St. Petersburg Becomes Russia's Unofficial Capital of Racially-Motivated Crimes

ST. PETERSBURG/ When the St. Petersburg City Court finally sentenced four white supremacists to a total of 39 years in prison in June for killing 29-year-old Congolese student Roland Epassak in September 2005, it was a positive decision that took human rights advocates by surprise after the 20-month jury trial, which was tarnished by controversial acquittals last July followed by a retrial in February.

In the row of the convicted men ranging in age from 19 to 26 were Andrei Gerasimov, who was sentenced to 14 years in a high security prison, Viktor Orlov, sentenced to 7 years, and Andrei Olenov and Yury Gromov, each given a 9-year term.

But it was an unusual verdict in a city so used to jurors letting perpetrators of hate crimes go free. The behavior of law enforcement and policymakers gives them a license to maim and kill while enjoying the backing of the general public.

"About 40 percent of the city's residents have xenophobic attitudes," said Tamara Smirnova, a sociologist and co-leader of St. Petersburg's multiracial umbrella organization, the House of National Cultures. A study on the level of xenophobia in St. Petersburg and Moscow she conducted last year revealed that 47 percent of Muscovites admit to xenophobic views, but explains that in St. Petersburg, "people are more open to revealing the reality than in Moscow."

Over the past five years, St. Petersburg has become Russia's unofficial capital of hate crime following a series of racially-motivated murders and an apparent sympathy towards the culprits on the part of local officials and residents that has sparked outrage among both local and international human rights groups.

"They have been dealt a serious blow today," said Ruslan Linkov, head of the Democratic Russia human rights movement as he watched a small picket of discontented nationalists, friends and relatives of the convicted men waving placards reading "Shame to Fascist Prosecutors!" and "It Could be You in Their Place!" outside the court building soon after the sentences were passed on June 19.

An Anniversary Present

"Today we have a good reason to commemorate the third anniversary of (Nikolai) Girenko's death," said Aliou Tunkara, president of the St. Petersburg African Union, a group that represents the city's African community. Girenko, an ethnographer who fought racial extremists through providing scientific evidence in court, was gunned down in his apartment June 19, 2004. He was also a force behind the formation of Tunkara's organization.

"He gave his life so that neo-Nazis could get their due, and I wish he were alive to see how the judiciary has finally come to its senses," Tunkara said. The June 19 sentence was a welcome change from a series of hate trials last year in which criminals were either acquitted or received light, symbolic sentences.

"But in the meantime, anything should be expected of the wounded wild animals they are," said Linkov as he spotted Yury Belyayev leading 20 of his followers outside the court. Belyayev, head of the extreme nationalist Freedom Party, which was outlawed in 2004, is currently serving an 18-month suspended sentence for promoting hate.

Only a few hours after the verdict, the need for Linkov's warning became apparent as Girenko's predecessor, Valentina Uzunova, 59, was hospitalized with severe injuries following an attack by a female neo-Nazi near Girenko's home on her way back from meeting his family. In the attack, she was stripped of a dossier on a hate trial against retired submariner Vladislav Nikolsky, whose hearing was due to convene the following day.

Exactly a week before the anniversary, Dmitry Nikulinsky, a 22-year-old Jewish student of biology at St. Petersburg State University, was stabbed to death in the stairwell of his apartment building--murdered in the same way his classmate, anti-fascist activist Timur Kachareva, was by a group of skinheads in November 2005.

Prosecutors have thus far ruled out any hate motives in the incident saying Nikulinsky's killing "was sparked by jealousy in what was likely a love triangle," declaring an ex-boyfriend of Nikulinsky's girlfriend a key suspect. But Linkov countered that argument: "With his distinct Jewish features and appearance... 20 stab wounds, a style typical of neo-fascists and akin to Kachareva's murder, which involved such a group, hate is the only possible motive," he said.

A Situation of Desperation

Despite the woes, Tunkara believes the latest sentence is a reflection of an improvement in the public awareness towards tolerance compared to two years ago, when Epassak was killed.

He recalls an African man, triggered by disappointment and fear for his life, who broke away from a crowd of demonstrators in front of the St. Petersburg City Hall a day after Epassak's murder waving a placard reading "Russians, you have awakened the Black Panther!"

That message of hate received so much media attention that it dominated angry chants of the mixed crowd of Africans and other anti-fascist demonstrators; Tunkara had to work very hard to distance the African Union, which had organized the demonstration, from what appeared to be a call for racial violence harkening back to the U.S. Black Panther movement of the 1960s.

"He did it on his own, but his message reflects the general mood of the desperate ethnic minority to which he belongs," Tankara said, adding "I don't rule out the emergence of the likes of Black Panthers if the problem of the rising xenophobia and violent hate crimes goes unchecked."

During the protests, St. Petersburg Police Chief Vyacheslav Piotrovsky told the protesting Africans and their supporters at the local parliamentary building that there was "nothing racist in (Epassak's) murder. He used to hang out with the lowest of the lows," Piotrovsky said, adding that Epassak "was drunk when he was attacked," although according to Epassak's doctor, there was no sign of alcohol in his blood.

The day following Piotrovsky's remarks, Belyayev, the self-proclaimed godfather of the St. Petersburg hate crime underworld, claimed responsibility for the murder on behalf of his Freedom Party and distributed a press release claiming to have deployed "beliye patruli" (white patrols) in the city center and on public transport in order to "cleanse the city of unwanted elements where the police have failed."

A few days later, Piotrovsky acknowledged he had lied to "silence the media and give enough room for my boys to investigate the crime," Fontanka.ru reported.

But in his earlier remark, Piotrovsky was only singing from the same hymn sheet as his colleagues.

"Ethnic minorities, especially blacks and Asians, have tended to allege racism as a way of diverting attention from their involvement in crimes," said St. Petersburg Police spokesman Pavel Rayevsky in January 2004, following an attack in which Russian language student, Isaac Mwita, 23, from Tanzania was stabbed by a group of five skinheads in a manner reminiscent of Satanic sectarian rituals.

He vehemently denied that hate crimes in the city had reached an alarming stage. "I wouldn't say such crimes have reached the level of concern that you (foreigners) would like to believe... They are daily occurrences in big cities in the West," Rayevsky said.

But Yury Vdovin, co-president of the local Human Rights watchdog Citizens' Watch, believes that the extremists enjoy the full support of the state. "Police tend to protect the state from citizens and make a saint of the government, which supports the rising wave of extremism, xenophobia and racism in a society dominated by the legacy of Communist-defined patriotism. It is like saying, Фwe (the state) cannot do it openly, so let the young (extremists) do the job for us," he said.

However, Belyayev's words also echo the voices of the law enforcement bosses: "The government just keeps its borders open for all sorts of lowlifes," he commented after the February 2006 slaying of two Kazakh women, "As if we didn't have enough of our own. When they arrive in town, the immigrants behave without respect to locals and take root in all sorts of criminal groups."

The Winds of Change

With Epassak's murder, the city witnessed a massive reaction against hate crimes for the first time. Suddenly City Hall and the legislative and law enforcement organs began to realize that what had appeared to be a small, weak minority was actually the main target of racial extremists, who were showing every sign of overwhelming any feeling of tolerance in the city.

However, Epassak's death only continued a wave of hate crimes that started with the killing of an ethnic Indian medical student from Mauritius, an Azeri watermelon vendor and a Roma girl in 2003--the last of these the skinhead assailants videotaped as proof of their dedication to the cause.

Epassak's murder was a turning point for the African community, moving them from a state of depression to take a more active stance. The "Black Panther" approach was replaced by the proactive massive awareness campaign on tolerance only because community members decided that the rising wave of hate crimes was due partly to lack of information about Africa and cultures alien to Russia. African activists visited more than 80 local schools as part of the campaign, exposing about 14,000 senior graders to positive views about Africa in less than two months starting in January 2006.

The campaign was not without its difficulties, however. At the peak of its second phase in April 2006, when group members were working in universities and other higher education institutions, one of its eight most active members, Lampzer Samba, a Senegalese fifth-year student at the St. Petersburg State University of Telecommunications Engineering, was gunned down by neo-Nazis, who left behind at the murder scene the gun emblazoned with a swastika.

This act was part of the extremists' media campaign to counter that of the Africans. In its January 26 issue, local extremist weekly Novy Peterburg ran a front-page story branding the tolerance endeavor as a "promotion of the African culture of cannibalism, drugs and the dissemination of infectious diseases among children."

"No one doubts the fact that the natives of Africa share a strong tradition of cannibalism to the present day," read an article in the paper. "Emperor Bokassa [the former dictator of the Central African Republic] and his son serve as proof. They have infested schools with their Negro jazz bands, displaying cannibalistic rituals and all kinds of sexual excesses, under the pretext of national tolerance."

The paper also urged the City Hall to send the African instructors for "veterinary medical checkups before any contacts with schoolchildren." The Prosecutor's Office said that legally, there was nothing offensive in the article.

It was also during this time that the city experienced another outbreak of violent hate crimes, including attacks on students from India and Jordan, an African and a Chinese person. Two men, Dembele Mamutu of Mali and Leon Canhem of Cameroon, were killed.

Lilian Sisoko, a nine-year-old African-Russian girl was attacked on the second day following the end of the trial of the suspects in the murder of nine-year-old Tajik girl Khursheda Sultavova; the suspects were either acquitted or given suspended sentences.
"(Racists) have been given license to attack and kill everything that moves; they won't spare the children now," said Lilian's mother Yekaterina Sisoko.

A Lack of Information

Novy Peterburg's article citing Emperor Bokassa as a product of the "African tradition of cannibalism" was echoed in the Kremlin as well. At a joint press conference with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in April 2006, President Vladimir Putin responded to a British journalist comparing the lack of democracy in Russia and Africa by saying: "It's not a fair comparison... It's typical of their (African) leaders Фto make snacks of each other,' but we don't have such traditions in Russia."

Alexei Mitrofanov, an LDPR Duma deputy later joined the race to the bottom while appearing in a talk show on the Rossiya television channel.

"To be frank I used the services of prostitutes in the 1980s when I was working in the West as a diplomat," he said, "but now the West is spoiled with dirty Negro prostitutes. It's full of filthy migrants from Africa." Mitrofanov faced no rebuke for his remark.

In fact, later on, a prominent anchor on the same channel had this to say with regard to an honor killing committed in the UK by an Iraqi father after his daughter began dating an Iranian Kurd: "Such incidents are not uncommon, especially in the UK; Europe has recently been invaded by the medieval barbaric traditions brought by migrants from the Islamic world."

This remark is typical of the Islamophobic propaganda rampant in the Russian media. Mukhlisa Zaripova, an expert in oriental studies and head of the St. Petersburg Tatar Community said: "It seems that she [the anchor] is not only ignorant about Islam as a religion, but also too blind to distinguish it from traditions that people hold irrespective of their religion or nationality.

Zaripova suggests that the war on intolerance should start with mass education of media professionals, perhaps similar to the kind of information campaign African activists brought to the schools. But Moishe Tresnikov, a spokesman for the St. Petersburg Jewish Community, says that it is Russia's spiritual crisis that has led the nation into this state of intolerance.Smirnova, of the House of National Cultures agrees that the lack of spirituality may inform the problem, but that the crisis has been exacerbated by a mixture of bad policies, a lack of awareness and overall economic difficulties.

Ali Nassor is a freelance journalist and a lecturer at the African Department of Oriental Studies at St Petersburg State University.