LR Racism Special Issue Part I: British Home Office Betrays Victims of Race Violence in Russia

As readers will know, La Russophobe has an ongoing investigation as to the denial of asylum requests by the British Home Office to persons who claim they would be racially persecuted in Russia if returned there. The Home Office issued a prior report claiming that incidents of racial oppression in Russia are not significant. This rationale, of course, kills two birds with one stone. It gives the Home Office a convenient excuse for keeping “undesireables” out of the country, and it makes the Kremlin happy.

Now, the Home Office has issued a second such report, one which appears to have been drafted in response to the concerns raised on La Russophobe and elsewhere.

At the outset, the report shies away from any mention of the term “race,” preferring instead to discuss “ethnic groups.”

At paragraph 3.7.6 the report states that “during 2005 numerous racially motivated attacks took place” but it makes no attempt to quantify them. It admits that “police investigations were generally ineffective” (para. 3.7.7) but claims that “there were indications that authorities were increasingly willing to acknowledge racial motivations for such criminal acts” (para. 3.7.8).

In an outrageous fashion, the report then proceeds to give several examples of skinhead prosecutions by the “authorities” without first having given any specific examples of “racially motivated attacks” (see para. 3.7.8), even though those examples are widely available both in the media and from the U.S. government.

The report then admits that “there are limits on the effectiveness of any protection the authorities are willing or able to offer” and then even more outrageously, concludes that “this discrimination does not amount to persecution” (para. 3.7.12). In bizarre fashion, the report states: “In some cases the authorities are willing to offer sufficiency of protection although the effectiveness of this protection may be limited by individual police officers/government officials.” In other words, many people will get no protection, and the rest will get protection which may not be worth anything at all. Most shockingly, the report states that “internal relocation” is a viable option when the local authorities are unwilling or unable to protect the victims.

In short, the British Home Office would appear to have gone quite berzerk. It is reaffirming a baseless position it previously took by offering even less evidence to support that position than it did before. It appears to be confirming an intention to arbitrarily refuse asylum which it is bound by international treaty to grant simply because it doesn’t want too many dark-skinned foreigners cluttering up the country. And by no means should Britain be thought to be alone in this, since doubtless many other governments will adopt a similar attitude using this precedent.

La Russophobe dares to wonder just how many dark-skinned students Russians would have to brutally murder before the British government would recognize that Russia has race persecution. Apparently, several dozen per year is not enough. What would be? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000?

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LR Racism Special Issue Part II: UN Betrays Victims of Russian Race Violence

DouDou Diene (pictured), you’ve just been told about the horrors of Russian race violence. What are you going to do now?

From the look on his face, he’s going to Disney World. Or perhaps someplace even nicer!

This man has just been told that 18 dark-skinned people have been murdered in Russia this year on the basis of racial hostility while hundreds of others have suffered physical attacks. He’s just been told that African people who have lived in major cities for years are terrified to leave their rooms. And his response is to smile like he just won the lottery? To top it all off, he was “so busy” that he “didn’t have time” to find out how it feels to ride the city subway, where he’d be taking his life in his hands if he rode without a phalanx of bodyguards (it seems he was committed to the race question only to the extent of spending one week in Moscow and St. Petersburg, not a single second in the provinces). Once again, we see that the U.N. is impotent and incompetent, a very sick, sad joke. In fact, if one were only a little bit cynical, she’d surely conclude this man had been bribed.

The Moscow Times reports:

With violent attacks on the rise, the state must do more to combat racism and xenophobia, a United Nations official said Friday.

Doudou Diene, the UN’s special rapporteur on racism, said he would urge Russia, in a report to be filed with the UN in the fall, to track the growth of racist attacks, adhere to international standards on protecting minority rights and encourage tolerance.

Diene spoke at a news conference in Moscow after a weeklong trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Russian officials and NGOs tend to see the current situation differently, Diene said, with authorities blaming the recent spate of attacks on a handful of marginal hate groups and NGOs saying Russia has a deeper, cultural problem.

“In Soviet times, the state encouraged friendship between different peoples,” Diene said. “It doesn’t do that anymore, and as a result, there is an ideological vacuum.”

Today, racism is not an official policy, he said. But there are signs that the problem is serious: Political parties run on racist and xenophobic platforms; skinheads perpetrate violent crimes, with many going unpunished; and some police have been accused of attacking minorities.

Diene said he was especially shaken after meeting with Africans.

“I met with people who have lived in Russia for 20, 30 years, and they’re completely isolated,” he said. “They’re alone, frightened, and scared to go outside.”

Africans are among the many groups of dark-skinned people routinely targeted by skinheads and neo-Nazis.

Eighteen people have been murdered and 147 injured in racially motivated attacks since the beginning of the year, said Galina Kozhevnikova, deputy director of the Sova center, which monitors extremist activity.

Diene was also stirred by a visit to a Gypsy settlement near St. Petersburg where people were living, he said, “in horrible conditions, totally marginalized and desperate.” Kozhevnikova, among the NGO representatives who met with Diene during his trip, said Sova registered at least two or three attacks every week.

The actual number of non-fatal attacks is probably three or four times higher than what the center registers, she said, because beatings of illegal migrants often go unreported.

Others who met with Diene included Supreme Court Chief Justice Vyacheslav Lebedev, Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Zvyagintsev, head of the presidential council for civil society Ella Pamfilova, ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, and Justice and Foreign Ministry officials, among others, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

Asked if he had ridden on the metro, a frequent site of racist attacks, Diene, who is from Senegal, replied: “I would like to ride in the metro, as I do everywhere, even though I’ve been advised against it. But I haven’t had enough time.”

Even as DouDou was hobnobbing in Moscow, the Kremlin was seeking to undermine the new U.N. commission on human rights, as RIA Novosti reports:

GENEVA, June 19 (RIA Novosti) – Russia hopes the UN’s new Human Rights Council will avoid the mistakes of its predecessor, which used human-rights issues to exert political pressure on nations, a deputy foreign minister said Monday.

The Council, which on June 16 replaced the Commission on Human Rights as part of a UN reform, is meeting in Geneva for its first session Monday to determine its agenda and mechanisms to take on duties from its predecessor.

And Alexander Yakovenko said he hoped the new council would not repeat the former body’s negative features.

“Above all, we would like to avoid any further politicization of this body’s activities so that discussions of human-rights issues are not turned into an instrument of political pressure on individual countries,” he said.

The deputy foreign minister is expected to attend the High-Level Segment of meetings on June 19-22 to be attended by senior officials from over 100 countries and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

The council comprises 47 states elected by the General Assembly based on their human rights records, including Russia and two other former Soviet nations, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. The Commission on Human Rights consisted of 53 members.

“One of the issues to be discussed is our [Russia’s] presence in the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. Russians are not working in the office at the moment, which is unacceptable,” Yakovenko said, adding that Russia’s dues to the office had been $2 million since December 2005.

UN diplomats said the first session, which will last until June 30, would be largely organizational, as the member countries would have to study its predecessor’s legacy.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

LR Racism Special Issue Part III: Russian High Court Frees Racist

The Moscow News reports:

Russia’s Supreme Court has overturned the verdict of Aleksandr Koptsev, who had attacked parishioners in a Moscow synagogue.Alexander Koptsev burst into the synagogue on Bolshaya Bronnaya street in Moscow on January 11, 2006, and stabbed eight people with a hunting knife before being wrestled to the ground by the rabbi and his son. Four of those injured were in serious condition. Russia’s Chief Rabbi, Berl Lazar, announced he was cutting short a visit to Israel and returning to Moscow after the incident.Koptsev was charged with racially-motivated attempted murder and humiliation of a religious group. He told investigators that he was jealous of Jews and their better living standards and was inspired to act by books and internet websites. He added that the main factor was his “desire to die” and he felt sorry for those he had injured. He has been described by Russian media as a skinhead. Russia’s chief rabbi stated that the attack was a symptom of the general climate of intolerance and xenophobia in Russia.On March 27, 2006, Koptsev was sentenced to thirteen years in prison and mandatory psychiatric treatment after being found guilty of attempted murder. A month later Koptsev’s lawyer, Vladimir Kirsanov, appealed to Russia’s Supreme Court to have his client’s sentence reduced, arguing he was mentally unstable, did not kill anyone, and did not cause any disabling injuries. Meanwhile, prosecution lawyers have also appealed to include the charge of inciting interethnic hatred, which was dropped by the court. The resolution of the Supreme Court, as quoted by Gazeta.ru internet daily, states that a Moscow local court will now reexamine Koptesev’s case.

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Exposing the Evil that is Putin

In the following brilliant column from the Moscow Times, Yezhednevny Zhurnal deputy editor Alexander Golts exposes the basic nature of the Putin regime. The consequences for Russians are quite terrifying, even if you are not one of them.

Russia’s militarists have scored another victory — over their own people. Two weeks ago, the State Duma voted in a key second reading to cancel four types of deferment from military service and amend five others. The Defense Ministry has said that reducing deferments would allow the military to call up an additional 90,000 men per year beginning in 2008. But this will come nowhere close to offsetting the shortage of recruits that will inevitably occur as Russia’s demographic crisis deepens.

It is equally obvious that a huge conscript military, which the top brass are fighting tooth and nail to preserve, is simply incapable of confronting the strategic challenges Russia is likely to face in the future. An army like this can only prevail by expending enormous numbers of poorly trained soldiers, which is useless when the enemy possesses surveillance satellites, pilotless aircraft and high-precision weapons that are capable of eliminating large numbers of troops without confronting them directly.

A large conscript army is also useless in the war on terror. In the final analysis, the war on terror is waged by small groups of soldiers and the outcome most often depends on training and the initiative demonstrated by junior officers. Yet these very factors — training and initiative — are useless or even harmful in an army that relies on massive battle groups.

So the military in its current form is both useless and impossible for the country to sustain. Yet the government continues to expend enormous effort to prop up this myth. The self-serving calculations of the military leadership are largely responsible for this, of course. After all, the professional expertise of our generals is limited to mobilizing hundreds of thousands of men in a short time and deploying them as cannon fodder.

The question is: Why is the political leadership so willing to go along with the brass? I don’t think they are worried about an officers’ rebellion. The fact is that President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle conceive of the relationship between society and the state in terms of a large conscript army. Putin’s vaunted power vertical mirrors exactly the hierarchical structure of the Russian military.

But this is not the most important thing. In effect, compulsory military service is the most onerous form of taxation a government can impose on its citizens. Putin and his team clearly believe the people should live in a state of permanent indebtedness to the state. And the best way for the state to call in this debt is to exploit the time, health and even lives of its citizens in the interest of national security.

Defending the fatherland, however, is not the main goal of our armed forces. The real goal is a kind of negative socialization. The regime regards everything that gives the military such a bad reputation — hazing and humilitation, the senseless drilling and the climate of falsehood and hypocrisy — as an ideal way to restore the “discipline” that society has lost over the last few decades. Exposure to these factors in the military is ideal preparation for life in a repressive society.

By curtailing deferments and drafting university graduates, the Kremlin will ensure that the largest possible number of Russian men pass through this human obedience school, which drills into our heads the notion that society should be organized in the same way as the military. The president makes the command decisions with the help of his staff, and average citizens are little more than foot soldiers who are expected to follow orders. The little man has no power. This is the main lesson of the negative socialization that will be drilled into the heads of most Russian men during their hitch in the service.

I don’t think the Kremlin’s plan will succeed in its entirety. It will probably just result in an exodus of young men from the country and bigger bribes for intake officers. But the Kremlin may well achieve its basic goal: “discipline,” which amounts to social and political passivity.

But this could prove a Pyrrhic victory, because imposing a barracks mentality on the population will bring modernization to a screeching halt. Bismarck once said that Prussian schoolteachers were responsible for the victory in the Battle of Königgrätz. With fewer teachers in the classrooms — since they’ll have to spend a year in the barracks, after which few young men will have any desire to give anything back to society — our country may lose the war of the future.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Cowardly Europeans Refuse to Stand Against Putin

Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl describes how the craven Europeans are once again appeasing a maniacal dictator in their midst. Anyone who doubts the need for such a blog as La Russophobe need only read this column to be convinced. Putin has figured out that dictatorship can be imposed over apathetic Rusisans without any of the ham-handed bluntness of the USSR, simply by making them too weak to defend themselves even if they wanted to. Welcome to the Neo-Soviet Union.

Crumbling Before Putin

Vladimir Putin must wait another month before he can play the coveted role of host to the world’s most powerful democratic leaders at the Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg. But already the Russian president appears close to accomplishing his principal objective: preventing a serious response by the G-8 to his autocratic domestic policies and imperialist bullying of neighbors.

A couple of months ago Western officials were confidently promising that Putin would not be allowed to strut among the elected presidents and prime ministers in St. Petersburg without being reminded that he is not their political peer. At the insistence of the Bush administration, Russia’s interventions in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova — former Soviet republics trying to establish themselves as independent democracies — were placed on the agenda of G-8 preparatory meetings. U.S. diplomats pressured NATO to allow the first steps toward membership this spring for Georgia and Ukraine.

In May, Vice President Cheney delivered a tough speech spelling out the case against Putin: his embrace of dictators in Belarus and Uzbekistan, his use of energy supplies as a tool of political blackmail, his elimination of independent voices in Russia. President Bush agreed in principle to visit Kiev before St. Petersburg, in order to bolster Ukraine’s beleaguered pro-Western democrats.

In the past few weeks, however, the Western will to stand up to Putin has crumbled. At a NATO ministerial meeting 10 days ago, France and several other European governments rejected U.S. talk of an “enhanced dialogue” with Georgia or a membership action plan for Ukraine — even as Russian-backed demonstrations in the Ukrainian Crimea forced NATO to withdraw U.S. Marines who had deployed there for an exercise. The White House then announced the cancellation of Bush’s visit to Ukraine, largely because of the inability of the pro-Western parties to agree on a new government.

Cheney’s speech, meanwhile, produced a backlash not just from Moscow but also in Western Europe, where the vice president was roundly criticized as too provocative. As for Russian neo-imperialism: Administration officials say they are still seeking to put Georgia and Moldova on the agenda of a pre-summit foreign ministers’ meeting next week, but they don’t expect to succeed. “We’re dead in the water,” says Bruce Jackson, a conservative close to many in the administration who heads the Project on Transitional Democracies. “Russia is playing a more aggressive, thought-out game, and they are outplaying us.”

Putin’s strongest move was his agreement to participate in a pending Western bid to freeze Iran’s nuclear program. In exchange for its support Russia won the postponement of a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have ordered an end to the program; it also delayed a looming rift between Russia and the West over sanctions against Tehran. As long as Moscow is nominally on board with its most important foreign policy initiative, the Bush administration is constrained from pressing the issues raised by Cheney — though officials insist that they haven’t been dropped.

European policymakers don’t suffer such scruples. In Washington and in Brussels, they are arguing straightforwardly that Putin’s noxious policies should be tolerated — not just because of Iran but also because of Russia’s importance as an energy supplier. Brussels has been intimidated: At a meeting at the Black Sea resort of Sochi in late May, Putin flatly rejected European Union appeals that Russia loosen its stranglehold on pipelines carrying gas and oil to Europe and allow greater European investment in Russian fields. Last week his government confirmed that Western companies will be allowed only minority stakes in all but the smallest projects.

Putin’s intransigence has produced a response that a U.S. official summed up in one word: “appeasement.” A senior European official explained the logic to me this way: For the foreseeable future, European economies will depend on Russian energy. But that energy won’t be available unless Russia makes huge new investments in the coming years and chooses to continue marketing its oil and gas in Europe, rather than China. “That means we have no choice but to support a powerful center in Moscow,” the official said, “so that the necessary investments are made and the supplies are available to us.”

Faced with such European fecklessness, U.S. officials appear to have resigned themselves to a summit at which Putin will portray himself as ruler of a resurgent superpower. Georgians and Moldovans will watch Western leaders toast Putin while the Russian boycotts of their exports and promotion of separatism in their countries go undiscussed. Russian democrats and independent civil society groups will, if they are lucky, content themselves with meeting mid-level U.S. officials in Moscow. And viewers in the rest of the world might understandably ask, does the Group of Eight exist to serve Russia? Or is there some other purpose?

One assumes that this craven “Senior European Official” was French, and that he believes his country also had “no choice” but to surrender to Adolph Hitler in World War II, or to launch the crazed Napoleonic invasions. But perhaps the worst offender is Germany’s corrupt former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who left office to become a paid shil for Gazprom, selling his own country down the river for personal gain.

Then again, why should Europeans be expected to stand up to Putin when Russians themselves won’t do so? Once again, the only thing that stands between Europeans and catastrophe is the courage of the U.S.A. and Britain, as well as of course the former Soviet slave states. Neo-Soviet Russia will still be defeated far more easily than the USSR, which lasted less than a century. The ones who will suffer most from European cowardice are the Russians themselves.

For, in the end, Russia will only breed resentment by trying to hoard its energy resources over the heads of the Europeans, and hasten their development of alternative energy sources even as Russia’s finite resources run out. Meanwhile, Russia’s myriad of social and political ills will take their tolls, and soon enough the Europeans will find they have a giant basket case to deal with.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !