WHO SUPPORTS THE NEO-NAZIS?

On 9 December 2008, the head of 20-year-old Tajik Salohiddin Azizov, who had been murdered in the village of Zhabino in the Moscow Region, was found in a dustbin near the local government building of Mozhayskiy District in western Moscow.

Warning

The stacker from Azizov's greengrocery and his 22-year-old compatriot Jamshad Aliyev first came under fire from automatic guns. Aliyev was wounded but managed to run away, while Azizov fell and was caught, slashed with a knife, beheaded and thrown into a ravine. Then the murderers, who belong to the previously unknown "Military Organization of Russian Nationalists" forwarded a statement about their action to rights organizations, indicating where the head of the Tajik citizen could be found.

The nationalists called the dead Tajik "an occupier from Central Asia" and themselves "concerned Russian people who are fed up with the foreign invasion of their home town". At the same time, the Moscow authorities received a warning saying that if they continue "settling foreigners in Russia" and do not start "evicting the blacks", "the concerned Russian people" will begin "exterminating" the officials themselves because, the nationalists believe, "there is no enemy worse than a traitor in authority who has sold out his Russian origin". "Officials, we will begin exacting revenge on you for their crimes! You will be held to account," the neo-Nazis warned. In style and threat, this rhetoric resembles the ultimatums issued by terrorist organizations.

Meanwhile, the nationalists did not pick upon the local government of Mozhayskiy District by chance, as it was just here that a schoolgirl, Anna Beshnova, was raped and murdered on 1 October 2008; a Tajik worker, Farhad

Tursunov, was arrested and charged with committing the crime. Anna, 15, died under the windows of a residential building, literally 30 metres away from her school No 714. According to forensic experts, the rapist damaged the girl's liver, strangled her and then raped her. Witnesses of the brutal crime - an 18-year-old boy from a neighbouring house and his sister - did not help Anna. The young people decided that the schoolgirl and the murderer were just a drunk couple making love. According to the boy, the criminal was about 30 years old, did not look Slavic and was wearing the special clothes usually worn by yardmen.

This testimony was made public. Neo-Nazis and friends of the girl promised to find and punish the criminals. Fliers and appeals were put up around the district, while racist inscriptions were written on the walls of buildings. Neo-Nazi organizations, including the Movement against Illegal Immigration (MAII), began staging rallies in front of the local government office. Several attacks were made on guest workers and soon the body of a Tajik citizen, 24-year-old Israil Tovarov, was found in the school stadium near where Anna Beshnova was murdered. He had been stabbed about 40 times with a knife. Frightened immigrants from Central Asia, who worked mainly as yardmen, began about 40 times leaving the district.

A sad list

Since then, ethnically-motivated murders, which are quite common anyway, have continued throughout Moscow. On 13 and 14 December alone, several foreign nationals were murdered in Moscow. On the night of 13 December, the body of a Tajik was found at the Solntsevks fruit and vegetable base in south-western Moscow. The following day, another 22-year-old Tajik was hospitalized with numerous knife wounds and died in hospital without regaining consciousness. At approximately the same time, the body of a 44-year-old Ukrainian was found in a flat in western Moscow. Again, on the evening of 14 December, an 18-year-old Kazakh, Yerlan Aytymov, was stabbed in the stomach and murdered in the South-Western District of Moscow on the evening of 14 December. Aytymov was a first-year student at the Gubkin University of Oil and Gas, one of the best school-leavers of Kazakhstan in 2008 and a holder of a Lukoil grant. And finally, on 14 December, the body of a 20-year-old Azerbaijani, who had been living in Moscow illegally, was found with a knife wound to the chest at 14 Govorov Street. While in the case of the Ukrainian the murder was clearly committed on domestic grounds, all the other crimes were definitely ethnically-motivated. This list goes on and on.

In 2008 alone, several Azerbaijani citizens were killed in the Moscow Region. On 11 February, three unknown people knifed an Azerbaijani on Orekhov Boulevard in southern Moscow. The murder was captured on a CCTV camera, showing that the criminals were dressed in black. On 18 March, Azerbaijani citizen Nizami Qarayev was found dead in southern Moscow. He had worked as a vendor in a nearby shop. Unknown young men knifed him several times. On 16 September, a 47-year-old Azerbaijani man died from numerous knife wounds to the stomach and chest and from a head injury in Zelenograd. The man was attacked by two unknown men. And finally, a 25-year-old citizen of Azerbaijan was killed in south-eastern Moscow on 2 December. According to eyewitnesses, he was stabbed by an unknown man during a brawl. Police officers who arrived at the scene of the crime found the body of the 25-year-old man with numerous knife wounds to the chest and stomach.

These terrible statistics make one shudder. In the first five months of 2008 alone, neo-Nazis killed 35 and wounded at least 80 people in the Moscow Region. In Saint Petersburg, 16 were killed and 19 wounded, in the Sverdlovsk Region - three were killed and four were wounded, in the Ulyanovsk Region - two were killed, and in Voronezh - one was killed and 11 were wounded. In 2008, the number of xenophobic crimes increased across Russia, significantly exceeding those of 2007.

Those like Ryno

What is surprising is that the media constantly talks about the success of the Russian law-enforcement agencies in neutralizing neo-Nazi groups in Moscow and other Russian cities. Indeed, on 5 December a court handed down sentences to a well-known Moscow gang of skinheads, one of whose founders was student and icon painter, Artur Ryno. Members of the group who were under age when they killed their victims were found guilty of 20 murders and sentenced to various terms in prison - from six to 20 years, although the neo-Nazis did not repent of their crimes and talked proudly of their feats. Meanwhile, we cannot say that the punishment of the Ryno gang had an influence on the situation in the Russian capital, which is literally engulfed by a wave of xenophobic murders.

It is clear that the Moscow police do not like admitting the ethnic motivation of the crimes committed by skinheads. It is much easier to blame them on "domestic conflicts", "a fight over a woman" and "ordinary hooliganism". If we take into account the fact that this problem has existed and been getting worse for many years, the local authorities will have to admit that they are unable to control the situation, especially as radical nationalists have now taken a drastically new direction: they are threatening the authorities themselves, who do not seem to know how to counter them. Or perhaps (this version has also been circulating in the media), they just don't want to do so. Maybe it is of benefit to someone to maintain a certain degree of xenophobia in Moscow.

It was reported that the law-enforcement agencies were unaware of the "Military Organization of Russian Nationalists" who left the head outside the Mozhayskiy district local government building. Allegedly, representatives of well-known nationalist movements, for example, the MAII, do not know anything about these "colleagues" either. It cannot be ruled out that no such organization exists and that the murder was just a "provocation by one of the legal political nationalist movements, in order to trigger a wave of nationalism in society".

The leader of the MAII, Aleksandr Belov, saw this as a link in "an incredible chain of events which are involuntarily connected" ahead of the Russian march. "I come under attack, one hour later the head of the security service of our organization is killed in a traffic accident, half an hour later my brother comes under attack, and then we get a decapitated body. All this is very strange," the leader of the Movement against Illegal Immigration said. He claims that he was assaulted by 15 people.

Why?

At the same time, many officials are talking about the problem of foreign workers who have lost their jobs as a result of the financial and economic crisis. The Russian media actively write about this, saying that guest workers who have lost their jobs rob and kill Russians. This is presented as an acute social problem. For example, they cite reports that guest workers committed almost 8,000 crimes in Moscow Region in 11 months. According to the Interior Ministry, workers killed more than 200 people and committed 66 rapes. Almost 40 per cent of the crimes were committed by Uzbek citizens. Here are some of them. In October, the mutilated body of a 19-year-old pregnant woman was found in the Ruzskiy District of Moscow Region. The investigation established that the woman had been taken out of the city and brutally strangled by two Uzbek citizens. In a cottage settlement in the Moscow Region, a worker who was not paid for the construction of a house attacked the owner of the house and his wife with a knife.

It is impossible to deny facts. But do representatives of "Russia's indigenous population" which also includes non-Slavs, commit fewer crimes? If a certain "Ivan Sidorov" commits a murder or rape, do the news wires stress that he is Russian? "In opinion polls, Muscovites say: we don't like the fact that migrants commit many crimes. This is true: most of the criminals are people from other regions. But no-one says that they are mainly migrants from neighbouring regions - Tula, Ryazan, Kaluga or Lipetsk. People who do not represent the indigenous population comprise only 3-5 per cent of migrants," says the deputy director of the Centre for Ethnic Cooperation, Viktoriya Shukhat.

Indeed, if you divide criminals into nationalities (so-called "people of Caucasian nationality" and so on), then why not also divide them by other characteristic external features? For example, if one of the murderers and rapists is red-haired or bald, then we can set up a movement and exact revenge on all red-haired or bald people…

On the other hand, we cannot deny that some immigrants from CIS countries do actually try to live by their own laws and rules in Moscow, which are often unclear and alien to residents of the Russian capital. "When in Rome do as the Romans do," says the proverb. But many guest workers ignore this maxim. This creates dangerous situations when the main argument in a dispute is hair colour or the shape of someone's eyes. Many of us look for an easy way out, including when looking for culprits.

A question arises: who forms the core of the "military organizations of Russian nationalists"? You would agree that a teenager or a young man who goes to college, has an interesting job or has varied interests and hobbies is unlikely to shave off his hair, put on big boots, take a bat and beat people. Which schools do the nationalists go to and who are their parents? Why did no-one explain to them that "being a concerned Russian" means something completely different from hatred for all "non-Russians"? Why did no-one explain to them that there is a much more effective way to prove their love for Russia and to defend it - for example, by becoming good doctors, teachers or sportsmen? And finally, why are the authorities of a huge country, who are talking about a rebirth and a special role for Russia in the world, unable to defeat a few youth groups?

In early December, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered the preparation of an urgent government resolution to reduce the quota (by at least 50 per cent) of the foreign workforce. "In order to defend the interests of Russian citizens on the job market, we are forced to reduce the quota. This is a temporary decision and, in the long-term, Russia is interested in an influx of migrant workers. But today we cannot provide them with as many jobs as before," Putin said.

It is impossible to disagree with the decision of the Russian Prime Minister. Perhaps the only sensible way out is to reduce the entry of foreign workers into Russia; if everything is done in strict accordance with the law, of course.

A smokescreen

When they talk about guest workers in Russia, they always say that they transfer significant amounts of money to their home countries and maintain their families with what they earn in Russia. This is absolutely true. But it is also true that for Russian officials, law-enforcement agencies and businesses, guest workers are a good source of income. There is no need for a journalistic investigation in order to understand the situation. Russian businessmen often keep migrant workers from CIS countries as slaves, paying them a miserable fraction of what they would pay Russians. The same Muscovites have no desire to get such a "wonderful" job - to sweep out the snow from the courtyard early in the morning for a miserable salary… Guest workers who do not have the necessary documents can always be "fined" for breaking the law. Has anyone ever attempted to improve the life of migrant workers in Russia and set up trade unions so that guest workers feel protected from those who may not pay them for the construction of a house in an elite settlement? Thus, it is not simply a question of quotas which are easily bought and sold…

At the same time, complaints by some Russian officials that, in some parts of the Russian Federation, Russians are in the minority, due to the influx of guest workers, are simply ridiculous. In order to be a guest worker in Russia (even if you do not have a work permit), you do not have to overcome special obstacles - it is enough to leave the country once in three months in order to update your documents. Many migrants get on a train and cross the border into Ukraine in order to satisfy the Russian authorities - the law is being observed. The most enterprising ones just send their passports back home while they continue building a house for someone or selling fruit in Russia. Many people have been living like that for years. At the same time, in order to obtain Russian citizenship, an ethnic Russian (as concerned officials desire) has to wait for five years and go through a huge number of bureaucratic procedures. It is easier for illegal guest workers of "Caucasian nationality" to settle down in Russia than it is for a law-abiding "Slav-looking" citizen to remain there.

Thus, the talk about nationalities is always a smokescreen. There is no ethnic component to this problem, but there is a well-established system - from the housing department to the Federal Migration Service, i.e. those who need to fan the flames of xenophobia. That's it. As long as the situation "is not rectified", Russia, a country that once defeated Nazism, will be known as a state where Nazism is raising its head…