Racially-motivated violence reached unprecedented heights so far this year in Kyiv and throughout Ukraine, with more than 40 attacks and as many as six murders, according to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are tracking such incidents.
In the past three weeks alone, two African citizens died on Kyiv streets, one a confirmed murder, the other not. But those two deaths brought to the number of suspected hate killings to six so far this year in the city.
“Regarding the situation in Kyiv right now, and throughout Ukraine, it is not something to joke about,” said Dr. Johnson Aniki, a Nigerian community leader in Kyiv.
“Foreigners, including Africans, live in fear. People are afraid to walk on the streets, people are afraid to walk home after work. The situation is very serious today.”
The attacks are all the more alarming, considering the number of Africans living in Ukraine is estimated to be only 10,000. Also, in a nation dominated by ethnic Ukrainians and Russians, other groups might account for as little as 4 percent of the national population of 46 million people.
Three years ago, Africans and other ethnic minorities in Ukraine said they started to feel a rise in hostility towards them, mirroring events in Russia.
At that time, in 2006, watchdogs recorded 14 racially motivated attacks and two murders, and police minimized the problem, labeling the perpetrators of these acts mere “hooligans.”
Since then, the recorded number of violent attacks against ethnic minorities and foreigners in Ukraine has skyrocketed. In 2007, there were 68 confirmed attacks, including eight murders.
Watchdogs and African community leaders stress that these figures do not come close to the true extent of harassment. Official statistics don’t exist.
Prompted by the recent violence, Aniki was among the organizers of a press conference held June 11 to raise awareness of the growing problem with xenophobic and racist crimes, and to urge Ukraine’s current government to implement stronger measures against hate crimes.
Prominent members of Ukraine’s African community were joined by Anna German, Party of the Regions’ politician, and Walid Harfouch, a person of Lebanese heritage who is known in Ukraine’s entertainment industry. Also attending were a lawyer representing a hate crime victim in Dnepropetrovsk and a representative of the Ministry of the Interior.
“What is happening today in Ukraine could be received as completely unexpected, a turning point,” said Dr. John George Manuwuike, the chairman of the Ukrainian chapter of the Nigerians In Diaspora Organization Europe (NIDOE).
“We decided nevertheless to bring this question to the attention of the international community, so that today, the current Ukrainian administration takes strong measures to prevent the further development of this and extirpate racism in Ukraine as a social phenomena.”
Racist police
Members of Ukraine’s African community said that the police seem apathetic to their cause and are often racist themselves.
“Attacks against Africans have been going on since I came to Ukraine,” said Charles AsanteYeboa, a citizen of Ghana who has been living in Kyiv for more than eight years.
Yeboa, the president of Kyiv’s African Center, said the center now records no less than three “incidents” a day.
But before incidents were “sporadic, not regular,” and mostly perpetrated by police, he said, who would demand documents and accuse a person of not having them in order to get a bribe.
After the Orange Revolution, Yeboa said, there was a period of calm in attacks, but then the nature of the attacks changed. “It’s no longer by the police, this time it’s by socalled hooligans,” he said.
Recent fatal victims include Baie Olubaiode, in his 40s, a handicapped Nigerian citizen who worked at Shuliavka market, and Atunga Luwila, 47, an asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Olubaiode was found dead with 10 knife wounds to his neck and stomach on May 29 in Kyiv’s Solmianskyi district. Watchdogs said the suspects are two young men, but so far no one has been charged for the murder. Reports also indicate that there were witnesses but nobody helped him.
Luwila, who had been on his way to work, was found dead lying face down on Harmantnaya street, near the Bolshevik shopping complex on the morning of June 9. He was found by a coworker around 8:40 a.m. Witnesses reported seeing bruises to the victim’s face and apparent severe head trauma. Police behavior at the scene alarmed witnesses and provoked rumors that they were hiding something.
According to members of Ukraine’s African community who arrived at the crime scene, police prohibited anyone from taking photographs of the body and told them the cause of death was most likely an epileptic seizure, which caused the victim to fall and hit his head on a metal pole nearby. The investigation is ongoing.
Government inaction
Watchdogs are also frustrated by what they see as inaction by Ukraine’s government.
While they are doing “better” at fighting raciallymotivated violence and pursuing cases where they weren’t before, said Jeffrey Labovitz, chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the slowness to change was perhaps due to “naivete.” The threat was so new that government authorities didn’t know how to react, but nonetheless, he doesn’t understand the hesitancy to change.
“First, they said there was no racism, then they said they were hooligans, then they accepted that maybe there are some aspects of racism, but they were very isolated cases,” Yeboa said.
“Then, they say ‘OK, there are skinheads, about 500, who are committing these acts.’ Skinheads cannot be hooligans in the first place,” he added.
Hate crimes are on the rise across Ukraine’s major cities, affecting business leaders, athletes, students and immigrants alike.
Last year for the first time, even women reported being attacked, said Labovitz.
IOM is one of several NGOs who collected comprehensive records of all attacks that occurred within the last three years.
Their records show the wide range of harassment and violent behavior ethnic minorities have been subject to over the last three years.
On Jan. 31 of this year, for example, a Libyan citizen was kidnapped, beaten and robbed after hailing a taxi. He was driven to the city outskirts where a group of men beat him and stole his documents.
On Feb. 12, also this year, the black wife of an American diplomat reported being verbally harassed and threatened by a single Ukrainian male for several minutes at a local park, while walking with her young child at around 9 a.m.
The incident that most struck him, Labovitz said, was the death of 18yearold Joseph Bunto, a Congolese asylum seeker who was stabbed 18 times on Jan. 27 after running down to a local store to buy water.
The violence, experts say, is being perpetrated by a small, but organized skinhead subculture that has taken root in Ukraine’s major urban centers, particularly in cities with large foreign student populations, such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Uzhhorod, Odesa and Vinnitsya.
Africans are particularly targeted in racist attacks, but Arabs, Asians, and Jews are also targeted.
The worst problem appears to be in Kyiv, where police and human rights organizations have counted 500 skinheads and where there is the highest record of raciallymotivated attacks. Watchdogs and Ukraine’s government estimate that there is a total of between 1,500 and 2,000 skinheads across Ukraine.
“Previously, you could find a lot of Africans on Khreshatyk, near the central post office, now it’s a forbidden place for Africans. This is going on in different regions of Kyiv,” Aniki said.
Ukraine’s skinheads lack telltale signs of their ideology, such as the shavedheads and patent leather black boots. “Today there are none of these signs, this means that they are among us, maybe they live on our streets, at the same entrance, on the same floor as us, they could be our neighbors, or at our place of work. So we are the only ones who can protect ourselves,” said Aniki.
Videos found on the Internet by watchdogs show groups of young men in everyday clothing, sneaking up on unsuspecting victims, beating them up in front of the camera and burning their documents. Watchdogs said the videos, which have since been taken off the Internet, were found on Ukrainian and Russian extremist Web sites.
“We believe they are an organized body because of the meticulous way in which they perpetrate these atrocities,” said Yeboa. “It’s coordinated, or speciallyplanned, to either intimidate, attack, kill, or whatever, foreigners, especially Africans.”
On Jan. 10, Yeboa himself was attacked while walking by a group of about 15 men, aged 16 to about 30 years old, and armed with a knife, iron bars and bottles.
“They were saying ‘let’s cut his head.’ I had to hold the guy who had the knife, and the knife entered my ear here, it cut here, and entered here deep,” Yeboa said, gesturing to his eye and different parts of his face.
“It was in the last minute, when I was holding the person who had the knife … and all of a sudden, a private minivan came around. He came to stop there and as he stopped, the light fell on them (the attackers) and they all ran away.”
Yeboa said his attackers were caught and arrested, but as of today, they still haven’t been prosecuted.
Media fueling the fire
Ukraine’s media is also accused of feeding into the extremist groups’ cause by spreading onesided and negative reporting of the nation’s immigrants and foreigners.
Yeboa was disturbed by an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper about Joseph Bunto’s Jan.27 murder.
“Instead of going straight to the point, the media … wrote under that ‘he is a refugee and claims to be living on 40 or 50 dollars a month, trying to divert the whole incident, trying to create the impression that he was involved in some illegal activities and maybe he was killed because of that.” Yeboa said.
“Presidential administration was surrounded by Negroes,” was the title of another article that shocked watchdogs, about an antiracism rally in Kyiv last year. The article was published by UNIAN, Ukraine’s main information service.
On June 13, another popular Ukrainian newspaper, Zerkalo Tyzhden, wrote a sensationalist report titled “Kyiv: a paradise for illegals?”
“It appears that if a unified state body for migrant issues doesn’t start working soon in Ukraine, and doesn’t implement a law about migration services, government authorities will have to shift the center of permanent language discussion from the Slavic group, to Turkic, Semitic or other languages,” journalist Inna Vedernikova wrote.
The article goes on to provide statistics about the sharp rise in crimes committed by “foreigners,” later referring to the problem in terms of “foreigners” and “illegal migrants” without clearly distinguishing between the two.
It cites Kyiv’s city prosecutor, Yevgenyi Blazhivskiy, saying that “the amount of unaccounted (unregistered) immigrants has exceeded 1 million.”
However, according to IOM’s Labovitz, “any figures claiming to show the number of illegal immigrants in Ukraine are inaccurate, as there has been no research or way to track numbers.”
NGOs filling the gap
Prominent international NGOs have stepped in to fill what they call Ukraine’s “pronounced lack of statistics on hate crimes.”
“There are very few consistent or wellpublicized statistics collected by government agencies,” cited a report by an IOMsupported initiative. “Nor do the various government bureaus separately responsible for what might be classified at (sic) hate crimes — i.e. the Ministry of Interior, the State Security Service and the General Prosecutor – coordinate their activities in a meaningful way.”
Experts say there has been a lack of monitoring beyond Kyiv. That will be changing, as local and international NGOs step up efforts over the next year to combat xenophobia and racism through monitoring and awareness campaigns.
At the beginning of 2007, IOM teamed up with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and Amnesty International and other NGOs and organizations to create the Diversity Initiative, a comprehensive project that aims to foster awareness and communicate ideas on how to fight xenophobia and racism in Ukraine.
The initiative, with cooperation from over 30 organizations, is broken into three main subgroups, legal, government, and civic, each organized to fund projects aimed at spreading awareness and making progress in their respective spheres.
Kyivbased Center for Civil Liberties initiated the first countrywide monitoring program this May and hopes to publish their results by the end of the year.
Labovitz and other watchdogs say the fight against racism and xenophobia in Ukraine is missing an important component, which is an information campaign at schools and within broader society to educate Ukrainians on diversity and other cultures.
Despite 16 years of independence, Ukraine remains a highly insulated, homogenous society, and its citizens lack exposure to other cultures and ways of life, particularly to different ethnicities.
Tarnishing Ukraine’s image
The rise in hate crimes and the Ukrainian government’s slowness to punish the perpetrators of the violence, threatens to tarnish Ukraine’s international reputation at a critical time.
Ukraine’s politicians are striving to bring the country down a path towards European Unionintegration and NATO accession, as well as attract investment before the UEFA2012 football championships.
“Regarding what Ukraine’s government aims to achieve today, I would say the president’s party, in the area of democratization of society compared to other postSoviet countries is quite laudable,” NIDOE’s Manuwuike said. “But at the same time, what we’re discussing today is a big negative on the reputation that Ukraine is building in front of the world, at home.”
A study published this past January by the Kennan Institute, a U.S.based thinktank associated with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, found that Kyiv has become a leading destination for transnational migrants from Asian, African and some Middle Eastern countries.
Most of Ukraine’s migrants come from China, Vietnam, Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, as well as African countries, particularly Nigeria, Angola, Somalia and the DRC, as well as Indonesia and Iran.
Asian and African migrants typically participate in retail trade and services.
“By overcoming deeprooted prejudices against migrants,” Ukraine “will be able to find the human resources required to grow and prosper in a global marketplace,” the report stressed.
Despite setbacks, watchdogs see signs of improvement. The government recently started using its problematic hate crimes law, Article 161, to prosecute in some cases. The law, which has existed since Soviet times, has been used only four times in history, three of which occurred just this past April and May for hate crimes that have taken place over the last three years.
They are the first cases of hate crimes convictions in Ukraine for direct violence against individuals.
It is uncertain what the punishments in each case will be, but watchdogs see it as a definite step in the right direction.
