Worship
Food Sharing Ministry
Alumni
Students + Refugees
Donate
Contact Us
Home
STUDENTS + REFUGEES

Young Adults and Students | Parish Center |
Task Force on Racial Attack and Harassment

• Background Information and Links
  • Updates
• Safety Tips
  • Report an Incident

2004 Annual Report of the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy Task Force on Racial Attacks and Harassment.



October 2004


The Task Force on Racial Attacks and Harassment was established in April 2001 by the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy, an interdenominational, international, English-speaking congregation in the Russian capital. At that time, the congregation and city were awash with reports of acts of violence and intimidation against persons of color. Members of the congregation who had suffered attack included diplomats, students, and refugees from Africa and Asia. Though the rise of such attacks was public knowledge among the foreign community of Moscow, the police, other government officials, and the media made no mention of this growing problem. In response to this widespread silence, the Task Force was born. The goals of the Task Force were threefold: 1) to gather evidence and data regarding racial attacks and harassment, thus demonstrating the reality of the problem; 2) distribute this evidence and other supporting anecdotes to embassies, human rights groups, Russian government officials, and the media; and 3) provide spiritual, pastoral, and emergency care to the victims of these attacks.
The History of the Task Force
Beginning in the summer of 2001, Task Force members canvassed the community, interviewing victims of racial violence, collecting evidence and compiling reports, and referring victims to the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy for pastoral care and peer counseling. To date, Task force members have documented more than 80 cases of harassment, violence, or unlawful police detention based on race. These reports detail one chilling tale after another of persons of color being taunted, harassed, or physically abused by skinheads, youth gangs, and other nationalist groups.

In the spring of 2002, Task Force members interviewed 180 members of the African community in Moscow on a range of issues to assess their perceptions and experiences as persons of color living in Moscow. The results were disturbing. Among those interviewed, 64% reported having been physically attacked in Moscow on the basis of their race; 16% of victims had to be hospitalized due to their injuries. Fifty-four percent reported being verbally insulted by the police on the basis of race, and 27% suffered physical assault by police officers. Ninety-five percent of all respondents said they regularly altered their method of movement around the city out of fear of racial attack. As demonstrated by this survey, the prevalence and threat of violence was, and remains, a reality for persons of color in Moscow.

Throughout 2003, the evidence gathered and disseminated by the Task Force was used by various third parties to highlight the rising tide of racism and racist violence in Moscow. Amnesty International incorporated Task Force data and reporting into its March 2003 publication, “Dokumenti,” the centerpiece of Amnesty International’s year-long focus on racism in Russia. In January a Dutch television journalist interviewed Task Force members for a story on racism. An April Moscow Times newspaper article highlighted the plight facing African refugees seeking asylum in Moscow. Extended articles on the rise of racism in Moscow, including interviews with Task Force members and victims of violence, were published in the New York Times, Financial Times, and Toronto Globe and Mail in November and December 2003 and January 2004, respectively. The U.S. State Department cited Task Force data in its 2003 Human Rights Report for Russia. Task Force members also traveled to the southern Russian city of Voronezh in April to help foreign students establish a community of support for victims of racist violence in their city, mirroring the ongoing spiritual and physical care provided by the Task Force in Moscow throughout the year.



The Work of the Task Force in 2004


Fire at the Russian People’s Friendship University

In 2003 and throughout 2004, Task Force members focused their investigative efforts and spiritual and emergency care on the victims of the devastating fire at the Russian People’s Friendship University on November 24, 2003. At approximately 2:00 a.m. on that snowy and frigid night, a fire swept through dormitory block number six at the heart of the university campus in southern Moscow. Forty-two students perished in the blaze, and up to 200 more were injured. For weeks after the blaze, dozens of students remained in hospital; students suffered external burns while escaping the flaming building, internal injuries from inhaling smoke, and fractures of the legs or spine after jumping from higher-floor windows. Block six housed more than 260 students from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Nearly all of the victims were first-year language students and had only recently arrived to Moscow, in some cases just hours before the fire began.

The account of events that early winter morning as retold by students interviewed by Task Force members differs greatly from the official version of events offered by Russian government and Friendship University officials. Here are just a few examples:
    		• Several students reported that as soon as they saw the flames, they called Moscow’s emergency services number; however, more than 30 minutes elapsed before the arrival of the first ambulances, which parked outside the locked gates of the university, forcing students to carry the injured and dying through the snow to help. This timeline is disputed by city officials, who claim that emergency services responded within minutes of being summoned and that their response was appropriate to the emergency.
    		• Even before the fire, students had complained of the dangerous living conditions within university dormitories. On the night of the fire, block six had no working fire alarm system, no intercom system, and no usable fire extinguishers on the floors. Two of the three exits of the building were locked from the outside, funnelling the students through only one door to safety outside. University officials stated after the fire that the building was in accordance with all fire safety codes.
    		• Just after the fire was extinguished, the mayor of Moscow declared on television that the fire had been started in one particular room on the second floor of the building, and that fault lay with the three Nigerian female residents of the room for overloading the electrical system. Three days later, Task Force members interviewed one of the residents of the room, a female student from Kenya, who disputed this account. She and her Malawian roommate awoke to the smell of smoke and cries for help from the hallway. They hurriedly left their room and fled down the stairs through the smoke and out of the building. They vigorously denied that the fire started in their room.

    Other eyewitness statement are also troubling. One MPC member, a journalism student who lives in the adjacent dormitory, was videotaping the fire and rescue effort when university police detained him and confiscated his video tape. Others claim that the firefighters and medics acted lackadaisically, and handled the injured and the bodies of the deceased roughly.

    Most students interviewed by the Task Force stated a belief that the fire was a racially motivated act of arson. While no direct evidence has been offered to support this theory (or any other explanation for the fire), the fears of the students are understandable. For years, students at Friendship University have lived under constant threat of racial attack by Moscow’s community of skinheads and nationalists, as well as harassment by the university and city police. In the weeks immediately preceding and following the November 24 fire, students reported several disturbing incidents on or near the university campus. These included the savage beating of an African student and MPC member on a Moscow metro platform by a gang of skinheads wielding beer bottles and steel-toed boots; repeated bomb threats against several university dormitory buildings; an attack on students by a gang of about a dozen skinheads which left six Latin American and African students hospitalized; and another suspicious fire in the kitchen of dormitory block number seven, which was extinguished with no causalities suffered.

    In the days and weeks immediately following the November 24 fire, Task Force members visited victims of the fire as they recuperated in hospital or in friends’ rooms, conducted interviews to determine the cause of the fire and the needs of the community, and organized the collection and distribution of food, clothing, medicine, and other emergency provisions. Members and friends of MPC donated more than $10,000 in support of the Task Force’s relief efforts; these funds were used to purchase additional food and clothing, textbooks and telephone cards, special medicines, and other items needed by the survivors of the fire. Task Force members also served as liaisons to international journalists who converged on the scene, directing them to eyewitnesses of the events to ensure the truth of the fire be told, and communicated with embassy officials to assist their outreach to their nationals among the student community. Nearly a year after this tragic fire, Task Force members continue to work with the African Student Union and other student leaders on the campus, assisting in the organization of community events and providing funds for fire victims as needs continue to emerge.

    The Changing Face of Racism
    One positive change witnessed thus far in 2004 is the decline in reports of racial attack and harassment received by the Task Force. In 2004 the Task Force has received less than half the number of incident reports gathered in both 2002 and 2003. Some speculate that one reason for this improvement may be the willingness of government prosecutors to classify these incidents as hate crimes and to prosecute them more vigorously; this in turn may propel the police to investigate these crimes more diligently, which might deter further attacks.

    Two murders in 2004 drew widespread media attention and may have spurred an increase in government action against racist violence. On February 21, Amaro Antonio Limo, a student from Guinea-Bissau, was stabbed to death in broad daylight on the campus of Voronezh Medical Academy. After initially classifying the murder as an act of hooliganism, the local prosecutor later deemed the act a hate crime. Considerable resources were assigned to the case, and eventually perpetrators were charged with and convicted of murder. Similarly, that same month a nine-year-old girl originally from Tadjikistan was beaten to death in St. Petersburg; in this case local prosecutors decided to classify the murder as a hate crime, and arrests and prosecutions were made. Throughout the year, other incidents of racial attack that in previous years would have gone unmentioned by the media or government have been regularly reported and commented upon in Moscow’s newspapers.

    However, experts in the field warn that the number of Russians who identify with skinhead or nationalist groups or support their causes is on the rise. In a Moscow Bureau of Human Rights poll conducted this summer, more than one-half of respondents voiced aggression towards or hatred of persons of color. A July survey conducted by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Studies (VTSIOM) found that 61% of those polled approved of the slogan "Russia is for Russians." Perhaps most disturbingly, on June 19 two gunmen shot and killed Nikolai Girenko, a St. Petersburg ethnographer who was one of Russia’s leading experts on neo-Nazis and racially motivated crimes. Girenko had advised prosecutors in fifteen cases, arguing for the classification of these cases as hate crimes, and at the time of his death was assisting prosecutors in their case against St. Petersburg’s most notorious neo-Nazi gang.

    The Aftermath of the Beslan Tragedy
    The downing of the two Russian airliners on August 24, the suicide bombing outside a Moscow metro station a week later, and the tragedy in Beslan in early September have accentuated even further the threats felt by persons of color in Moscow. An early, and since disproved, assertion by the government in the wake of the Beslan crisis was that at least ten of the hostage takers were Arabs, and one was an African. In the days and weeks following this comment, many African members of the MPC community reported to the Task Force that they had been accused of supporting terrorists and had been threatened with physical harm. In one publicized case on September 18, a gang of skinheads attacked four persons from the Caucuses in a metro car; according to the Moscow Times, witnesses reported that the attackers yelled, “This is what you get for terrorist attacks!” as they beat their victims. Unfortunately, these recent terror attacks have increased the level and intensity of xenophobia experienced by many foreigners in Moscow and across Russia, especially persons of color.

    Summary
    The decline of individual incidents of racial attack and harassment reported to our Task Force in 2004 point to an improvement in the situation for persons of color in Moscow and Russia. Recent high-profile arrests and the willingness of prosecutors to classify racially-motivated acts as hate crimes may have led to a reduction in the number of such acts.

    However, other acts of violence and intimidation, including the Friendship University fire and continued threats against the student community of Moscow, the murder of Russia’s leading neo-Nazi expert and prosecutorial advisor, the backlash felt by persons of color following the recent terror acts, and the increase of xenophobic rhetoric indicated in recent surveys, point to racism and racist violence as remaining an unresolved problem in Russian society.

    Thus the work of the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy’s Task Force on Racial Attacks and Harassment will continue in the coming year. By all accounts, there is still a need for Task Force members to gather evidence of racist violence, to distribute this evidence so that government and non-government agencies can work together towards a solution to this crisis, and to minister to persons who suffer verbal harassment and physical assault simply because of the color of their skin.