celticdb15
Hall of Famer
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2007
- Messages
- 8,469
AMerica is not the only ones having problems w\immigration issues,
Have these guys takin it too far though?? Heres an interesting article from
a russian newspaper.
Violence and hatred in Russia's new skinhead playground
Fascism is vilified in Russia after the sacrifices the nation endured to
defeat Nazi Germany. But a racist skinhead culture is on the rise - and it
is becoming increasingly vicious
The Independent/January 25, 2005
By Andrew Osborn
Skinheads may be a British invention but when it comes to sheer
numbers, levels of violence and hatred of foreigners a damning new
report suggests Russia has become the bovver boys' blood-soaked new
playground. It may be a country that vilifies fascism more than any other
and arguably had to make the most appalling sacrifices to defeat Nazi
Germany 60 years ago but this is where skinhead culture has taken hold
like nowhere else.
Driven by crushing poverty, a lingering sense of humiliation after the
collapse of the Soviet Union and outrage over Chechen separatist terror
attacks, Russia's skinheads are becoming increasingly organised,
increasingly violent and increasingly numerous.
A report claims Russia's youth is embracing the very ideology their
grandparents fought against so implacably to the point where Russian
skinheads, or britogolovy, now account for almost half the world's "skins".
Adhering to a unique blend of neo-Nazi ideology and rabid Russian
nationalism, Russian skinheads are among the most violent, and have
staged a wave of savage attacks on non-Russians and children as young
as five in the past year, leaving many of their bleeding victims to die
slowly.
Forty-four people were killed in racially motivated murders last year,
more than double the previous year, human rights activists say, and in
many cases the perpetrators were young, white, bomber jacket-clad
skinheads shouting neo-Nazi or nationalist slogans. They rarely shoot
their victims, preferring to stab them repeatedly or beat them to death
with chains or knuckle-dusters. And the odds are always stacked in their
favour because they hunt in packs of at least three and pick the most
vulnerable targets. Their ranks seem only to swell, from about a dozen in
the early 1990s to up to 60,000 today.
The report, entitled How to quell the neo-Nazi setbacks in a country that
defeated fascism, was produced by the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights
and is among several recently that throw the spotlight on a dark
underbelly of Russian society the authorities would have you believe
barely exists.
"Today in Russia there are 50,000 skinheads at the very minimum while in
the rest of the world including America, Europe and other countries there
are about 70,000," Semyen Charny, the report's author, says. The real
number could be much higher, he adds, because neo-Nazi groups
actively try to keep their organisations secret. If nothing is done to
combat the skinhead menace, experts warn that their numbers could
swell to 100,000 within a few years.
With names such as "Blood and Honour", "Moscow Hammer Skin", "United
Brigades 88" (H is the eighth letter in the alphabet. HH stands for Heil
Hitler!), and "Skin Legion", there are estimated to be up to 10,000 in
Moscow and perhaps 5,000 in St Petersburg.
Their code is simple. They don't drink vodka (beer is the Aryan drink),
they do not do drugs, they do not do petty crime (only murder and
assault), they are supposed to have a good knowledge of Russian culture
and to be able to hold their own in a 15-minute fight. Girls, known as
"skin girls", are welcomed into their ranks and are often used to spot
targets without attracting attention.
But what unites them above all is a hatred of foreigners, in particular of
anyone with dark features hailing from the Caucusus region of southern
Russia or from Asia or Africa. The views of Semyon Tokmakov, a
convicted skinhead who brutally attacked a black US Marine in Moscow
seven years ago and still espouses skinhead rhetoric, is typical. "Why have
they [foreigners] all come here?" he told Associated Press. "They bring
nothing but drugs and Aids [and] every day they harass and steal our
women."
Nor do skinheads make any distinction between children and adults or
the young and the old. In St Petersburg, a crucible of skinhead activity, a
nine-year-old Tajik girl was murdered last year and her case was no
exception. Hurshida Sultanova was stabbed to death in front of her father
by a group of about 10 'skins.' She was knifed 11 times. When asked
whether he felt sorry for the murdered Tajik girl, Tokmakov did not bat
an eyelid. "When you kill cockroaches you don't feel sorry for them, do
you?"
In recent years, experts say, the skinheads' methods have become far
more brutal. "They now use screw drivers and knives and increasingly
their attacks end in murder," Sergey Belikov, a specialist in "skins", told
the weekly Argumenty i fakty publication. "Earlier, there was an unspoken
rule to leave children and the old alone. That has been abandoned. The
first wave of skinheads [in the early 1990s] could be called simple
hooligans. Today's generation are professional killers."
Many "skins" look up to Alexander Sukharevsky, the leader of the far-
right National People's Party that has splintered into two groups of the
same name. Party members favour the Nazi salute and wear black
armbands featuring a Russian swastika-like cross.
Sukharevsky preaches the politics of hate believing that the white race is
under attack from a tide of undesirable non-white foreigners. He has
admitted that his movement thrives on Russia's post-Soviet social
problems. "They [recruits] come themselves," he has said. "They are like
small moths; they are so defenceless, these skinheads, and are very
vulnerable.
"Nearly all of them are from poor families; they are a product of society's
disease. We are forced to raise them like fathers and mothers do because
nobody has ever raised them or taught them anything. They are the
future of our country."
Sukharevsky is also deeply anti-semitic. He openly laments that Hitler did
not succeed in "liberating Russia from the yoke of Jews". Experts say
wannabe skinheads are soaked in a culture where neo-Nazi and
revisionist literature proliferates and white power music predominates.
They favour greetings such as "Heil Hitler!" or "Hail Russia!" and their
favourite battle cries include "Forward Russians!" and "Russia for the
Russians!"
Although they are supposed to abstain from vodka, many of them do not,
and enjoy beer too but since they do not really have any money to speak
of they tend to hang about in each other's homes or in abandoned
buildings and communal areas on the outskirts of Russia's big cities.
Some crime analysts have claimed that they sometimes have links to, or
are the same as, Russia's home-grown football hooligans, singling out
Moscow's Spartak and TsKA teams as their favourites. Such a theory
gained credence in 2002 when Russia went out of the World Cup at the
hands of Japan, starting a riot in central Moscow with cars set alight,
shops attacked and passers-by beaten.
Many saw the hands of the skinheads behind what looked like a well
planned riot. Some say Russia's skinhead problem is a product of
society's general malaise. Alla Gerber, head of the Holocaust Fund, has
said she believes the problem is getting out of control. "Society is sick
with xenophobia. Like a cancer it is spreading through the country." She
says surveys show 28 per cent of adult Russians want to bring back
special settlements for Jews and 48 per cent are in favour of curbing the
rights of national minorities.
Alexander Brod, head of the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, believes
almost two-thirds of the population share a similar ideology, that "Russia
is for the Russians and all misfortunes stem from foreigners".
April 20, Hitler's birthday, is always a time of increased tension in Russia
since skinheads have promised to mark the occasion "by killing African or
Asian people". The human rights group Sova said that last year alone,
citizens from at least 24 different countries were attacked [on different
dates] and that the method rarely varied.
"As a rule, such crimes have common characteristics: the victims have a
non-Slav appearance and will be attacked by a group of teenagers not
usually numbering less than five. The victim will be kicked, beaten with
baseball bats and if the attackers are fewer than five will usually be
stabbed." Now the skinheads have become frighteningly well organised
targeting human rights activists, lawyers and academics who oppose
them.
Last June they murdered Nikolai Girenko, one of the country's leading
anti-skinhead experts, in an attack apparently designed to punish him for
his work in helping convict young neo-Nazis. Mr Girenko had made some
two dozen studies on neo-Nazi and skinhead groups for the authorities
in Moscow and St Petersburg and frequently acted as a special adviser to
the public prosecutor in St Petersburg in high-profile race-hate cases. He
was shot through his flat door with a sawn-off shotgun.
Mr Girenko was best known for his work in the trial of three youths
accused of the racist murder of an Azerbaijani man in 2002. He was
subject to many death threats and the communal entrance hall to his
building was daubed with fascist and racist graffiti including, inevitably,
the swastika. A shadowy far-right group called "Russian Republic"
claimed responsibility for the murder.
The toll of skinhead victims is staggering. Last October, a 20-year-old
Vietnamese student, Vu Anh Tuan, was stabbed to death in St Petersburg,
prompting fellow students to demonstrate against far-right violence. Last
September, St Petersburg skinheads attacked Tajiks.
Armed with knuckle-dusters and metal rods, 10 to 12 "skins" fell on a
group of women and children described in the media as "Tajik Gypsies" at
a main railway station. Five-year-old Nilufar Sangbaeva died on the spot
and a six-year-old girl died of her injuries later. One attacker said they
wanted "to cleanse our land of gypsies". They were sentenced to up to 10
years in jail.
This month, several high-profile Jews were attacked in Moscow, and a
Jewish cemetery in St Petersburg was desecrated. Again this month, a
man with Uzbek features was murdered in provincial Russia and a man
from the Caucusus knifed to death in Moscow.
Many skinheads say they resort to violence because they are bored. In
Voronezh, a university town 300 miles south of Moscow which has an
unusually high number of racist attacks, Amaro Antonio Limo, a 24-year-
old medical student from Guinea Bissau, was stabbed to death last year.
"We were bored so we decided to go down to Mir [Peace] street where
there are many foreign hostels and kill a black," said one. "It didn't matter
to us which country he came from."
The Russian authorities say the skinhead problem is grossly exaggerated
and all countries have similar elements but activists disagree. Russia's
bovver-boy problem is, they say, a direct result of society's problems
where unemployment is high, wages low and prospects for many young
people grim. "When there are such economic and other hardships there
are usually two ways of dealing with it," Mr Brod of Moscow's Human
Rights Bureau says. "The first is to reflect, and the second is to look for an
enemy and blame him for your problems. Unfortunately, Russia has
chosen the second path."
Have these guys takin it too far though?? Heres an interesting article from
a russian newspaper.
Violence and hatred in Russia's new skinhead playground
Fascism is vilified in Russia after the sacrifices the nation endured to
defeat Nazi Germany. But a racist skinhead culture is on the rise - and it
is becoming increasingly vicious
The Independent/January 25, 2005
By Andrew Osborn
Skinheads may be a British invention but when it comes to sheer
numbers, levels of violence and hatred of foreigners a damning new
report suggests Russia has become the bovver boys' blood-soaked new
playground. It may be a country that vilifies fascism more than any other
and arguably had to make the most appalling sacrifices to defeat Nazi
Germany 60 years ago but this is where skinhead culture has taken hold
like nowhere else.
Driven by crushing poverty, a lingering sense of humiliation after the
collapse of the Soviet Union and outrage over Chechen separatist terror
attacks, Russia's skinheads are becoming increasingly organised,
increasingly violent and increasingly numerous.
A report claims Russia's youth is embracing the very ideology their
grandparents fought against so implacably to the point where Russian
skinheads, or britogolovy, now account for almost half the world's "skins".
Adhering to a unique blend of neo-Nazi ideology and rabid Russian
nationalism, Russian skinheads are among the most violent, and have
staged a wave of savage attacks on non-Russians and children as young
as five in the past year, leaving many of their bleeding victims to die
slowly.
Forty-four people were killed in racially motivated murders last year,
more than double the previous year, human rights activists say, and in
many cases the perpetrators were young, white, bomber jacket-clad
skinheads shouting neo-Nazi or nationalist slogans. They rarely shoot
their victims, preferring to stab them repeatedly or beat them to death
with chains or knuckle-dusters. And the odds are always stacked in their
favour because they hunt in packs of at least three and pick the most
vulnerable targets. Their ranks seem only to swell, from about a dozen in
the early 1990s to up to 60,000 today.
The report, entitled How to quell the neo-Nazi setbacks in a country that
defeated fascism, was produced by the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights
and is among several recently that throw the spotlight on a dark
underbelly of Russian society the authorities would have you believe
barely exists.
"Today in Russia there are 50,000 skinheads at the very minimum while in
the rest of the world including America, Europe and other countries there
are about 70,000," Semyen Charny, the report's author, says. The real
number could be much higher, he adds, because neo-Nazi groups
actively try to keep their organisations secret. If nothing is done to
combat the skinhead menace, experts warn that their numbers could
swell to 100,000 within a few years.
With names such as "Blood and Honour", "Moscow Hammer Skin", "United
Brigades 88" (H is the eighth letter in the alphabet. HH stands for Heil
Hitler!), and "Skin Legion", there are estimated to be up to 10,000 in
Moscow and perhaps 5,000 in St Petersburg.
Their code is simple. They don't drink vodka (beer is the Aryan drink),
they do not do drugs, they do not do petty crime (only murder and
assault), they are supposed to have a good knowledge of Russian culture
and to be able to hold their own in a 15-minute fight. Girls, known as
"skin girls", are welcomed into their ranks and are often used to spot
targets without attracting attention.
But what unites them above all is a hatred of foreigners, in particular of
anyone with dark features hailing from the Caucusus region of southern
Russia or from Asia or Africa. The views of Semyon Tokmakov, a
convicted skinhead who brutally attacked a black US Marine in Moscow
seven years ago and still espouses skinhead rhetoric, is typical. "Why have
they [foreigners] all come here?" he told Associated Press. "They bring
nothing but drugs and Aids [and] every day they harass and steal our
women."
Nor do skinheads make any distinction between children and adults or
the young and the old. In St Petersburg, a crucible of skinhead activity, a
nine-year-old Tajik girl was murdered last year and her case was no
exception. Hurshida Sultanova was stabbed to death in front of her father
by a group of about 10 'skins.' She was knifed 11 times. When asked
whether he felt sorry for the murdered Tajik girl, Tokmakov did not bat
an eyelid. "When you kill cockroaches you don't feel sorry for them, do
you?"
In recent years, experts say, the skinheads' methods have become far
more brutal. "They now use screw drivers and knives and increasingly
their attacks end in murder," Sergey Belikov, a specialist in "skins", told
the weekly Argumenty i fakty publication. "Earlier, there was an unspoken
rule to leave children and the old alone. That has been abandoned. The
first wave of skinheads [in the early 1990s] could be called simple
hooligans. Today's generation are professional killers."
Many "skins" look up to Alexander Sukharevsky, the leader of the far-
right National People's Party that has splintered into two groups of the
same name. Party members favour the Nazi salute and wear black
armbands featuring a Russian swastika-like cross.
Sukharevsky preaches the politics of hate believing that the white race is
under attack from a tide of undesirable non-white foreigners. He has
admitted that his movement thrives on Russia's post-Soviet social
problems. "They [recruits] come themselves," he has said. "They are like
small moths; they are so defenceless, these skinheads, and are very
vulnerable.
"Nearly all of them are from poor families; they are a product of society's
disease. We are forced to raise them like fathers and mothers do because
nobody has ever raised them or taught them anything. They are the
future of our country."
Sukharevsky is also deeply anti-semitic. He openly laments that Hitler did
not succeed in "liberating Russia from the yoke of Jews". Experts say
wannabe skinheads are soaked in a culture where neo-Nazi and
revisionist literature proliferates and white power music predominates.
They favour greetings such as "Heil Hitler!" or "Hail Russia!" and their
favourite battle cries include "Forward Russians!" and "Russia for the
Russians!"
Although they are supposed to abstain from vodka, many of them do not,
and enjoy beer too but since they do not really have any money to speak
of they tend to hang about in each other's homes or in abandoned
buildings and communal areas on the outskirts of Russia's big cities.
Some crime analysts have claimed that they sometimes have links to, or
are the same as, Russia's home-grown football hooligans, singling out
Moscow's Spartak and TsKA teams as their favourites. Such a theory
gained credence in 2002 when Russia went out of the World Cup at the
hands of Japan, starting a riot in central Moscow with cars set alight,
shops attacked and passers-by beaten.
Many saw the hands of the skinheads behind what looked like a well
planned riot. Some say Russia's skinhead problem is a product of
society's general malaise. Alla Gerber, head of the Holocaust Fund, has
said she believes the problem is getting out of control. "Society is sick
with xenophobia. Like a cancer it is spreading through the country." She
says surveys show 28 per cent of adult Russians want to bring back
special settlements for Jews and 48 per cent are in favour of curbing the
rights of national minorities.
Alexander Brod, head of the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, believes
almost two-thirds of the population share a similar ideology, that "Russia
is for the Russians and all misfortunes stem from foreigners".
April 20, Hitler's birthday, is always a time of increased tension in Russia
since skinheads have promised to mark the occasion "by killing African or
Asian people". The human rights group Sova said that last year alone,
citizens from at least 24 different countries were attacked [on different
dates] and that the method rarely varied.
"As a rule, such crimes have common characteristics: the victims have a
non-Slav appearance and will be attacked by a group of teenagers not
usually numbering less than five. The victim will be kicked, beaten with
baseball bats and if the attackers are fewer than five will usually be
stabbed." Now the skinheads have become frighteningly well organised
targeting human rights activists, lawyers and academics who oppose
them.
Last June they murdered Nikolai Girenko, one of the country's leading
anti-skinhead experts, in an attack apparently designed to punish him for
his work in helping convict young neo-Nazis. Mr Girenko had made some
two dozen studies on neo-Nazi and skinhead groups for the authorities
in Moscow and St Petersburg and frequently acted as a special adviser to
the public prosecutor in St Petersburg in high-profile race-hate cases. He
was shot through his flat door with a sawn-off shotgun.
Mr Girenko was best known for his work in the trial of three youths
accused of the racist murder of an Azerbaijani man in 2002. He was
subject to many death threats and the communal entrance hall to his
building was daubed with fascist and racist graffiti including, inevitably,
the swastika. A shadowy far-right group called "Russian Republic"
claimed responsibility for the murder.
The toll of skinhead victims is staggering. Last October, a 20-year-old
Vietnamese student, Vu Anh Tuan, was stabbed to death in St Petersburg,
prompting fellow students to demonstrate against far-right violence. Last
September, St Petersburg skinheads attacked Tajiks.
Armed with knuckle-dusters and metal rods, 10 to 12 "skins" fell on a
group of women and children described in the media as "Tajik Gypsies" at
a main railway station. Five-year-old Nilufar Sangbaeva died on the spot
and a six-year-old girl died of her injuries later. One attacker said they
wanted "to cleanse our land of gypsies". They were sentenced to up to 10
years in jail.
This month, several high-profile Jews were attacked in Moscow, and a
Jewish cemetery in St Petersburg was desecrated. Again this month, a
man with Uzbek features was murdered in provincial Russia and a man
from the Caucusus knifed to death in Moscow.
Many skinheads say they resort to violence because they are bored. In
Voronezh, a university town 300 miles south of Moscow which has an
unusually high number of racist attacks, Amaro Antonio Limo, a 24-year-
old medical student from Guinea Bissau, was stabbed to death last year.
"We were bored so we decided to go down to Mir [Peace] street where
there are many foreign hostels and kill a black," said one. "It didn't matter
to us which country he came from."
The Russian authorities say the skinhead problem is grossly exaggerated
and all countries have similar elements but activists disagree. Russia's
bovver-boy problem is, they say, a direct result of society's problems
where unemployment is high, wages low and prospects for many young
people grim. "When there are such economic and other hardships there
are usually two ways of dealing with it," Mr Brod of Moscow's Human
Rights Bureau says. "The first is to reflect, and the second is to look for an
enemy and blame him for your problems. Unfortunately, Russia has
chosen the second path."
