← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Petr
Thread ID: 20436 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-09-28
2005-09-28 13:51 | User Profile
[I]Jews are whining about that Ukraine is not yet a Politically Correct dictatorship...[/I]
[url]http://www.fsumonitor.com/stories/092605Ukraine.shtml[/url]
[FONT=Arial][SIZE=5]Getting Away With Hate[/SIZE] [B] The Moscow Times
Monday, September 26, 2005. Issue 3260. Page 8.[/B]
[B] Since the Orange Revolution, Ukraine seems in many respects to have left its giant neighbor to the east behind. But there is at least one thing that the new Ukrainian government can learn from Russia. Along with all of the positive changes, there is a strongly negative trend that has gone largely unnoticed. The plague of neo-Nazi violence that has made Russia's streets so unsafe for its ethnic minorities over the past several years is now undeniably present in Ukraine. Even worse, the Ukrainians are repeating the same mistakes that the Russians made when the skinhead menace first raised its ugly head in the late 1990s.[/B]
In both countries, gangs of youths are busy terrorizing people who don't meet their definition of racial "purity." In both countries, their attacks are getting both more frequent and more violent, provoking strong rhetorical condemnation from political leaders, but that is where the similarities end.
[B]While in Russia the most frequent targets of skinhead violence are dark-skinned migrants, in Ukraine it is the Jewish community that is bearing the brunt. And while Russian officials have over the past few years begun to openly talk about the need to combat neo-Nazi extremist gangs, racism and anti-Semitism, the standard response in Ukraine is to deny that these problems even exist.[/B]
This policy of denial has been on shameful display over the past month in reaction to two attacks on Jews in Kiev. On Aug. 28, a group of young men nearly killed a yeshiva student in the downtown area. Screaming anti-Semitic abuse and throwing bottles, the skinheads knocked Mordechai Molozhenov to the ground and stabbed him repeatedly. He is now in a coma in an Israeli hospital.
To the credit of the Ukrainian authorities, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko swiftly condemned the attack, and three suspects were arrested shortly thereafter. It was at this point, however, that police officials started to botch the job.
The Interior Ministry issued a statement asserting that there was no proof that the attack was motivated by anti-Semitism, despite the fact that the Ukrainian edition of the Russian daily "Komsomolskaya Pravda" reported on Aug. 31, that one of the arrested suspects had a swastika tattoo on his arm.
Gennady Moskal, a deputy minister of internal affairs, then publicly asserted that three recent attacks on Jews in Ukraine (the Molozhenov stabbing, the murder of an Israeli in the Crimea, and the beating of a rabbi in Zhitomir) were not motivated by antisemitism, according to a Sept. 1 report posted on the Russian Jewish Congress' web site Antisemitizmu.net.
The chief rabbi of Kiev, Moshe Azman, publicly contradicted the deputy minister, arguing that the youths who stabbed Molozhenov shouted antisemitic slogans, that such attacks were becoming more common in Ukraine and that: "This problem is getting worse because nobody is taking it upon himself to eliminate it."
Two weeks later, the pattern repeated itself. On Sept. 11, Rabbi Mikhail Menis and his 14-year-old son were visiting the Kiev Expo Center when they were set upon by seven young men and a young woman armed with chains. After a sustained beating, during which some of the attackers reportedly yelled neo-Nazi slogans, the attackers left. Both the rabbi and his son then approached a group of police officers, who within five minutes detained the group of suspects. Two of the youths have been charged with "hooliganism" while the other six are being held as witnesses.
Although the police response was commendable in its swiftness, a reporter for the MIG news agency was flabbergasted by police statements that denied anti-Semitism had anything to do with the attack. Police officials are reportedly asserting that they "firmly believe" that the attack on the rabbi and his son was nothing more than "hooliganism." Vadim Rabinovich, head of the Ukrainian Jewish Congress, countered by saying that when he visited the suspects in jail, they told him in front of police guards that: "We will beat the Yids in the name of the purity of the nation."
My organization's monitoring of anti-Semitic incidents in Ukraine confirms that violent attacks on Jews have become more common over the past year and a half. All of these attacks have taken place in predominantly Russian-speaking regions of the country, raising the possibility that some of these gangs are being inspired by or may be in contact with their comrades in Russia. A few particularly problematic cities stand out--four attacks have been recorded in Kiev over the past year, a mob beat a yeshiva student in Donetsk last year and two rabbis were set upon in Odessa last summer. In January, skinheads severely injured a group of Jewish children in Simferopol--one 14-year-old girl had to have emergency plastic surgery as a result. Police made some arrests, but emphatically denied that skinheads even existed in their city. [B] With the exception of a few Ukrainian and Russian Jewish web sites, the Ukrainian media has ignored most of these attacks, though its coverage has improved somewhat since Yushchenko became president.[/B]
What hasn't changed since the Orange Revolution is the pattern of denial that neo-Nazi violence poses a significant threat to Ukrainian Jews. Arresting suspects is commendable and necessary, but denying the obvious motives behind these attacks insults the victims and emboldens the victimizers. The Ukrainian Criminal Code has a hate-crimes statute that could add several years of prison time to the extremists who stabbed Molozhenov, but the fact that this law has only been successfully applied once in the entire post-Soviet history of Ukraine speaks volumes about the lack of seriousness with which this problem is being approached.
It took dozens of murders and hundreds of assaults for Russian officials to finally admit that they had a serious problem on their hands. Will the Yushchenko government wait that long?
[I] Nikolai Butkevich, research and advocacy director at the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times. [/I][/FONT]