MOSCOW: Russia’s small Cameroonian community was shocked and saddened, but not surprised, when fellow citizen Kanhem Leon was murdered by racists. They know the danger of violence is ever present.
Simon Samba Samba, the Cameroon embassy’s second secretary, says he always advises new arrivals not to walk around on their own and to avoid places where skinheads hunt foreigners.
“When people came here to study in communist times, it was not like this. But now people are poor and drunk. Maybe they are not happy and they attack our lads on the street,” he said.
A series of random racist murders, like that of 28-year-old Leon late last year and other foreign students in Moscow and elsewhere, have forced the issue into the headlines.
Last month, a man shouting “Heil Hitler” wounded eight people in a knife attack on a Moscow synagogue, and attacks on immigrants are so common that they rarely make the press.
President Vladimir Putin has responded by calling racism an “infection” and ordered police to take steps to crush it. But experts say its roots are deep in demoralised post-Soviet society and will not be easy to pull out.
The skinheads, they say, are like a mixture of neo-Nazis and soccer hooligans grafted onto the casual racism that the Soviet Union concealed under its communist rhetoric.
“Our ideology is racism above all. We don’t like Tajiks, Armenians, Jews — we don’t like anyone of a different race,” said one self-declared skinhead in an interview with Reuters.
The man calls himself Tesak (machete) — “because I like knives” — and wears big black boots and a short, padded jacket.
“At the moment in Russia we’re not very organised, there is no single leader. We just have groups of five or 10 people who go out to kill Armenians, Chinese, Tajiks,” he said.
His group Format 18 — the numbers one and eight represent the initials of Adolf Hitler — posts videos of its attacks on its Website. One clip shows a group of young, muscular men in their uniform of jeans and boots beating a Tajik trader in a market before it ends with the slogan of “White Power”.
Most Russians strongly disapprove of such assaults, but opinion polls suggest passive racism is widespread.
Foreign visitors to Russia are often shocked by casual racist language and behaviour that has long been taboo in their own societies.
Late last year, polling firm Levada Centre said 53 per cent of 1,600 respondents supported the phrase “Russia for the Russians”, while the numbers supporting a limit on immigration were markedly higher than the year before.
Some political groups have flirted with racism, and the Rodina (Motherland) party was barred from Moscow elections last year for a campaign advertisement that said “let’s clean the city of rubbish” over pictures of immigrants from the Caucasus.—Reuters
