Please read for yourself
Again I send many oceans of blessings and self determination to African people everywhere.
ONE BLACK HEART ONE BLACK LOVE
Baba Ras Marcus

DAVI JOSEPH wrote:

'Why are you here, Mr. Nigger?'

Back in the USSR, racial tolerance was a top
priority, but in today's Russia,writes MARK
MACKINNON, people of colour live in perpetual fear.
Xenophobia is on the rise, and violent skinheads
don't deserve all the blame

By MARK MACKINNON

Globe and Mail, Saturday, January 31, 2004 - Page F3

Even sitting in the campus cafeteria, just steps
from his dorm room, Tolessa is afraid.
A 21-year-old Ethiopian whose dark skin and black
hair single him out both against the white
background of a snowy Moscow winter and among his
fair-skinned Russian classmates, he is afraid at
first to speak about the racism he has faced,
worried about the retribution it may bring.
Finally, he agrees to talk, but chooses to sit at a
table partly hidden by plastic trees and asks that
his last name not appear in print. "We are afraid
even to mention it," the thin physical mathematics
student says, dropping his voice as a blond waitress
delivers coffee. "This group, the skinheads, they
are not small in number. In fact, I sometimes feel
as though they are half the population of Moscow.
People tell us to leave this country, that Russia
is only for the Russians."

Tolessa, who studies at Moscow's famous People's
Friendship University, goes on to describe a life
dominated by fear. When a Nigerian man was beaten
to death by neo-Nazis near the campus recently,
every African in the city felt a shiver down the
back, he says, knowing it could have been them. "We
stay on the campus and, if we want to go anywhere,
we have to organize a group. Maybe in a group they
won't attack us," Tolessa says as a friend nods in
agreement. "We can't go out after 6 p.m.,
especially on the metro. When people look at us,
they just see our colour -- they call us 'chorniyy'
[black]."

It's a long way from the days when the Soviet
Union bragged of seamlessly blending its Slavic,
Caucasian and Central Asian populations, claiming
to have created a non-racial "homo sovieticus,"
while condemning the United States and other Western
countries for their inequalities and racial
violence.

The death of the Nigerian student was just one in
a string of racial incidents around People's
Friendship University, which was established in
1960 (and initially named after Zaire's first prime
minister, Patrice Lumumba, killed in a U.S.-backed
coup) to draw foreigners to what was supposed to be
a free and equal communist utopia. Several weeks
ago, six foreign students were beaten by skinheads
as they waited for a bus just off campus. In the
past month and a half, there have been several
attempts to penetrate the campus's outer fence,
repeated bomb threats and as many as eight
suspicious fires.

That's why it's so hard for students such as
Tolessa to accept the police verdict that a
horrific blaze that broke out in a dorm on Nov. 24,
killing 43 foreign students and putting 200 in
hospital, was caused by bad electrical wiring.
African and Asian students talk of the police as
enemies, saying they often have to pay large bribes
just to avoid arbitrary arrest. "Before they even
investigated, they said it wasn't arson," says
Anchu Regga, an Ethiopian refugee who was sleeping
that night not far from Block No. 6, where the fire
started. "But there was a fire in another block the
next day, and another one two days after that. I
can't see how they can all be accidents."

Even Russians studying at the university say it's
obvious that a hate group is prowling the campus,
intent on frightening the foreign students into
leaving the country. "It had to be arson. There have
been too many fires too close together," says
Tania, a 23-year-old medical student, adding that
"Block 6 is where the most black students were,"
but refusing to give her last name for fear she
might be expelled. Even after the deadly blaze in
November, she adds, her own dorm was set on fire --
again in the middle of the night, starting in the
kitchen as most students were sleeping. Could it
have been accidental? "The fire was spreading too
fast . . . it was as though gasoline had been poured
everywhere. We all think it was skinhead groups who
did it."

Dmitry Bilibin, the university's acting director,
now faces negligence charges in connection with the
November fire. He says he has a theory about the
real cause, but refuses to say what it is. He does,
however, concede that the university must deal with
an almost constant threat from extreme racists. It
spends almost $250,000 (U.S.) a year on private
security, and needs 200 guards to protect its 3,700
students. Mr. Bilibin says membership in skinhead
groups is growing and xenophobia is becoming more
popular, something he blames on the social chaos
caused by Russia's rapid transition to market
capitalism and its sudden embrace of Western ideas.
Many young people, he says, have come to feel that
their country, once the centre of an empire, was
betrayed somehow, and ethnic minorities have become
the scapegoat of choice.

It's not an idea limited to Russia's young. In
last month's parliamentary elections, two parties
with ultranationalist leanings made surprising
gains. Vladimir Zhirinovsky's oddly named Liberal
Democratic Party (LDPR), which has represented the
far right since the breakup of the Soviet Union,
nearly tripled its share of the vote to 11.5 per
cent. That was good for third place and a
significant share of seats in the State Duma. Even
more surprising was the appearance of a new
political movement called Rodina, or Motherland.
Formed just three months before the election, it
blended open xenophobia with a nostalgic call for
the renationalization of key resources to claim
almost 10 per cent of the vote.

So now, Rodina and the LDPR, both branded fascist
by their opponents, have more seats than either the
Communists or Russia's battered liberals in the
Duma, making them a force with which President
Vladimir Putin will have to contend, and perhaps
make deals.

Yuri Tabak of the Moscow Human Rights Bureau said
the rise of anti-foreigner sentiment has roots
similar to those of the anti-Semitism that arose in
Weimar Germany in the 1920s. A once-proud empire
has been humbled, there is widespread social chaos,
and people are looking for someone to blame. Then,
as now, the targets chosen by many are ethnic
minorities.

Mr. Tabak has studied the rapid rise of Rodina,
and says co-leader Dmitry Rogozin saw the direction
society was headed and crafted his rhetoric to
appeal to those who feel left behind by the change
Russia has seen over the past decade. "Rogozin is
actually quite cynical," he says. "He knows very
well what to say at this moment. He moulded his
party to play to the current situation." Indeed, Mr.
Rogozin seems quite aware that he's a creation of
the current political climate. "If I hadn't
appeared, some other person would have," he told an
interviewer recently. "And that person would have
said, 'The Jews are to blame for this problem. The
Azerbaijanis are to blame for that one. The
Americans are to blame for yet another.' "

Three years ago, Russia launched a program to
contain racism, setting up a hot line and special
legal offices for victims of persecution, and
establishing tolerance courses in schools and
universities. In a televised address, Mr. Putin
spoke out against xenophobia and said violent
extremists "threaten the future of our country."

However, instead of getting better, racist
attitudes appear to be hardening, and critics say
the program's effectiveness has been severely
hampered by spotty application and the racist
attitudes of the authorities themselves. According
to official estimates, 20,000 people in Moscow
alone now belong to skinhead organizations or other
extremist groups, a 30-per-cent increase from five
years ago.

Among their favourite targets are Jews -- dozens
of street signs last year were painted with
swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti -- and those
from the Caucasus region on Russia's southern flank,
a historic hatred that has grown deeper through a
decade of bloody war in the breakaway republic of
Chechnya. However, Western diplomats are also
targeted, and embassies as diverse as those of
Sweden, the United States, Tajikistan and China
have appealed to authorities to do a better job of
protecting foreigners. The tension builds around
April 20, which is Hitler's birthday, an occasion
now marked in Moscow by a spate of racist attacks
and neo-Nazi marches even though millions of
Russians died during the Second World War.

The largest neo-Nazi group, believed to be part of
the infamous international Blood and Honour
movement, is thought to have several hundred
members and be behind most organized attacks, such
as the riot after Russia's humiliating loss to
Japan in the 2002 soccer World Cup. It puts out Ya
Russki ("I'm Russian"), a flimsy newsletter that
describes the danger of non-white foreigners in Russia.