Envoys Get Police Hotline
By Vladimir Kovalev, STAFF WRITER

St.Petersburg Times.ru, Russia
April 19 2005

Foreign diplomats working in St. Petersburg last week reached an
agreement with city police to create a direct line of communication
with local law enforcement management over improper police behavior
and hate crimes that the police take no action on, representatives
of foreign missions said.

“Sometimes the police behaves impolitely, not only in relation to
foreign citizens, but also to representatives of diplomatic missions
that are working here,” Ruben Akopyan, dean of the city’s diplomatic
corps, said Monday in an interview. “It sometimes happens that the
police do not know the rights of such people and how they should act
toward them.

“We have reached an agreement that if anything of this nature occurs,
we will inform the head of the police or a person responsible [for
this question],” he said.

Akopyan said neither he nor any other staff of the Armenian Consulate
in St. Petersburg had been ill treated by police, but indirectly
suggested that unpleasant incidents have affected representatives of
other diplomatic missions.

“Nothing of the kind has happened to me or people who work with me.
But if incidents of this or any other kind do happen, we solve them
using the law,” he said.

The latest reported case when diplomats were allegedly maltreated by
police officers happened at the end of January, when an unidentified
man stopped an Audi car with a Polish license plate on Zvenigorodskaya
Ulitsa and took the diplomat’s ID card. The criminal demanded $200
for the card to be returned, local media reported.

The city police could not be reached for comment Monday.

The U.S. embassy in Moscow on Monday warned its citizens about racist
attacks that could be initiated by skinheads on April 20, May 1 and
May 9.

“In previous years, extremist groups, particularly ‘skinhead groups,’
have marked these holidays by assaulting people of color, and in
particular, by targeting foreigners. These groups are very dangerous
and should be avoided. When out in town, do your best to avoid anyone
resembling a skinhead,” the embassy wrote on its web site.

“They typically shave their heads and wear black leather clothing
with Nazi swastikas. Tourist areas … are frequently targeted by
skinheads,” the letter said, “The police have informed us of the
potential for problems on the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday [on
Wednesday] and have assured us that they will take every precaution
deemed appropriate to ensure public safety.”

Human rights advocates have expressed their hope that the police will
do their job on Wednesday, but say what they do on other days is a
big question.

“I hope it will not be that dangerous for April 20 because the police
is expected to act,” Yury Vdovin, co-head of the St. Petersburg branch
of human rights organization Citizen’s Watch. “The problem is that
we live between fascism and communism, and I won’t be happy if either
of these sides win.”

“Foreigners, especially those who don’t appear to be from the West,
should unfortunately always beware in Russia,” he said Monday in
an interview.

Russia has almost as many skinheads as the rest of the world put
together, the Moscow bureau for human rights says.

“There are about 50,000 skinheads in Russia. In comparison, in the rest
of the world, except Russia, there are not more than 70,000,” Interfax
quoted Semyon Chyorny, an expert with the bureau, as saying Monday.

St. Petersburg has the most skinheads – some 10,000 to 15,000, the
expert said.

The northern capital is followed by Nizhny Novgorod with up to 2,500
skinheads, Rostov-on-Don with more than 1,500 and up to 1,000 in
Kaliningrad, Pskov, Yekaterinburg and Krasnodar. There are several
hundred skinheads in each of Voronezh, Samara, Saratov, Krasnoyarsk,
Irkutsk, Omsk, Tomsk, Vladivostok, Ryazan and Petrozavodsk, he said.

The groups are not united, operate independently and usually include
up to several tens of members, the human rights advocate said.

“If in the past the groups of skinheads existed only in major cities
and the towns of the southern part of Russia where the interethnic
relations are tense, today we can talk about this movement spreading
to all the territories, to the regional and district centers,” he said.

Most of the 40 killings committed on the grounds of national hatred
in 2004 in Russia were by skinheads, Chyorny said.