Even as a growing number of labor migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus are returning to their homelands due to the global economic downturn, hate crimes against them are continuing unabated, independent monitors in Russia report.
Russian human rights activists, joined by supporters from international organizations, called on President Dmitry Medvedev in early July to take action to stop racist attacks in Russia. Many of the hate crimes, activists say, have targeted Central Asian migrant laborers.
The Sova Center in Moscow has published a report on its website with a list of apparently ethnically-motivated violent attacks in Russia. [For additional information click here]. Migrants from Central Asian countries are among the most frequent victims of bias-motivated attacks, the report indicates.
A sampling of some recent attacks shows that on June 30, a 32-year-old Uzbek man suffered lung injuries when three men stabbed him in the Gatchina District of Leningrad Oblast as he was on his way to a work site, the news website konkretno.ru reported. A Kyrgyz man was knifed in Moscow by students who shouted racist slogans, according to a June 15 report by jewish.ru, and on May 26, two assailants stabbed a Tajik man to death on a bus in Yaroslavl, Sova reported.
"The number of prosecutions pale in comparison to the increasing frequency in which the crimes are being committed," says Human Rights First, a New York-based group whose members traveled to Moscow in early July to support Russian colleagues monitoring hate crimes.
Rights activists point out that Russia has no central anti-discrimination agency, and victims of racially-motivated crimes cannot file complaints themselves, but must rely on a prosecutor's determination for a case to be opened. They also say that Russian leaders have not done enough to promote tolerance.
Russian leaders have talked publicly about establishing migrant quotas. But some regions, such as St. Petersburg, openly say they did not plan to institute them. In any event, quotas seem unnecessary amid the present economic hardships. Many migrant workers want to return home, but cannot because of a lack of funds. "Not everyone has the money for a return ticket. There are some who work literally for their food and some sort of roof over their head," Alexander Verkhovsky, Sova's director, told EurasiaNet.
Even though there is a steady outflow of economic migrants, Sova and other human rights groups in Russia and abroad have reported that attacks on foreigners are continuing, and even increasing in some areas. "The number of attacks depends only on the number of potential attackers, and that depends on the success of racist propaganda, and not the real state of affairs," Verkhovsky explained. He also said that a police crackdown on far-right youth groups in Moscow prompted extremists to retaliate even more viciously for a time.
"I think this isn't a seasonal phenomenon," says Verkhovsky, "but a reaction from the neo-Nazi underground to quite specific steps by the police -- the arrests and trials of their comrades. It's the typical reaction of a militant underground."
Central Asians are among the more vulnerable to discrimination and abuse. Coming from the poorest region of the former Soviet Union, many Central Asian migrants are unable to afford lawyers -- or pay the bribes that many guest workers must make to corrupt officials or employers in order to prevent harassment. "Tajiks make up the greatest percentage of victims from among labor migrants because they are the poorest, and therefore, the least protected," says Verkhovsky. The Tajik People's League in Moscow is one group that has sprung up to campaign for better treatment. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].
The Sova Center cautions that its data is likely incomplete. Sova activists believe many attacks go unreported. The group recorded 99 murders and 437 violent assaults that appeared to be ethnically-motivated in 2008. Of that total, at least 49 of the dead and 110 of the injured were from Central Asia. The rates in 2009 to date are similar: of the at least 36 killed and 125 injured so far this year, at least 19 of the dead were Central Asians.
Dmitry Poletayev, senior researcher for the Russian Academy of Sciences' Research Institute for the Study of Productive Forces, told EurasiaNet that despite the economic crisis in Russia, as well as efforts to establish quotas, migrant labor is not likely to diminish significantly soon. If some migrants have left, it is due to lack of work, and not the threat of quotas. Eventually, he suggested, many migrants will return, in part because the lowest-paid positions can be expected to remain unfilled by Russians.
Poletayev asserted that attacks on migrants did not appear to correlate to their actual numbers. "I do not think that the number of migrants in Russia is related to the number of crimes against them. More likely the number of attacks depends on the level of xenophobia," he said. Poletayev also cautioned that the data on numbers of migrants and attacks are incomplete. The government does not release statistics about either the numbers of migrants, or attacks on them.
Russian anti-discrimination activists have themselves suffered assaults from the groups that they have worked to expose. In 2004, St. Petersburg ethnographer Nikolai Girenko, who provided testimony about extremist groups in court proceedings, was shot to death in his doorway. And on July 2, Ilya Dzhaparidze, an anti-fascist activist, was stabbed to death by neo-Nazis in Moscow.
Editor's note:
Catherine Fitzpatrick is a New York-based freelance writer specializing in human rights issues.
