YEREVAN PRESSING FOR TOUGHER ACTION AGAINST ANTI-ARMENIAN RACISM IN RUSSIA
By Emil Danielyan
Eurasia Daily Monitor, DC
June 27 2006
Armenia’s leadership has indicated its discontent with the Russian
authorities’ failure to stop racially motivated attacks on non-Slavic
immigrants in Russia. Such attacks have claimed at least six Armenian
lives this year. Faced with domestic outcry against its reluctance to
publicly exert pressure on Moscow, official Yerevan is now pressing
for tougher Russian action against the xenophobic violence.
President Robert Kocharian and Prime Minister Andranik Markarian
showed the first signs of such pressure as they met with the Kremlin’s
visiting top representative to southern Russia, Dmitry Kozak, on
June 16. The official purpose of Kozak’s visit to Yerevan was to
discuss ways of boosting economic ties between Armenia and the Russian
regions making up the Southern Federal District. But statements from
official Armenian sources suggest that the continuing racist killings
dominated much of the discussions. The Armenian leaders clearly used
the opportunity to convey their concerns to a close and influential
associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Kocharian, according to his office, condemned the "nationalist
murders" and urged Russian law-enforcement bodies, widely accused of
inactivity and even connivance, to act in a more "quick, steadfast,
and understandable" manner. Markarian was quoted by his press service
as demanding that Moscow take "serious steps to identify and bring
the guilty to justice as well as to avert more such incidents."
It also emerged that a group of senior officials from the Armenian
Foreign Ministry will fly to Moscow on Thursday, June 29, to hold
special talks on the issue with their Russian counterparts. "I think
that from now on such discussions and exchanges of concerns will
be a continuous process," Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister Gegham
Gharibjanian said on June 15. He admitted that the authorities in
Yerevan have been "a bit late" in reacting to the problem.
Their reaction (quite strong and extraordinary, given the close
nature of the Russian-Armenian relationship) followed the murder of
yet another ethnic Armenian resident of Russia. Artur Sardarian, 19,
was stabbed to death, apparently by a group of neo-Nazi youths, on
a suburban Moscow train on May 25. Sardarian is reportedly the sixth
Armenian man killed in Russia because of his non-Slavic looks during
the first five months of this year. His violent death came just over
a month after the high-profile, fatal stabbing of 17-year-old Vigen
Abramiants on a Moscow subway platform. The Russian law-enforcement
authorities’ initial refusal to characterize it as a hate crime
enraged even the Kremlin-connected leaders of Russia’s large Armenian
community.
According to the Moscow-based anti-racism Sova Center, ethnic
hatred has already motivated 18 murders and 129 attacks in Russia on
dark-skinned immigrants from the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Africa
this year. Sova reported at least 28 such deaths last year. Sova and
other Russian human rights organizations lay much of the blame on the
Russian law-enforcement agencies’ notorious leniency towards skinhead
groups, which are believed to carry out such crimes. The skinheads,
numbering tens of thousands across the country, seem to operate in a
climate of near-impunity, with neo-Nazi and other extremist literature
widely available on Russian streets and especially on the Internet.
While condemning the racist violence, Kozak assured Kocharian and
Markarian that it is "not specifically directed against Armenians."
He also claimed, "The Russian authorities are doing everything to
solve and rule out such crimes."
Few in Armenia would agree with this assertion, however. A group
of Armenian civic groups that staged a small demonstration outside
the Russian Embassy on June 5 said in a joint petition that the
neo-Nazi elements guilty of the racist killings are operating "with
the sponsorship of some Russian state structures." The protesters
also marched to the Foreign Ministry building in Yerevan to demand
that the Armenian government finally bring the Russians to task. "I
am convinced that if the Armenian authorities took a tougher line the
situation would not be so grave," said Avetik Ishkhanian, chairman
of the Armenian Helsinki Committee and one of the protest organizers.
Leaders of local pro-Western opposition parties are even more outspoken
in condemning both Moscow and Yerevan. Hovannes Hovannisian of the
Liberal Progressive Party branded Kocharian’s regime as a "Russian
vassal" in a June 17 interview with the Haykakan Zhamanak daily. "What
is being done to Armenians in Russia is part of a state policy,"
he charged.
There is also mounting concern among Armenian pro-establishment circles
that have traditionally been oriented toward Russia. Vahan Hovannisian,
a leader of the governing Armenian Revolutionary Federation, observed
with shock on June 16 that Russia is now a far more dangerous place
for Armenians than Turkey. And the chairman of the Writers Union
of Armenia, Levon Ananian, decried what he described as a deadly
"hunt for Armenians" underway in Russia during a recent roundtable
discussion in Yerevan.
Such statements, coupled with the increasingly frequent criticism
of Russia in the Armenian press, cannot fail to contribute to the
ongoing erosion of the traditionally strong pro-Russian sentiment
in Armenia. Opinion polls conducted in recent years show a major
pro-Western shift in Armenian public opinion resulting, among other
things, from Moscow’s perceived hard bargaining in its controversial
economic dealings with Yerevan.
"Gone are the days when a Russian orientation was not even disputed in
this country," Alexander Iskandarian, a political analyst and director
of the Yerevan-based Caucasus Media Institute, told the Hayots Ashkhar
daily. "There is more and more talk here of alternatives, alternative
ways of development and geopolitical orientations. And that is good."
Kocharian apparently had this in mind when he told Kozak that the
racist attacks "do not stem from the interests of Russia and the
Russian people."
(Hayots Ashkhar, June 21; Haykakan Zhamanak, June 17; Statements
by the press services of the Armenian president and prime minister,
June 16; RFE/RL Armenia Report, June 15)