Human rights advocates declare Russian 'emergency' Human rights advocates gatherto declare 'emergency' in Russia
By Lev Gorodetsky
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
January 24, 2001
MOSCOW, — More than 1,000 activists from across Russia
gathered here over the weekend
to declare a national human rights ``emergency."
But many Jewish leaders, objecting to the gathering's anti-Kremlin
tone,
stayed away.
Speakers at the two-day Emergency Congress in Defense of Human Rights,
sponsored by the liberal
Yabloko Party and some U.S. foundations, denounced Russian President
Vladimir
Putin for the war in Chechnya, as
well as alleged human rights violations and encroachments on freedom of the
press.
Grigory Yavlinsky, the Yabloko leader who attracted a large number of
Jewish voters in Russia's last
presidential elections, said there is a clear totalitarian tendency in
Russian society, which he said threatens the
constitution.
The congress, organized by former dissidents, including Yelena Bonner,
the widow of former political
prisoner Andrei Sakharov, was militantly anti-Kremlin, which was the reason
many Jewish organizations preferred
to stay away.
Alexander Axelrod, who works in the Moscow office of the
Anti-Defamation
League, said he did not take
part in the congress because he considers the anti-government stance of its
organizers unproductive.
But Leonid Stonov, a former Soviet refusenik who now works for the
Union
of Councils for Soviet Jews,
used the congress to draw attention to what he called a disturbingly high
level of xenophobia and anti-Semitism in
Russia during the last two years of the former President Boris Yeltsin's
term
and in the first year of Putin's.
According to a report by the UCSJ, ``Anti-Semitism, Xenophobia and
Religious Persecution in Russia's
Regions: 1999-2000,'' anti-Semitism remains a bellwether for Russia's civil
society and its view of democracy.
While the most violent incidents declined in 2000, Jews continue to
face
hatred in several regions, as local
officials have allied themselves with anti-Semitic elements within
Communist,
neo-Nazi, Russian Orthodox and
other groups.
These forces act with near complete impunity, sending the message that
neither the central nor local
governments will adequately protect Russian Jews, said the report.
