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Ukrainian officialdom is beginning to take notice of the rising tide of assaults on foreigners.
By Nickolai Butkevich, research and advocacy director at the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union.

10/5/2007- Amid the drama of Ukraine's latest political crisis, few observers have noticed a series of potentially groundbreaking statements on the problem of extremist violence issued by top government officials in recent weeks. For years, Ukrainian officials either ignored or denied that organized hate groups even exist in Ukraine, despite reports by the media and nongovernmental organizations of a growing number of anti-Semitic and racist attacks. Breaking dramatically with this trend, in March personnel of the Interior Ministry proposed forming a unit to combat radical neo-Nazi youth gangs, and the new interior minister, Vasily Tsushko, reportedly called for a law to disband organizations that use fascist symbols. A month later, on 12 April, President Viktor Yushchenko sent a letter to his top law-enforcement officials demanding that measures be taken to arrest and punish the vandals who defaced Jewish and other memorial sites. The president echoed Tsushko in noting the increased activity of extremist groups in Ukraine. What prompted this burst of candor? Coincidentally or not, an unusually high number of racist attacks took place throughout the country in March and April, raising the disturbing prospect that Ukraine may be taking its first steps on the path of neighboring Russia, where racist violence is now a daily event.

Lengthening list of attacks
A report by Vyacheslav Likhachyov, who monitors events in Kyiv for the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, detailed several recent incidents. On 3 March, around 50 extremist nationalists held a rally in Kyiv. With arms extended in the fascist salute, the demonstrators screamed slogans like "Ukraine for the Ukrainians!" in a protest near the city's Shulyavsky Market, whose traders are mostly from African nations and other developing countries. The protesters accused the traders of "sleeping with our women" and held signs reading, bizarrely, "Stop Zionist-African expansion." Three protesters reportedly attacked a Chinese man who had the misfortune to walk past, chasing him into a nearby McDonald's, where security guards eventually stopped them from beating him. In late April, the market burned down in a mysterious fire; police are investigating the possibility that either neo-Nazis or ordinary criminals were behind the blaze. Attacks on dark-skinned people are becoming so common that some past victims have resorted to arming themselves, having largely given up on the possibility that the police will protect them. On 9 March, eight teenagers attacked five Indian students at a medical institute in Simferopol. One of the students used a scalpel during the brawl to slash one of the attackers, who was subsequently hospitalized; another Indian used a gas-powered pistol. Police denied that the attackers were neo-Nazis, despite the fact that similar attacks were reported the previous and the following month, strongly suggesting the possibility of an organized campaign to target foreign students.

Incitement of neo-Nazi violence often takes place in Ukraine with complete impunity. On 16 March, hundreds of neo-Nazis gathered in Kyiv for a "white power" rock concert by the group Tin Sontsa (Shadow of the Sun). An anti-fascist youth activist was assaulted near the concert venue – the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy – after trying to take pictures of the event. Recorded speeches of Adolf Hitler were played during the concert as the musicians screamed "Sieg heil!" and raised their arms in the fascist salute. The lead singer reportedly incited the crowd, calling out, "If you see a Jew, break his nose!" There was unconfirmed information that market traders from the Caucasus working near the concert venue were also attacked. A particularly depressing example of racist incitement took place at a center of learning. On 18 March, university students in Kharkov held a torchlight procession on campus. Marchers shouted in unison: "One race! One nation! Our motherland – Ukraine!" and "Give the best dormitories to Ukrainian students!" University officials reportedly authorized the demonstration, which passed without incident. The head of the Kharkov Human Rights Protection Group, the country's leading human rights group, Evgeny Zakharov, said this was the third such demonstration on that campus in recent months and that violence against foreign students followed the previous marches. However, the victims were too intimidated to report the attacks to the police. On 14 April, around 100 members of the far-right group Patriot of Ukraine held a legally sanctioned rally in Kyiv, the newspaper Segodnya reported. Screaming "One race! One nation! Ukraine!" the demonstrators marched without incident as police looked on. Public incitement of ethnic hatred is illegal in Ukraine.

Scant signs of change
One heartening aspect of the recent rise in xenophobia and violence is the changing attitude toward the problem shown by the Ukrainian media. In the past six months or so the media have gone from largely overlooking or minimizing the problem to giving it moderately good coverage. The tone of the coverage ranges from dispassionate reporting to alarmist, with many references to "fascism" and in some cases attempts to link the violence to western Ukrainian nationalists, for the most part unfairly. The Donetsk edition of the Russian national daily Komsomolskaya Pravda reported on 16 April, for instance, that an Egyptian diplomat was attacked in downtown Kyiv by around a dozen neo-Nazis. It is unclear if any arrests followed the attack, or if it was specifically motivated by racism.

Three neo-Nazis damaged houses being constructed by Crimean Tatars in Simferopol, according to a report in the 27 April edition of the local Golos Kryma newspaper. The incident took place on 20 April, which is Adolf Hitler's birthday – often a time of increased neo-Nazi violence. The three youths damaged eight houses before they were chased off by Crimean Tatars, an ethnic group that was deported en masse by Joseph Stalin in 1944 and allowed to return to its homeland only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Tatars caught one of the youths and turned him over to the police. According to two witnesses quoted in the article, the young man had two swastika emblems on his clothes, along with another on his backpack. Despite this, and despite the timing of the incident, local police refuse to admit the possibility that the youths are admirers of Hitler. "Information that skinheads were involved in this incident has not been confirmed," the regional police's spokesman Aleksandr Dombrovsky was quoted as saying, echoing comments made by local police officials in the wake of a 2005 neo-Nazi attack on Jewish children in Simferopol and subsequent clashes between ethnic Russian and Crimean Tatar youths. The two men who escaped the Tatars then attacked some Indian medical students who unluckily crossed their path.

Aside from the welcome candor of Yushchenko and his new interior minister on the threat that violent extremists pose to public safety, the government's reaction to this wave of violence has been mixed. As with previously reported anti-Semitic attacks, there have been relatively few arrests made in connection with the recent assaults. It remains to be seen what sort of concrete actions, if any, will follow the change in rhetoric. But there are some signs of hope. On 28 April, police in Kyiv arrested 77 people, including 37 whose "appearance was similar to skinheads," after they tried to hold a march to honor an SS unit made up of Ukrainians during World War II, according to a report by the UNIAN news agency. The police were enforcing a court order banning the march, which generated much controversy in the Ukrainian media. While some Ukrainians see the soldiers of the SS Galichina division as heroes who fought for an independent Ukraine, others accuse the unit of war crimes. It is unclear what charges, if any, were filed against the 77 demonstrators, though presumably the owner of a taxi cab in which Molotov cocktails and a swastika insignia were found potentially faces serious legal consequences. The same day, Tsushko revealed that his ministry was considering creating a unit charged solely with combating extremist groups. Nevertheless, given the political instability that the country is experiencing, even the best-intentioned efforts to mount a coordinated crackdown on extremist groups will be unusually difficult to mount. In the meantime, it's a safe bet that hate groups, emboldened by the government's apparent inability to counter their activities in any systematic way, will continue trying to demonize, terrorize, and even kill people who don't fit into their image of "one race, one nation."