RUSSIA: Foreign Students Under Attack

By Kester Kenn Klomegah Reprint | | Print |

Kester Kenn Klomegah

MOSCOW, Nov 25 2005 (IPS) - Students from developing countries are coming under increasing attacks from extremist groups in Russia.

Human rights organisations and students groups have issued new warnings after one Spanish and two Peruvian students were attacked this week in Voronezh, a city of about one million located 580 km south of Moscow. One of the Peruvian students, Enrique Arturo Urtado, a first year student at the Voronezh State Architecture and Civil Engineering University, died on way to hospital. The students were attacked by 15 to 20 young men carrying what the police called “blunt metal and wooden objects.”

The attack led to a ‘march against hatred’ joined by about a thousand students and local people.

A Congolese student was murdered in a similar incident in St. Petersburg earlier this month. About 800 African and Asian students marched in protest then to the city administration building.

The students carried the dead student’s photograph and placards such as ‘An Arab student was killed the day before yesterday, a Vietnamese student was killed yesterday, and an African student has been killed now. Who will be killed tomorrow?’ and ‘Why do Russians treat foreigners this way?’ Students from Latin American, Asian and African countries are particularly vulnerable to attacks. The students are also regularly subjected to public racial abuse. The difficulties foreign students face run far deeper than the government acknowledges, and seem to be getting worse. The statistics on offer seem to vary. The Moscow Bureau of Human Rights said in a report released August that there were 44 racially motivated murders in Russia in 2004, and at least 10 in June alone this year. According to the Sova information-analysis centre, 119 racist attacks were registered in Russia this year in which 19 foreigners were killed and 233 beaten up. Forty of these attacks were registered in and around Moscow, with six killed and 96 beaten up. The other dangerous towns for foreigners are Voronezh, St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Sverdlovsk, Nizhny Novogorod and Irkustsk. But the real numbers could be higher than these statistics suggest. The police investigate several attacks as acts of hooliganism rather than racially motivated. Hooliganism carries a lighter sentence.

“What’s happening is due to absolute corruption of the law enforcement agencies, and the inability to supervise those entrusted with the duty to maintain law and order in society,” Moscow Bureau for Human Rights director Alexander Brod told IPS. “Russian society is full of chaos, and the laws are not implemented the way they should be, to protect the defenceless,” he said. “These crimes are even not punished seriously, meaning the perpetrators face no consequences, and such crimes in effect will continue to increase.” In Voronezh, he said, regional governors simply tolerate promotion of xenophobic policies such as ‘Russia for Russians’ to win support from local people. Head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, says the Russian government and judiciary are turning a blind eye to xenophobia, and the Russian media is playing “a serious role in the terribly rapid spread of xenophobia in the country.” The practice of assaulting foreigners has become widespread because “for many years law enforcement agencies and the judiciary have been doing everything to protect those hooligans,” Alexeyeva told IPS. “The brutal attacks were just the latest in series of apparently racially motivated crimes against foreign students, and these must have some political underpinnings,” Association for Foreign Students director Gabriel Kotchofa told IPS. “It’s beyond our simple understanding why all these are happening to foreign students in a country that seeks chairmanship of the Group of Eight industrialised countries next year, and integration into the civilised international community,” he said. The situation is becoming very scary, Kotchofa said. “Anybody could be the next victim.”

Some local authorities have said they cannot protect foreign students. “We are of course deeply sorry for them, we consider it a huge problem, and we are worried about every student in the country,” head of the official Committee on Youth Affairs Denis Petrov told a meeting in Moscow last week. But, he said, “there is no federal law clarifying whether the regional administrations have that responsibility. Until there is such a law, there is nothing we can do to protect them.” Education and science ministry spokesman Andrey Fursenko has said the ministry will review the list of universities it recommends for foreign students, and boost security on campuses. But Fursenko acknowledged that may not be enough.

“Tolerance is a matter of education and culture and cannot appear overnight,” he said. Russian children should be taught social tolerance in schools from an early age, he said. But in the meanwhile every university should set up councils to teach students to behave, he said. And the police must do more.

“I absolutely disagree when such incidents are interpreted as cases of hooliganism,” he said. He warned of the “irreparable damage that will be inflicted on the country’s image abroad.”