The Moscow Times
Friday, August 13, 2004. Page 2.
News in Brief
Racism Warning
MOSCOW (AP) — Racism is spreading at an alarming pace in Russia, resulting
in a growing number of ethnic-based killings and attacks on minority groups,
human rights activists said Thursday.
Authorities have been reluctant to persecute the publishers and authors of
numerous virulently xenophobic and anti-Semitic publications that have
flooded Russian cities, said Alexander Brod, the director of the Moscow
Bureau for Human Rights and coordinator of an EU-funded program monitoring
xenophobia, anti-Semitism and ethnic discrimination in Russia.
A nationwide poll conducted earlier this year had 42 percent of respondents
saying that the involvement of Jews in politics, business and other spheres
must be curtailed — a prejudice that reaches far back into Russia’s
pogrom-haunted past — while 35 percent spoke against such restrictions and
the rest did not have an opinion.
Some 60 percent of those polled supported restrictions against migrants from
Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.
The poll of 2,500 people, conducted by the independent Expertisa foundation,
had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.