PROSECUTORS SAY WEEKEND ATTACKS ON FOREIGNERS ARE HATE CRIMES
MOSNEWS, Russia
July 4 2006
Moscow prosecutors said Monday that they considered the stabbing of
five ethnic minorities a hate crime, following a spate of attacks
on dark-skinned people in Moscow this weekend, The Associated Press
reports.
Four ethnic Armenians and one Azerbaijani were attacked by about 15
assailants at a subway station on Saturday, said Sergei Marchenko, a
spokesman for the Moscow prosecutor’s office. The Moscow prosecutor’s
office initially said only two people were hurt in the attack and
that it was being investigated as "hooliganism," not a hate crime.
Russia has seen a wave of xenophobia and hate crimes in recent years,
with hundreds of attacks reported, including many on dark-skinned
immigrants from former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus Mountains
region.
Rights activists say hate groups are emboldened by authorities’
mild approach to prosecuting hate crimes, and say that neo-Nazi and
extremist literature is sold freely.
In Yerevan, Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian on Monday
condemned the attack, and called on Russia to do more to head off a
rising tide of violent xenophobia in the country. "This is a widespread
and continuing phenomenon in Russia," Oskanian said. "The Russian
authorities need to take serious steps to thwart it, otherwise such
incidents will be a serious threat to Russia itself."
Meanwhile, three suspects in the Saturday stabbing of a Kazakh citizen
were arrested for a racially motivated crime, the Interfax news
agency reported. Also Saturday, two Uzbek citizens were hospitalized
with multiple stab wounds after being attacked in southwest Moscow,
Interfax said.
Alexander Brod, who heads the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, said that
the surge in attacks might be tied to two high-profile conferences that
opened in the capital on Monday before a summit of the Group of Eight
major industrialized nations that begins next week in St. Petersburg.
"On the eve of two such important events, it’s quite possible that
Moscow’s nationalist radicals demonstrated their aggressiveness to
announce their presence," Brod told The Associated Press.
Interfax quoted an Armenian community leader, Ara Abramian, as saying
the attacks were "a direct provocation before the G-8 meeting,"
and sharply criticized Moscow law enforcement for failing to prevent
such assaults. "I can’t understand how big groups of skinheads can
walk around the Moscow metro and freely attack people with (knives)
in the center of Moscow in broad daylight," he said.