Africans, Jews Suffer In Month of Attacks

By Ali Nassor

Special to The St. Petersburg Times

Published: October 21, 2005 (Issue # 1115)

A wave of hate crimes has rocked St Petersburg in the last forty days, with a series of racial assaults on individuals and businesses, and vandalism of a cemetery, in what human rights advocates are describing as an alarming trend.

“I’d call it the month of terror, were it not for fears that I’d be publicizing the extremist values these people are proud of,” said Aliou Tunkara, head of the St Petersburg African Union, referring to a month that saw two Africans killed, a number of foreigners put into intensive care, the destruction of over 100 gravestones in the city’s Jewish cemetery and repeated attacks on a Jewish restaurant.

Joseph Kuate, 27, an asylum seeker from Cameroon was attacked last Monday at a bus stop near the Chernaya Rechka metro station by a group he described as “guys in black and army boots, some in caps and others with shaven heads, armed with chains and sticks.”

“Seeing that I was bleeding and that there were people running after me, a cab stopped and took me to Nevsky Prospekt,” said Kuate, speaking at the Mariinsky Hospital where he was recovering from his injuries.

The driver dropped Kuate off at the 28th police station on Ulitsa Marata, though he said the duty officer was not keen to let him in. “He slammed the door shut in my face, and then it took at least half hour of repeated shouting and knocking on the door by three girls and two boys who were hanging around the courtyard before the officers let me in, wrote the report and called an ambulance,” Kuate said.

The attack on Kuate came just a few weeks after the murder of a Congolese student, Roland Epasak. Epasak was attacked on Sept 10., and died from his injuries three days later in hospital.

Shortly after Epasak’s murder, the banned extremist organization Freedom Party claimed responsibility for the attack. The organization issued a press release saying that it had deployed “white patrols” in the city center “to cleanse the city of unwanted elements where the police has failed.”

On Sept. 19, a Jordanian student at the Mechnikov Medical Academy, Jaudat Ashamail, was assaulted and taken into intensive care at the same hospital where Epasak died.

On Sept. 28, Leandre Sawadogo from Burkina Faso died at home following an assault in the street committed in May. Sawadago had undergone three brain surgery operations to treat the results of the attack, and spent much of the intervening four months in a coma.

The spate of attacks, however, has not been restricted to the city’s dark-skinned community.

Members of the local Jewish community have expressed concerns over repeated acts of vandalism at the city’s Jewish cemetery and a series of attacks on a local Jewish restaurant, Shalom, over the past month.

Yury Vdovin, head of the local branch of human rights organization Citizens’ Watch, is pessimistic about the apparent trend in St. Petersburg and the city’s role as a beacon for extremists across the country.

“When [the extremists] beat the drum in St Petersburg, Moscow and the provinces start trying to catch up,” he said, commenting on the recent attack in Voronezh, which resulted in the murder of a Peruvian student.