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Experts Puzzled by UNESCO Tolerance Prize for City

By Galina Stolyarova

Staff Writer

The city’s human rights community had a mixed reaction to the news that St. Petersburg has been awarded the UNESCO Tolerance Prize for what the United Nation’s cultural wing regards as a major achievement in promoting tolerance.

“The UNESCO decision came as an even bigger surprise than the news about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize,” said Alexander Vinnikov, St. Petersburg coordinator of the Russia Without Racism movement. “Neither winners have done anything to deserve the prize, which means the awards were given for political reasons, unfortunately.”

Koichiro Matsuura, the Director-General of UNESCO, said the St. Petersburg government program on tolerance had been honored for its “constructive efforts to inculcate mutual respect and tolerance in a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society and to prevent and eradicate all forms of discrimination.”

St. Petersburg was officially nominated for the prize by Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. The most visible evidence of the government program has been the distribution on the St. Petersburg metro of flyers with quotations on the theme of tolerance from Russia’s greatest writers and cultural luminaries.

UNESCO’s decision has left people across the political spectrum perplexed. Liberals and nationalists alike spoke about the award with surprise bordering on astonishment.

“I have not noticed any breakthrough in terms of tolerance,” Vinnikov said. “On the contrary, the level of xenophobia in the city remains exceptionally high, which is most alarming.”

Human rights advocates say that many people in government agencies across Russia are xenophobic in various ways and manifest their xenophobia in the course of their official duties. For example, the Police University in St. Petersburg approved and adopted an explicitly anti-semitic textbook of contemporary Russian history. The textbook was banned from classrooms after a high-profile scandal necessitating intervention by President Dmitry Medvedev.

In March this year, the 15-day Xenophobii.NET (No to Xenophobia) campaign ended in arrests when viewers leaving a screening at Rodina film theater in the center of St. Petersburg were dispersed by the police. A group of film-goers, mostly anarchists and members of the antifascist movement, were heading to a metro station after watching the film when the police attacked the group, detained around 20 of them and drove them to a police station, while the rest managed to escape.

In an interview with the BaltInfo news agency, Andrei Kuznetsov, a public relations coordinator for the St. Petersburg branch of the ultra right wing Movement Against Illegal Migration (DPNI), said UNESCO’s experts had made a superficial judgment.

“What they may have seen in the city center is nothing more than nice packaging; to see the ugly truth that hides inside you need to travel to the outskirts of the city,” Kuznetsov said. “Go to Rybatskoye, Obukhovo or Komendantsky Prospekt, and you feel the difference immediately: there are very few police, there is cheap housing and a tough attitude toward everything that is alien. Unless the government adopts a decent migration policy, nothing is going to change, however much effort is made and however many prizes are awarded for that effort.”

The UNESCO Tolerance Prize was established in 1995 and is awarded biannually to individuals and organizations for their contribution to the promotion of tolerance.

The prestigious prize will be awarded in Paris on Nov. 16, 2009, when International Tolerance Day is celebrated.

Russia suffers from excessively high levels of xenophobia, said Yury Chaika, Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation in a meeting with journalists earlier this year. “In Russia we do have problems with extremism, international relations and xenophobia. We see it and acknowledge it,” he said.

According to statistics collected by the Moscow Bureau of Human Rights, in 2008, 122 people were victims of xenophobia.

According to a 2009 report compiled by the Moscow-based SOVA center, the development of xenophobia in Russia is fueled by the rhetoric of large numbers of law enforcement officials and the mass media, and also by the activities of pro-governmental youth movements.

“The war in Georgia definitely contributed to ethnic xenophobia, even though we should emphasize that the authorities had made every effort to prevent the military confrontation from growing into a widescale campaign against ethnic Georgians,” reads the SOVA center report.

“The new trend has been particularly obvious since the autumn of 2008, as Russia becomes increasingly affected by the global economic crisis. Anti-immigration propaganda has increased dramatically, and false reports are being spread of allegedly soaring rates of crimes committed by immigrants,” the report continues.

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