Agence France Presse — English
April 27, 2006 Thursday 3:22 PM GMT

Ethnic Armenians, Tajiks urge Russia to stop racist violence

MOSCOW, April 27 2006

Ethnic Armenians and Tajiks living in Russia on Thursday called for
action against the rising number of racist murders in the country,
five days after a youth of Armenian origin was killed in the Moscow
subway.

“Today we need civil solidarity and we must develop a plan of action
to prevent xenophobia” from spreading in the country, said Ara
Abramian, president of the Armenian Union of Russia, which represents
some two million Russians of Armenian descent.

“We want our children not to be afraid to go out in the street after
six o’clock in the evening,” Abramian told a news conference in
Moscow.

Along with representatives of the ethnic Tajik community, they called
for a peace march against the racist violence which they claim
Russian society has been ignoring and that Russian authorities often
fail to identify as racially motivated.

Last Saturday’s murder in the subway in the center of Moscow was “the
sixth murder of an Armenian in Russia since January,” Abramian said.

Govkhar Djurayeva, the head of a human rights group called
Tajikistan, representing nearly one million people from the central
Asian country living in Russia, stressed the need for action against
skinheads, extreme right-wing youths “who spread fascist messages
over the Internet”.

The attacks by bands of skinheads, often labelled as “hooliganism” by
Russian authorities, generally target people from the Caucasus and
the former Soviet republics of central Asia, as well as from African
and Asian countries.