The pro-Kremlin Nashi movement picket in front of the Estonian Embassy, November 12, 2006. The sign reads "Estonia, learn history!"
Photo: Pavel Smertin
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Human Rights Report Unsettling
The Sova human rights center issued its annual report on nationalism and xenophobia in Russian society yesterday. The report identified three tendencies that predominated in 2007: a rise in ethnically-motivated crimes, less investigation of those crimes and “the authorities punish only disloyal organizations.”
Most notable in the report, “Radical Nationalism and Resistance to It in 2007” were the action of the Movement against Illegal Immigration and pro-Kremlin youth movements. The report's author, deputy director of the center Galina Kozhevnikova, cited the We Won't Let Migrants Drive campaign by the pro-Kremlin group The Locals (Russian Mestnye), which, although it was presented as an attempt to reduce the presence of illegal taxis, had overt racial overtones. Ours (Russian Nashi) protested in front of the Estonian Embassy in connection with the relocation of the Red Army soldier monument in downtown Tallinn, and that action also took on increasingly racist overtones as it progressed.
Another example cited by Kozhevnikova was a Movement against Illegal Immigration meeting held at the entrance to the Russian Exhibition Center the day before the abortive Gay Pride parade on May 26. “Russia will be Russian or it will be uninhabited!” a speaker shouted. “Lucky hunting, wolves!”
The Locals press secretary Maria Shapovalova called the Sova report “unprofessional, superficial and ungrounded.” Union of Right Forces lawyer Vadim Prokhorov called it “Absolutely true. When the authorities need to close an organization they find inconvenient, the National Bolsheviks, for example, they do it very quickly.” Movement against Illegal Immigration leader Alexander Belov agreed with Prokhorov. “The division is not made on legal principles, but on the principle of the presidential administration's attitude,” he noted. “If the administration doesn't like a structure, anything it says is interpreted as extremist.”
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Jan. 30, 2008
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