Paul Goble reports:

Because of an unusual combination of circumstances, Chechens could easily make up one-third of young Russian citizens to be drafted this fall, a figure that means non-Russians would easily form more than 50 percent of that draft class and one that is certain to disturb Russian commanders and politicians, according to a Moscow military analyst. In an extensive article in the current issue of “NG-Regiony,” Vladimir Mukhin calls into question official claims that the just-completed spring draft cycle was successfully fulfilled and points to even greater troubles ahead this fall in complecting the Russian Federation’s armed services. It is true, Mukhin says, that the military was able to draft the 133,200 young people in the plan and that 21.5 percent of them had higher educations, double the figure from a year earlier. It reduced the number of evaders to 6700, a quarter the rate one year earlier. But the military was able to do that only by drafting individuals whose health is at the very least questionable.

Human rights groups like the Soldiers’ Mothers committees believe that as many as half of those drafted should not have been because of poor health, and even the General Staff announced this time around that 30 percent of those it was calling to the colors should not have been. But the prospects Moscow faces this fall are even more problematic, Mukhin continued. On the one hand, the services will have to draft 200,000 young people all at once, 180 percent of the number drafted this spring, and on the other, it will have to fill simultaneously two classes who will be leaving service at the same time because of changes in the length of service required. Indeed, Mukhin argued, “such a large influx into the army as is scheduled to occur this fall has not happened before in post-Soviet Russia to their more senior commanders and the media, about whether they will be able to cope.

In this situation, Mukhin says, “it is not excluded that in order to fulfill draft quotas for the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and other Russian forces, the military commissariats will begin to draft young people from Chechnya,” a step they have not taken in recent times because of the troubles there but which could generate about 70,000 draftees this fall. Because Chechens are “more healthy and accustomed to the military way of life than are young people from other regions,” few of them would be excluded under the new and more relaxed health grounds. And if Moscow does decided to take this step, Mukhin writes, then this fall “every third new draftee could be a Chechen.” Mukhin’s article is not the only one focusing on these problems. “Gazeta” reported that the military’s draft program on “The New Face of the Armed Forces” anticipates retaining the draft until at least 2030, thus eliminating one means commanders might have to maintain Russian dominance in the army.

And an essay carried by Sobkorr.ru discussing the situation argued that the desire of commanders to continue to rely on draftees not only reflects the continuing impact of what it called a Soviet-era mentality but also raised questions about what kind of conflicts Russia’s military in fact needs to be prepared for. Obviously, there are certain steps Moscow could take to address this situation – drafting a higher percentage of ethnic Russians than of others as it has done in the last two draft cycles or reducing the size of the military – but neither of those are attractive militarily or politically and consequently underscore just how many problems the Kremlin now has in filling the ranks.

The Moscow Times reports that racist violence is "exploding" in Russia's largest and supposedly most sophisticated city, supposedly booming with wealth and happiness, right in Vladimir Putin's backyard. Do you dare imagine what might be going on in a place like Chelyabinsk -- that is, if any dark-skinned people were foolish enough to go there?

The number of hate crimes committed in Moscow has exploded this year, rising sixfold compared to the same period last year, Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin said Friday. The authorities registered 73 hate crimes in Moscow in the first six months of this year, a trend Bastrykin said must be halted with "decisive and systematic efforts."

"We are worried that while the overall number of crimes registered in Russia has shrunk by 9 percent, crimes of an extremist nature are increasing year after year," Bastrykin said, Interfax reported.

The Moscow branch of the Investigative Committee announced Friday that it had opened two criminal cases involving hate crimes, one of which involves 12 racially motivated murders. The announcement came after the beginning of two high-profile trials in the Moscow City Court last week, in which several teenagers are accused of murdering multiple dark-skinned victims — as well as an Investigative Committee statement Thursday saying seven ultranationalists are suspected in at least 21 racially motivated murders. Mikhail Ionkin, spokesman for the committee's Moscow branch, said the spike in hate crimes was not just a reflection of the authorities' efforts to crack down on such crimes."It's no secret that hate crimes are on the rise," Ionkin said. "We are not registering more because of any change in methods or priorities on our part. We have always worked with equal focus against extremism."Ionkin declined to say what could be behind the dramatic rise. "It's complicated," he said.

The case of Artur Ryno, who went on trial last week in the Moscow City Court with eight other people suspected of committing 20 racist murders, received so much publicity that it could have sparked copycat crimes, said Galina Kozhevnikova, deputy head of the Sova center, which tracks hate crimes. But the authorities' apparent decision to prosecute neo-Nazi groups more actively could also be contributing to the spike, Kozhevnikova said."In big cities, we know there are lots of underground Nazi groups," she said. "When the government began to investigate their activities and arrest them, they reacted violently against ethnic minorities. "Kozhevnikova cited an incident earlier in the year when a racist murder was committed in the same location where a group of neo-Nazis had been arrested by police in Moscow the previous day. A city police spokesman denied Friday, however, that there has been any rise in hate crimes in the city this year. "Such crimes are becoming less frequent," said the spokesman, who declined to give his name. "In my opinion, certain organizations beef up the statistics on such crimes in order to attract funding. "The Sova center recorded 60 racist murders across the country so far this year, while it recorded a total of 85 such crimes in all of 2007. The actually number of hate crimes is likely three to four times higher than the number registered by authorities, Kozhevnikova said.

Russia has already experienced nearly as many
incidents of race killings in just the first six months
of this year as it had in all 2006. Moscow,
supposedly its bastion of civilization, leads
the way in barbaric race violence.

Human rights experts say that it's very difficult to know the relationship, if any, between groups such as Slavic Union and DPNI and the street killings. "As for the blasts and killings, any groups that are responsible are autonomous. They are acting on their own," said Bakharev, the Slavic Union member and lawyer. The organizations are structured in a loose network in which the Slavic Union and DPNI act as political and organizing arms, not unlike Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, but they don't seem to issue direct orders to the smaller units of skinheads or other radicals, said Dmitry Dubrovsky, a senior research fellow with the Russian Museum of Ethnography in St. Petersburg who works as an expert witness for the city's police and prosecutor's departments. "Nobody says to them, go to the streets and kill the blacks," Dubrovsky said, meaning people with darker skin. "It's the ideology of 'We should remove the blacks from the streets,' but the tool for removing them is up to the smaller groups." Bokov, the Moscow city official, said he didn't think the murders could be traced to the larger nationalist fronts. "The leaders of these big organizations have no control over these small groups," Bokov said, adding that he thought that many attacks that were counted as hate crimes in fact were provoked by personal feuds. "Of course, these big organizations and their rhetoric contribute to the worsening of the situation."

Many suspect that the nationalist groups are aided by relationships with Russian security officers. "There is no proof at all of any systematic support," said Galina Kozhevnikova, the deputy director of Sova, the human rights group in Moscow. "But I think that they probably have personal ties with police. There are in all likelihood many within the police who agree with them and who work with them." Bakharev, the Slavic Union lawyer, agreed. "There are quite a lot of people in law enforcement who support the nationalists," Bakharev said. He later added that, "The number of groups is growing . . . and their methods are getting tougher month to month."

The International Herald Tribune reports:

Though violence in Chechnya has decreased markedly in recent years, fighting between Muslim insurgents and Russian troops threatens to engulf a neighboring region, a human rights group said in a report released on Wednesday.

The group, Human Rights Watch, asserted that a recent spike in insurgent attacks in the region, Ingushetia, has provoked a spate of kidnappings, torture and arbitrary killings of innocent civilians by law enforcement reminiscent of earlier rights abuses in Chechnya.

Government officials from the region have disputed the report's findings.

Ingushetia, a tiny Muslim republic on Chechnya's western border, has long been considered a relatively peaceful enclave in the North Caucasus, a mountainous region in Russia's south. Recently, however, it has become a haven for rebels fleeing a brutal counter-insurgency in Chechnya.

The aggressive anti-insurgent policies of Chechnya's president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, have brought a modicum of stability to the republic after two wars and nearly half a decade of internecine fighting, though at the cost of hundreds if not thousands of civilian casualties.

Ingushetia could suffer a similar, if less brutal, fate, according to the 105-page report that is based on interviews conducted over the last year with local officials and victims of violence.

The region's government recorded 86 attacks on law enforcement in 2007 and another 28 attacks in the first three months of 2008. A total of 65 servicemen were killed in the republic in 2007.

In response, the Russian Interior Ministry has stationed thousands of federal troops in the republic, who, along with their local colleagues, often fail to discriminate between legitimate insurgent targets and civilians when conducting operations, Human Rights Watch says.

"Certainly you cannot fully compare Ingushetia and Chechnya," Tanya Lokshina, the researcher for Human Rights Watch who wrote the report, said in at a press conference.

"At the same time," she said, "the kind of abuses that we now see in Ingushetia are the abuses that used to characterize Chechnya: extrajudicial executions, torture, forced disappearances, abduction-style detentions."

The human rights group Memorial recorded 29 cases in 2007 in which police detained civilians without providing grounds for doing so. One of those detained has been confirmed dead and three are still missing.

The organization also documented 40 extrajudicial killings by government forces last year. The report by Human Rights Watch describes several of these in graphic detail, including the killing of Rakhim Amriev, a six-year-old boy shot when security forces raided his family's house on November 9, 2007 in search of a relative.

According to testimony from the boy's family and other witnesses, three servicemen, backed by about 100 soldiers and security officials, burst into the family's home in the village of Chemulga with barely a warning and opened fire. Rakhim Amriev was killed immediately, shot in the head. His mother, Raisa, was shot in the arm.

The incident provoked a nationwide outcry, prompting the government to launch an investigation, something it rarely does in such instances. After more than seven months, however, no suspect has been identified.

Officials in Ingushetia, including the Kremlin-backed president, Murat M. Zyazikov, a former general with the Federal Security Service, have regularly denied reports of human rights abuses, calling the situation in the republic stable.

Kerim-Sultan A. Kokurkhaev, Ingushetia's government-appointed human rights ombudsman, said at the press conference on Wednesday that the situation in Ingushetia was "no worse than in any other territory" in Russia. He called the work of Human Rights Watch and other rights groups "fascist," adding that the Human Rights Watch report was "meant to destabilize the situation."

The official acknowledged that people had been kidnapped by federal troops and that in the fight against terrorism there had been human rights violations, but he praised the government for a slight decrease recently in violent crimes.

Though many in Ingushetia once backed the government's strong-armed tactics, such support seems to have ebbed in recent months. Violence against civilians has sparked raucous street protests that have rankled the authorities. Some of the more vocal critics have become the victims of reprisals, as the government has moved to restrict public demonstrations and quash them when they arise.

Ingushetia has also become dangerous for journalists critical of the government's counter-insurgency tactics. In November last year, unknown men kidnapped and beat three journalists and a human rights worker planning to cover an anti-government protest. They were later released, but warned to leave Ingushetia.

The actions of the government in Ingushetia threaten to further destabilize the republic and the surrounding region, Mr. Lokshina said.

"If the government does not change its policies," she said, "then the tensions in the republic will grow."

Paul Goble reports:

The growing number of attacks in the Russian Federation against members of minority groups as well as against those who seek to defend them and the increasing willingness of many Russians to accept such actions as normal represent threaten the chances for the emergence of freedom and democracy there, according to a Moscow commentator.In an essay posted online recently, Sobkorr.ru’s Sergey Petrunin writes that the willingness of Russians and to laugh off these events or to ignore them altogether not only creates a climate in which more such attacks are likely but also promotes the “dehumanization” of the population that helped produce the horrors of Stalinism and fascism.

When individuals and groups look or are encouraged to look “at the suffering and destruction of others with indifference,” he writes, then such people can be easily transformed into “bio-robots” acceptant of and consequently ultimately capable of almost any crimes as the world of the camps showed. Indeed, he suggests, the tendency to laugh off such events may be even more harmful than the events themselves, contributing to the destruction of “the world of human interrelationships,” the conversion of people into beasts, and the launch of “a senseless and pitiless war of all against all.” The occasion for Petrunin’s bitter reflections was an event that occurred earlier this week. Members of a pro-Kremlin youth group pelted two of Russia’s most distinguished human rights activists, Lev Ponomaryev and Ludmila Alekseyeva, with eggs, when the latter were speaking out against the actions of Kopeik prison camp jailers which resulted in the death of four inmates.

“The 18 provocateurs broke into the hall during the middle of the press conference, silently threw eggs [at the two activits] .. and then ran away, “without identifying themselves or making the kind of statement which would have identified them more specifically and allowed society to know who these miscreants were. The reaction of many people to this was not widespread horror at this attack against Ponomaryev and Alekseyeva, the 82-year-old doyenne of Russian human rights activism, but rather a willingness to ignore it altogether – few Russian or Western media outlets covered it -- or the kind of “hee-hee” snickering that has greeted many other outrages, Sobkorr.ru reported. But the attack against the two human rights activists like the throwing of sex toys onto the stage where opposition figures are appearing is far from the only disturbing development in Russia that is receiving this kind of treatment, Petrunin points out.

There are regular clashes between members of different ethnic groups. There are attacks on migrants and others by skinheads. And there are car burnings almost every night. These things are “no longer some kind of a warning,” the Sobkorr.ru commentator says. “This is the world in which we live, and it is terrifying to imagine how [this all] will end.” That is all the more so because for Russians as for many others there are some frightening precedents. “Since 1914,” he writes, “millins of people looked on the death and suffering of those around them. And then [the terrible revolutions of] 1917 came and the still more terrible years of 1918, 1919, 1920 …”

For some groups in the population of the Russian Federation, the impact of such actions is compounded by the attitudes of Russian officials. Recently, Moscow prosecutors announced that they would not open a criminal case regarding the beating of Yulduz Khaknazarova, an Uzbek student in Moscow. Although she was beaten by skinheads to within an inch of her life on May 11th and has been undergoing medical treatment since then, Russian officials have treated Khaknazarova as if she were the problem rather than the victim of the actions of others. Indeed, one militiaman reportedly asked her why she had thrown herself on the tracks of Moscow metro.

Such violence and the unwillingness of Russian officials to take action is reflected in the following statistic: During the first five months of this year, there were no fewer than 144 xenophobic attacks against minorities, attacks that have resulted in 76 deaths and at least 163 wounded. In very few of these cases have the militia or other force structures arrested anyone and in even fewer have prosecutors brought perpetrators to trial, a pattern that makes many of the more violent groups feel themselves invulnerable and thus leads many of the members of these groups to assume that the Russian population and the Russian authorities are in fact on their side.
And many of these xenophobic groups view the popular reaction to the liberation of an officer who sought to kill Anatoliy Chubais and continuing demands that no Russian soldier be punished for crimes in Chechnya as additional evidence that their views enjoy increasingly widespread support.

Many years ago, Nadezhda Mandelstam, the great Russian memoirist and herself a victim of Stalin’s crimes, wrote that “happy is that country where the despicable will at least be despised.” Following her lead, all those who care about human rights must agree that Russia today is not a happy one, however much oil money it may now have.

Susanne Scholl, Moscow‑bureau‑chief of‑Austrian Public Television, writing in the Moscow Times:

In Russia, if you have dark hair and a slightly swarthy complexion, you are likely to be in danger. Sadly, the country’s leaders have tolerated, if not encouraged, fear of foreigners and assaults on those whose appearance differs from the average Russian.

In a residential area of Moscow, a group of adolescents, many with shaven heads and wearing combat boots, marches and shouts Russian nationalist slogans. When they come across three Azeri boys, they don’t hesitate. Soon, one of the boys — only 13 years old — lies severely injured; he will have to be hospitalized. The other two are injured as well. The perpetrators are never caught. Bashir Osiyev, 24, an Ingush-born clerk in a Moscow bank, is assaulted by a group of skinheads while walking home with a friend. The friend is badly wounded but manages to escape. Osiyev dies after being stabbed in the back. Two of the assailants are injured in the course of the fight and arrested after seeking medical assistance at a hospital. The others are never caught.

Two men from the Caucasus are on their way to the metro and are attacked by a group of adolescents with knives. Both are treated in the hospital, the perpetrators escape unrecognized.
In a small town in central Russia, two Uzbeks are viciously beaten up by a group of teenagers.
All of these incidents occurred within just one week. They are picked at random from an endless series of similar assaults, many of which end fatally.

The authorities tend to play down these attacks as the acts of rowdies — even when the perpetrators are caught and can be prosecuted. This is because charging someone with racism and xenophobia is more complicated and the process more drawn out than winning a conviction for simple thuggery. Indeed, racists can be assured of considerable sympathy from the security forces and the public. After all, these attacks generally don’t occur in some dark alleyway. In most instances, they take place in crowded markets, metro stations, or simply in busy streets.‑Pedestrians nearby look the other way, even if the victims are women and children.

A Chechen friend of mine and her 14-year-old son were attacked on the street by three drunken skinheads. The skinheads began to push them around and harass them, as people on the street looked away and kept moving. My friend managed to talk insistently to the three until eventually they left her and her son alone, only to pounce on a married couple that happened to be passing by. The man looked like he was Jewish, they insisted loudly, and started to push him around. But he’s Russian, his frightened wife insisted, whereupon the three apologized and let him go.

Neither husband nor wife were alarmed that the three drunks were chasing Caucasus natives and Jews but pressed charges because they, as Russian citizens, had been harassed. My friend didn’t. It would not do any good, she said resignedly, and then spoke of how her 12-year-old daughter is repeatedly told at school that all Chechens are criminals and that nobody likes them.
Since the day that then-President Vladimir Putin spoke on television of wasting Chechen terrorists in the outhouse, hatred of Caucasus natives has become all but socially acceptable.

Once again, a subgroup of the population has been declared outlaws and potential terrorists, satisfying people’s urge to find a clearly identifiable enemy who can be blamed for all that is wrong in the country. While there has been no lack of speeches calling for tolerance and condemning racist and anti-Semitic attacks, the situation barely changes. The Soviet Union was anything but tolerant. But since its collapse, a gnawing feeling of inferiority has crept into Russian society. Both the state and openly racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic groups — of which there are dozens, as well as more than 100 clearly xenophobic publications — increasingly ignore the country’s multi-ethnic character. In an everyday context, this is reflected in slogans like “Russia for Russians,” which really means white European Russians.

The attacks therefore are directed in equal measure against people from the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, as well as Russian citizens from the Caucasus or who belong to one of the country’s 90 national minorities. The state hypocritically expresses its concern while doing nothing to oppose it, because too many officials are only too willing to exploit such sentiments.

The Russian-language newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda ("Young Communist Truth") ran a three-part article in English and Russian versions on April 28, April 29 and April 30. Here is the article in full:

Paul Goble reports:

Russian skinheads are attacking non-Russians in ever increasing numbers both to intimidate the latter and to recruit additional people to their movement, thus extending “a mass fascist terror” throughout the country, according to the chief editor of Moscow’s Novaya gazeta. Speaking on Ekho Moskvy on Wednesday, Dmitry Muratov pointed out that over the last three months “fascists [in the Russian Federation] have killed 38 people and wounded 113 more,” and they have advertised what they have done in order to scare some and “recruit” others. Indeed, he warned, what is taking place in Moscow and elsewhere in the Russian Federation must be described as “a recruitment campaign for a fascist army.”

But as disturbing as that development is, Muratov said, even more worrisome is the failure of the Russian government and especially the FSB to combat it. “Where is the FSB?” the editor asked rhetorically. Can anyone really believe that its officials “do not know about the massive actions” of the last month? Others, including the SOVA Analytic Center whose documentation of these attacks Novaya gazeta has published, have issued similar warnings. But Muratov’s comment is particularly important because he describes the way the “fascists” are now seeking to frighten off journalists who try to cover this wave of violence. After his paper carried an article at the end of last month on skinhead attacks , its author, journalist Valery Shiryayev, received a series of threats. Listen, he was told, “you are a puppet,” working for other unspecified forces. “You do not deserve to live,” the hate messages continued. “Death to the kikes, glory to Russia. Russia for the Russians. Success to all who struggle. Zieg Heil!” Muratov said that his newspaper had reported all this to the authorities, including the FSB, which has primary responsibility for responding to such attacks.

Unfortunately, he said, that agency has done little or nothing to stop what is going on, raising questions as to whether the FSB is doing its job, penetrating such fascist groups or whether at least some of its officers view these groups as “socially close” to the intelligence service, its virtual allies.

Given both the attacks on minorities and the threats journalists who cover them have received, Muratov was asked by his host whether he had ever considered seeking political asylum abroad, much as Elena Tregubova, the author of an insider’s account on the Kremlin, received this week in Great Britain. The Novaya gazeta editor responded that he had never considered this possibility for himself. “That would be “impossible. We will continue to work here.” But he did make several comments about the Tregubova case that highlight just how bad things now are in Russia and how implicated the Russian elite is in this deterioration. Muratov said that some “among the so-called Russian elite” will be pleased, not only because Tregubova won’t be around to describe them any more but also because her arrival in London will send property prices there down since it has become “dangerous” for Russians to live next to someone with “principled views who does not conceal them.” While Tregubova’s desire for asylum is completely understandable given the nature of the Putin regime, Muratov’s continuing effort to combat this rising tide of fascism in the Russian Federation is not only noble but calls out for the kind of support from the West that he and others like him often do not get. And that is all the more so because his comments about the threats his journalist has received show that he understands, as Pastor Niemuller did in Nazi Germany, that attacks on “people from the Caucasus” can lead to attacks against Jews and against Russians who are prepared to speak out against such viciousness.

It's a powder keg waiting to explode. He continues:

One in every four Moscow residents now is an illegal immigrant, according to the chairman of the city’s legislative assembly, although Vladimir Platonov acknowledges that neither he nor anyone else knows the exact figure which various experts say is between one and three million people. During a program on Ekho Moskvy on Tuesday, Platonov said both the number of illegal immigrants in his city and the lack of reliable statistics about them were unacceptable, and he called for new laws to deal with the situation in order to protect the rights of those living in the capital legally. His remarks came as the time limit for one of measures the city has tried to deal with the situation ran out. At the end of February, Moscow officials had announced that illegal migrants had a month to come “out of the shadow” by paying 2,000 rubles (80 U.S. dollars) for registration.

For three reasons, only a few hundred took advantage of this special offer. First, many do not want to pay the taxes that they would face if they were legal. Second, their employers are happy to keep them in an illegal status so they can pay them less. And third, many of them know that only one-third of Moscow’s legal immigrants have jobs. In addition to this program, the city government has taken several other steps. It has succeeded in having its quota for new immigrants cut from 500,000 last year to only 250,000 in 2008, a dramatic reduction that may give the authorities a chance to get a handle on illegal immigrants. Moreover, the city has developed special plastic cards for legal immigrants and required that employers make sure that they hire only those who can show these or other evidence of legal residence. And the authorities have increased the number of militia roundups of illegals.

But despite those efforts and Platonov’s call for even more draconian legislation, many Russian commentators and groups argue that the city is not doing enough to cope with an influx that they view not only as unacceptable but as a direct threat to their way of life. Aleksandr Belov, the coordinator of the openly racist Movement against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), said that Platonov’s efforts would do little or nothing to solve the problems he said illegal immigrants pose. His solution? A crackdown on officials who take bribes in order to “close their eyes” to the presence of illegal immigrants. Belov has a point: Ever since Mayor Yuri Luzhkov issued his infamous directive in October 1993 to expel from the city of Moscow “persons of Caucasus nationality,” many militiamen in the Russian capital have routinely supplemented their income by extorting money from non-Russian groups. Other commentators, like Vladimir Zharikhin, the deputy director of the Moscow Institute of CIS Countries, argue that there is no single magic bullet that will end the problem. Instead, they say, the city and the federal government must combine a variety of strategies if they are to rein in what even Platonov sees as a program now out of control.

It is not clear that officials at any level are ready to do that, and consequently, the problems related to illegal immigration, including increasingly frequent and violent clashes between them and Russian skinheads, seem certain to continue and possibly even grow worse.
And one reason for such a conclusion is that Moscow is no longer the only magnet for such illegal immigrants. In St. Petersburg, according to a recent report, 40 percent of the guest workers are illegal, a figure that may be even higher than their share in the Russian capital.