Racism in Russia

2006-04-04 13:01

Saint Petersburg - Katya was once a proud young mother. Then the awkward stares and the insults started. Then her nine-year-old daughter Liliana was stabbed in the neck on March 25.

"If I had known what I would have to go through... I would have thought about it a hundred, no a thousand times, before having a mixed race child," said Katya, a 28-year-old beauty parlour manager in the northwest Russian city of Saint Petersburg.

Drinking tea in a cafe outside the hospital where Liliana is recovering, Katya recalls how she met Liliana's father Fomkan, a young musician from Mali. They soon married and had a child.

"Of course it's unusual in Russia to have a mixed race child. Even my parents were against it at the start. But I was proud of my marriage and my child," she says.

Ashamed

Four years later the couple divorced and Fomkan returned to Mali. Liliana's life took a turn for the worse. Children began insulting her at school and the stares became ever more insistent.

"It's monstrous to say this but sometimes I'm ashamed to have a mixed race child and I avoid telling people," Katya says.

The three stab wounds on Liliana's neck and ear are healing. But the trauma remains. "She talks only about that, she asks 'why me?'"

Katya, in tears, says she is thinking of sending Liliana to her father in Mali to protect her.

"Liliana has told me 'I don't want to live without you, but I don't want to die here either'."

Local prosecutors said the attack on Liliana by two young men near her home was probably racially motivated, fitting a pattern of growing racist violence in Russia.

But Russian authorities have only slowly begun to label attacks on people with dark skin as racist.

Saint Petersburg's governor, Valentina Matviyenko said earlier there was no "xenophobic tendency," despite a sharp increase in the number of attacks.

Child called a 'monster'

A few days before Liliana was stabbed, a city court sentenced seven teenagers for taking part in another attack using chains, baseball bats and knives that resulted in the death of a nine-year-old girl from the Central Asian state of Tajikistan.

The teenagers were cleared of racism and murder and found guilty of "hooliganism" for the February 2004 attack, receiving sentences of between 18 months and five-and-a-half years in prison.

A report in November 2005 by the independent Sova group found that murders officially classified as racist more than doubled in Russia between 2003 and 2004 from around 20 to at least 45.

Racists mainly target immigrants from the former Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as people from Asia and Africa.

"Skinheads are operating in almost all regions of Russia," said Galina Kozhevnikova, a researcher at Sova, as she described an ever more organised fascist movement in Russia that is gaining a foothold in mainstream politics.

A Russian neo-Nazi website with a Saint Petersburg contact address this week carried a report of the attack on Liliana calling her a "nine-year-old monster" under a headline reading: "The Clean-Up of the City Continues."

- SAPA