St. Petersburg Times - 04.14.2005

St. Petersburg Times

Inaction Alarms Israelis

By Vladimir Kovalev, STAFF WRITER 

The latest refusal of the St. Petersburg Prosecutor's Office to initiate criminal cases over the publication of articles inciting racial hatred in local nationalist newspapers has resulted in a sharp reaction from Israel politicians on the eve of President Vladimir Putin's visit to the Holy Land.

Representatives of influential Israeli political circles suggested this week that Israeli leaders must raise the question of prosecutors' lack of attention to nationalists with Putin when he visits at the end of this month.

"I believe that the government of Israel and our President Moshe Katsav, who invited Putin, should question him about the official reaction of the Russian government to the mass appearance of anti-Semitic publications in the Russian media," said Avigdor Lieberman, head of Our Home Israel party, in a comment submitted to the St. Petersburg Times on Wednesday.

The Israeli politicians were alerted by the actions of St. Petersburg human rights advocates from the Democratic Russia party and Citizen's Watch who filed a complaint with the city prosecutor's office in January 2005 over anti-Semitic publications in the newspaper Rus Pravoslavnaya, or Orthodox Russia.

Last month the prosecutor's office issued an official warning to it and several other local newspapers that had published similar articles. The human rights advocates say that the office is taking too little action and insisted that criminal cases be brought against the newspapers.

"In January 2005, the newspaper Rus Pravoslavnaya, which is registered in St. Petersburg, published a so-called 'letter of 500,' which was saturated with extremism and hatred toward Jews," Ruslan Linkov, head of the St. Petersburg branch of the Democratic Russia party, said Tuesday in a telephone interview. "Neither St. Petersburg nor federal law enforcement bodies have reacted in a proper legal way to this publication that flares up national hatred."

"Criminal ignorance by the city prosecutor's office and General Prosecutor's Office has led to a result that 2 months after the 'letter of 500' appeared, the same newspaper has published a no less disgusting anti-Semitic letter to the General Prosecutor, this time signed by 5,000 supporters of Nazi ideology," Linkov said.

"This clearly suggests that xenophobic tendencies are growing in Russian society, which raises serious concerns," he said.

The newspapers' editors, however, argue that the prosecutor's office has been too harsh toward them.

"I believe the prosecutors are too strict with their repression because we've never been distinguished for our unrestrained publications," Oleg Gusev, editor of newspaper Za Russkoye Delo, or For the Russian Cause, which also got a warning from the Prosecutor's Office in March. "If we touch on Jewish questions, we use such well known authors as Fyodor Dostoevsky or Henry Ford, so for this reason it would be silly to prosecute us just for quoting these authors." 

"They just got on us for this letter of 500 that we published and signed, using it as a reason to persecute us," he said. "We believe that the Jewish question is one, but not the main reason for economic problems, in the country. The most important is an absence of Russian self-consciousness among the population."

In the letter issued Jan. 23 and signed by 19 State Duma deputies of the Rodina and Communist factions among others, authors demanded that the General Prosecutor's Office ban the Jewish religion in Russia.

"The Jewish religion is anti-Christian and hates humanity ... sometime it uses ritual killings," one line of the letter said.

While he was advocating that the newspapers be prosecuted at the end of March, Linkov received a threat from supporters of Nazi ideology. It was posted on a web forum where there was a discussion about the official warnings issued by the prosecutor's office.

"Leave Linkov to us, we will deal with the problem," an anonymous person wrote.

Linkov submitted the threat to the City Prosecutor's Office, which started an investigation of the case.

The office could not be reached for comment, but according to city police St. Petersburg has not only several newspapers that publish anti-Semitic materials, but there is a quite significant presence of nationalistic groups operating in St. Petersburg.

"At the moment there are 18 pro-Nazi and extremist groups, and we know their leaders. According to our data, the groups contain up to 12,000 to 13,000 people aged from 13 to 30 years old," Andrei Chernopyatov, head of the city police department for terrorism and extremism, said Wednesday at a briefing.

A total of 153 crimes were committed against foreigners in the first quarter of 2005 in St. Petersburg, but most of them are not related to cases of national hatred, he said.

This week the police said it detained several people suspected of participating in the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in St. Petersburg in December, when several tens of graves were damaged and sprayed with Nazi symbols.

"The criminal police department has solved the case of vandalism," Vladislav Piotrovsky, head of the city criminal police, said Wednesday at a briefing.

The police refused to reveal to the public the age of the detainees or their affiliation with particular extremist groups, saying this information would be kept secret in the interests of the investigation.