Amnesty International is urging Ukraine’s government to do more to combat racial discrimination by law enforcement officers.
Amnesty International is urging Ukraine’s government to do more to combat racial discrimination by law enforcement officers. The international human rights organization, in a report released July 10, cites racist attitudes among police as a major obstacle to easing the nation’s increasing racial tensions.
Because of widespread racist attitudes, people who commit racially motivated crimes in Ukraine operate with “virtual impunity,” the Amnesty International report concludes.
In recent months, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry has blamed a small but active number of “skinhead” youth groups for violence against ethnic minorities.
However, in its 40page report, Amnesty found racist attitudes to be widespread in Ukrainian society, including among state employees who are supposed to be protecting minorities’ rights.
“It is true that there are some skinhead groups in Ukraine that profess a racist, neofascist and violent ideology. But not all members of skinhead groups are racist, and, furthermore, racial discrimination in Ukraine is not limited to these groups and is much more widespread,” the report reads.
While most of the violent attacks are carried out by “young people who often subscribe to a racist subculture,” the report stressed that “many more people are subject to harassment, discrimination and abuse from state officials and ordinary members of the public.”
Amnesty issued 10 recommendations to Ukraine’s government, urging it to end impunity for racially motivated crimes, combat racism and xenophobia in society and end racial discrimination by state officials.
The report drew on research, surveys and interviews.
“Excuse me, but the police are racist themselves,” Amnesty cited Samuel, a refugee from Angola, as saying. He described an occasion when police asked for his identification documents. Samuel said when the police returned his refugee passport he saw they had drawn a picture of a monkey over his photograph. He complained to Migration Services, who issued him a new passport but advised him not to complain to the police, according to Amnesty.
In 2007, Amnesty conducted a poll among 37 foreign students who attend the National Aviation University in Kyiv, and found that every one of those questioned suffered racial abuse in public places or at the university. All but two of them said they were physically abused during such incidents. Also, 17 students said they had been subjected to repeated police identity checks.
“In many cases victims do not report crimes because they have no confidence that they will get justice,” Amnesty said. “If victims do complain, the authorities may be reluctant to take action, and if the case goes to court the perpetrators are usually prosecuted for ‘hooliganism’ while the racist nature of the crime goes unacknowledged and unrecorded.”
The failure, the report said, is punctuated by inadequate provisions in the law and poor police response.
The targets are often students and refugees from other nations who clearly stand out from Ukraine’s white, Slavic majority population. However, the problem extends to Jews and anyone who looks different. Even diplomats, businessmen and professional athletes have been subject to discrimination and attacks.
Home to what were, in Soviet days, respected universities, Ukraine remains a popular destination for students from abroad. The number of Africans living in Ukraine is estimated at 10,000 or so. Education Ministry figures show that some 7,000 students from China are currently studying in Ukraine, 2,500 Jordanians, 2,300 Syrians, 2,200 Indians, 1,500 Malaysians and 1,000 Vietnamese.
Over the past year, Ukraine faced mounting criticism after rising violence against ethnic minorities, particularly Africans and Asians. Amnesty said government representatives have demonstrated “a bewildering lack of understanding about the nature of racial discrimination and the gravity of the problem in Ukraine.”
During a meeting with Amnesty in September 2007, an employee of the State Security Service of Ukraine, an agency known by the acronym of SBU, stated that racism is a “policy pursued by the state aiming at the eradication of a race and guided by an ideology.”
Amnesty also said the Ukrainian government minimizes the problem by underreporting the number of racist crimes that are happening.
“Officials frequently point to the high levels of racist crimes reported in Western Europe as proof that the problem is worse there than in Ukraine when, in fact, racist incidents simply go unrecorded in Ukraine,” it said.
In March 2008, the Deputy Minister of the Interior stated that there were 1,000 crimes committed against foreigners in 2007, including 22 murders and five murders by March of 2008. However, he claimed only one of these murders was racially motivated.
In sharp contrast, monitoring conducted by several nongovernmental organizations and released in May shows the amount of raciallymotivated attacks is increasing each year, and have already recorded more than 40 attacks and as many as seven murders just in 2008.
The most recent of which occurred just three weeks ago, when on June 19 a Middle eastern student, Modestel Abu Farah, was found murdered near Shulyavska metro station.
In the last year, Ukraine’s government started taking the first steps in addressing racism and xenophobia in the country, watchdogs said.
In May 2007, the Ministry of Internal Affairs developed a plan to combat racism and xenophobia. And in September of last year, the Ministry set up a Department for Ethnic Crimes. Amnesty said the department merely releases statistics on crimes committed by foreigners in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the SBU also set up a department to combat racism and xenophobia, whose main task is to investigate and prevent crimes by organized racist groups.
“These government initiatives demonstrate that, while awareness is growing, these are just the first steps towards addressing the problem of racial discrimination,” Amnesty said.
Ukraine’s existing laws that address racist crimes are rarely used. Only four such prosecutions have taken place, including three in the last year. Two cases involved the murder of a Korean and Nigerian citizen, while a third involved the beating of a Japanese tourist.
The definition of what constitutes a racial crime is not clear enough, experts say, and penalties are relatively light. For prosecutors, “it is all too easy” simply to avoid filing charges, rather than prosecuting cases they may lose, according to a report by the Diversity Initiative Group, a project initiated by several nongovernmental organizations to address racism in Ukraine.
Elisabeth Sewall can be reached at [email protected], or 4964565, ext. 1091.
