 200 fundamentalist Orthodox Christians in Moldova’s capital Chisinau dismantled a large metal Chanukah menorah on a downtown square and replaced it with a wooden cross on Sunday, December 13, according to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) item. News footage showed a bearded priest leading the group in chanting antisemitic slogans. The menorah had been installed by the local Jewish community on Europe Square, and the Orthodox Christian group placed it upside down on Stefan cel Mare Square. Neither police nor onlookers intervened.
"The Jews can try to kill us, to traumatize our children," but Moldovan Orthodox believers will resist, Father Anatoliy Chirbik]said, speaking into a sound system. Moldova, he said, is an Orthodox country, and the Jewish people are trying to "dominate people." Allowing the menorah to be set up had been "a sacrilege, an indulgence of state power today," he said.
Justice Minister Alexandru Tanese condemned the removal of the menorah. The Orthodox Metropolitan promised to investigate and take action, according to local reports. Incitement to racial and religious hatred in Moldova is subject to a fine or imprisonment of up to three years.
In neighboring Romania, the Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism urged the authorities to take "immediate measures" against the perpetrators. "Such an act committed by a priest with the Orthodox Church is totally inconceivable,” a statement said. “It takes us back to the days when the local population, if it did not participate, witnessed with indifference the crimes committed against the Jews." The Moldovan government now says that the menorah has been returned to its original site and is under police guard. On December 16, the government expressed "deep regret," JTA reported. In a letter to Richard Stone, chairman of the NCSJ, an advocacy group for Jews in the former Soviet Union, and Mark Levin, NCSJ executive director, Moldova’s Ambassador in Washington Nicolae Chirtoaca wrote that "the Republic of Moldova is a democratic state and guarantees the fundamental human rights and freedoms, whereas hatred, intolerance, xenophobia and other negative phenomena are inadmissible."
On December 17 in Washington, UCSJ: Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union expressed “deep concern” over the incident. In a letter signed by UCSJ’s national director Micah H. Naftalin and chairman Larry Lerner and addressed to Ambassador Chirtoaca, UCSJ said it was “gratified” that the national and local governments have condemned the incident but asked the authorities to investigate under Moldovan laws prohibiting public incitement of ethnic or religious hatred Father Anatoliy and the men who pulled down the menorah. The letter warned that “failure to bring such charges against Father Anatoliy and his followers would send a dangerous signal of impunity to them and to other Moldovans who harbor anti-Jewish prejudices.”
UCSJ also sent a letter to Prosecutor General Oleksander Medvedko in Moldova’s neighbor Ukraine, protesting “the continuing antisemitic incitement by the mayor of Uzhgorod, Sergey Ratushnyak. Despite the fact that public hate speech is illegal in Ukraine, Mayor Ratushnyak is flaunting the law with impunity, making false accusations against the Jewish community that play on dangerous age-old stereotypes. This hate speech is particularly worrisome within the context of the current election campaign, during which other candidates seem afraid to clearly and consistently condemn Mr. Ratushnyak's demonization of Jews.” The letter asked Medvedko to “personally supervise a criminal investigation into the mayor's statements, which clearly violate Ukrainian law, and undermine the international image of Ukraine.”
2. MENORAH VANDALIZED IN RUSSIA. Vandals damaged a menorah in downtown Smolensk, Russia, according to a December 15 report by the regions.ru news web site. Posters and other decoration around the menorah, set up to mark Chanukah, were damaged. The city's chief rabbi stated that the damage on the menorah could not have been the work of just one vandal.
3. LITHUANIAN JUSTICE MINISTER DENIES COLLABORATION WITH THE NAZIS. Students of European history, shocked earlier this year by Russian charges of Poland’s provoking Nazi Germany’s war, face another new twist on wartime tragedies. Lithuanian Justice Minister Remigijus Simasius has said his country should answer questions regarding its behavior during World War II with its head held high. Writing in his blog earlier this month, Simasius dismissed accusations that Lithuania was an antisemitic country and collaborated with the Nazis. "First of all, the fact that many Jews were killed in Lithuania does not in itself mean that Lithuanians were Jew killers,” he wrote. “Quite on the contrary: Lithuania was a place where Jews were safe and lived in peace. Until the Nazis came. Had Lithuanians been antisemitic, Lithuania would not have become a haven for the Jews, and Vilnius would not have been known as ‘Jerusalem of the North.’"
According to Simasius, Jews were neither persecuted nor oppressed in Lithuania and “throwing accusations of antisemitism, or collaboration, at Lithuania is insulting to the memory of the hundreds of Lithuanians who had helped Jews. How can anyone accuse Lithuania of collaborating with the Nazis, if this collaboration simply never took place in any official or formal ways.”
World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder called the Simasius statement "disingenuous" and a distortion of the facts. Lauder noted: “Such rewriting of history is totally misleading and unacceptable. Instead of recognizing that many ethnic Lithuanians actively collaborated with the Nazi occupiers to round up Jewish citizens, Minister Simasius chooses to placate the revisionists in his country. It beggars belief that someone should today still argue that antisemitism played no role in the extermination of Lithuanian Jewry when the collaboration of so many Lithuanians with the Nazi occupiers is well-documented.”
More than 90% of Lithuania's pre-war Jewish population of 220,000 was annihilated during World War II. In 1995 in Israel’s Knesset, Lithuania's President Brazauskas apologized to the Jewish people on behalf of his nation for those Lithuanians who had taken part in the Nazi persecution and killing of Jews during World War II.
4. ITALY'S CULTURE OF RACISM EXPOSED BY FANS' ABUSE OF BLACK SOCCER STAR. Born in Sicily to Ghanaian parents and adopted at age two by natives of the Brescia region, the soccer team Inter Milan's Mario Balotelli “personifies a refusal to accept a multi-ethnic society,” Britain’s “Guardian” wrote on December 13. The report noted the chant "A Negro cannot be Italian" by fans of a rival team, Juventus, and mentioned fines amounting to the tens of thousands of euros that Juventus paid recently for the second time because of racist chants by its fans.
At 19, striker Balotelli is a great promise of Italian soccer. “He speaks with the accent of his region, but has received far more racist abuse than other black stars in Italian football because his Italian identity is seen by some as a provocation,” the British newspaper wrote. "The difference [from other black players] is Balotelli is totally black and totally Italian, and that has provoked a short circuit among fans," said Sandro Modeo of the daily “Corriere della Sera.”
“As Italy's immigrant total reaches 7%, the treatment of many of the ‘Balotelli generation’--the half-million children of immigrants born in Italy who qualify by law for Italian citizenship--is becoming an increasingly controversial issue in a country which still, overwhelmingly, considers itself white,” “The Guardian” wrote. "Balotelli is stubborn, combative, and can be a bit of a bully, but at the same time he is generous, brave, and irreverent," said Fare Futuro, a think-tank run by the prominent center-right politician Gianfranco Fini. "He is pure talent. Genius and lack of restraint all in one. What else could be more Italian than that?"
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