10 April 2004 20:46
"Voice of Islam" - Russia`s central press fosters xenophobia
Russia's central press are guilty of inculcating xenophobia and in particular Islamophobia in readers, according
to a report originally carried on the regional news web site http://www.regions.ru/ and broadcast on Radio Russia's
"Voice of Islam" on 9 April. An EU-backed conference on xenophobia and racial discrimination was held in
Moscow at the end of March. A survey of hate speech in the Russian presidential election campaign indicated that
politicians were aware that Muslims made up a substantial proportion of voters, so they tried to avoid the topic of
Islam. And a survey of newspapers published in Moscow has shown that crosswords frequently demonstrate "a
pathological Islamophobia and contempt for Caucasians and Asians in general". The following is the text of the
report; Subheads inserted editorially:
The regional news web site http://www.regions.ru/ has published an analytic article "Tolerance inculcated in
Russian media". On 28-30 March, Moscow's Moskovskiy Training Centre hosted an all-Russian conference backed by
the European Union called Ways to Overcome Xenophobia, Racial Discrimination and anti-Semitism in the Multiethnic
Russian Federation. A three-year project is being carried out by the Moscow Human Rights Bureau together with the Moscow
Helsinki Group and the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews. Well-known politicians, political scientists, experts,
representatives of diplomatic missions, human rights champions, public figures and journalists attended the
conference.
The following spoke at the conference: US Ambassador in Russia Alexander Vershbow, the president of the Union of
Councils for Soviet Jews, Abramovits; the Union's international director, Leonid Stonov; the president of the
Assembly of Peoples of Russia, Ramazan Abdulatipov; the chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group Lyudmila Alekseyeva; the
director of the Centre for Interethnic Cooperation Ashot Ayropetyan [phonetic]; the secretary of the Russian Union of
Journalists, chairman of the Committee for the Protection of Free Speech and Journalists' Rights Pavel Butiontov,
and others.
The participants adopted a resolution on the problems of xenophobia and violence due to racial and religious
intolerance in Russia.
Election campaign survey
In addition, in Moscow on 1 April the Centre for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, in conjunction with
the Sova centre for information analysis and the Moscow Helsinki Group, presented the results of a survey on hate speech
in the election campaign and outside it. The author of the hate speech research, Galina Kozhevnikova, pointed out to a
general reduction of improper statements against Muslims. Politicians took account of the fact that a significant
proportion of the electorate is of the Islamic faith, and tried not to touch on this topic, Kozhevnikova pointed out.
The situation varies depending on the local authorities.
What is clear is that the concrete image of the enemy depending on ethnic affiliation has been eroded, and there has
been a three-fold increase in general xenophobia and statements about non-Russians in general. In this connection with
this, there is particular mention of the LDPR election slogan - We are for the Poor, we are for the Russians - which
pits potential voters against persons of any other nationality.
Amongst the party newspapers examined in the election campaign, the following stand out: Vechernyaya Ryazan, which
belongs to the former mayor of Ryazan, Ryumin; Sovetskaya Rossiya, which backs the CPRF; and Vpered Rossiya, the
newspaper of Boris Fedorov's party of the same name.
Incidentally, during the election campaign Catholics, sects and Protestants came in for it even from One Russia. It
was One Russia's Dmitriy Sablin who ordered a poll in which he asked potential voters whether they were worried by
the dominance of Caucasus immigrants. And Konstantin Zatulin, commenting on the idea of courts moving to the Far East,
declared: One can imagine that judges of the Arbitration Court will use their dossiers to beat off the Chinese sneaking
through the border.
Summing up the results of the survey, Centre for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights head Yuriy Dzhibladze
declared that the perceived tendency of hate speech to incite hatred towards other people and foreigners points to the
need to promote the idea of tolerance through PR methods.
Xenophobia in crosswords
Leading members of the Union of Journalists' Association for Ethnic Problems monitored the major newspapers
published in Moscow for the period of a year, and on the basis of the results of the research accused almost all the
central media - except for Novaya Gazeta - of provoking xenophobic sentiments and creating a negative and false image of
people from other ethnic groups and religious confessions, particularly Islam and Muslims and Caucasians.
The secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, Pavel Gutiontov, related that what the association's experts
aimed to do was to examine those publications which incite interethnic and religious hatred. He said that there were no
newspapers in Moscow free of articles of a xenophobic, racist and even fascist tendency.
The secretary then gave the floor to the president of the Association of Ethnic Problems, Suliyeta Kusova, who is a
Cherkess by nationality. The results of almost two years of work led to experts to depressing conclusions: it is
precisely the solid, well-known, respectable Moscow media which are flooded with the interethnic hatred, racism and
chauvinism which are verbally condemned, Kusova said. The experts concluded that a very fine system had developed in the
media for inflicting pin-point blows to create a negative image of persons of Caucasian nationality and persons of the
Islamic faith.
Kusova started by looking at the crosswords in the newspapers, because these are an indication of the popularity of
the publication. That is, in Kusova's opinion, the popularity of a newspaper depends directly on whether or not it
has a crossword. And in the crossword clues she discovered a pathological Islamophobia and contempt for Caucasians and
Asians in general. Kusova cited an example. Clue: Religion often smelling of Bin-Ladin. Answer: Islam. Clue: A Caucasian
terrorist. Answer: Abrek [bandit of honour, outlaw] But in the Caucasus an abrek is also a hero, bogatyr [folk hero],
Ilya Muromets [legendary hero], Stenka Razin [Cossack leader], Kusova exclaimed angrily. To be precise, an abrek is a
man of the mountains who fought against the Tsarist forces and the administration in the period before the Caucasus was
joined to Russia. And so in Russia abreks were equated with bandits, but if you compared them with Stenka Razin here,
you see the point. For Izvestiya, too, abrek crops up as the answer to the crossword clue - petty bandit from an aul
[Caucasian mountain village]. Another crossword managed to insult everybody from the Asian part of the world. Who is a
crude, uncultured and harsh man, was the clue. An Asian!
Such little things, Kusova explained bitterly, give rise to a disgraceful attitude towards Muslims and Caucasians in
everyday life. She recounted cases from her own life. A doctor in a clinic, a nice, intelligent woman, writes out a
prescription and asks sympathetically: Do you understand Russian, she says, shall I translate it for you? Kusova
lamented that this whole experience of a negative attitude sweeps over us. Xenophobia manifests itself in everyday life
in molecular form, and the generally respected central newspapers take part in whipping up this Caucasusophobia,
Islamophobia. Articles of this sort appear in Izvestiya every day.
Media culprits
It took the journalists a long time to get the experts to name all the publications they had monitored and reviewed.
They really had to drag the information out of them. We never did get any specific figures. Right at the end of the
conference Kusova gave in and named 11 central newspapers and periodicals, though she did not say whether this was the
whole list or part of it. And the information was extremely diffuse and more like a selection of comments from a
complaints book. For example, the liberal Moskovskiye Novosti went so far as to publish articles by Vasiliy Aksenov and
Igor Guberman. The first speaks badly of Islam and Muslims, the second, Kusova said, calls for mosques to be destroyed.
In Argumenty i Fakty, satirist Mikhail Zadornov explains that the Caucasus is as aggressive as it is because it has
eaten too much meat - I quote Kusova.
Izvestiya takes particular pains, of course: there are comments by the well-known intellectual Maksim Sokolov about
happiness without non-Russians, and anti-Islamic passages by publicist Aleksandr Arkhangelskiy, and a provocative
article by Oleg Osetinskiy entitled If I were Bin-Ladin. And there is an article by theologian Andrey (?Kurayev) about
the mountain people and nomads living off raiding. Kusova cited in this context the well-known article by Yuliya
Kalinina in Moskovskiy Komsomolets on the need to expel non-Russians.
Izvestiya correspondent Yelena Timofeyeva, who attended the meeting, of course tried to defend her newspaper and
demanded precise criteria for the assessments used by the researchers. Kusova, however, repeated: Izvestiya is
contributing a lot towards creating a negative image of Islam and the Muslims.
There is a classification of the material, Kusova said. It is divided into three groups. First, openly and
consciously chauvinistic articles. Thus the aforementioned article by Kalinina was compared to articles published in the
openly fascist media.
Second, there are articles testifying to a shallow knowledge of the subject. We know that most journalists have not
read the Koran, and the cultural history of the world's people is clearly not their strong point. Yet they embark
on writing about delicate subjects. Such is the article, again in Izvestiya, Goodbye Ichkeria, where the abrek Zelimkhan
Kharachoy was described as a bandit specializing in killing Tsarist Russian officials in the 19th century. Kusova's
version is that Zelimkhan was a national hero of the Chechen people who headed the national liberation movement against
the colonial yoke.
The third group of articles sullying the honour and dignity of Caucasians and Muslims consists of items giving an
ethnographic picture or study and seeking to trivialize what they describe, in other words, to give pictures of
foreigners' lives written from journalists' customary vicious bent for the exotic. They create a stupid,
marginal image of peoples who have a long and unique culture. This is a vulgarization. Kusova believes that such a
pop-culture approach to the religious specifics and traditions of the peoples of Russia is almost the most harmful,
because the desire to learn about them leads in the wrong direction and blocks understanding of what is happening.
[Radio Russia] |
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