Originally Posted by
TheRifleman
I get along with everyone, just don't push my buttons, as I'm the last person you want to mess with.
And who are you kidding??? you people are extremely racist and nationalistic.
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'Why are you here, Mr. ******?'
Back in the USSR, racial tolerance was a top priority, but in today's Russia,writes MARK MACKINNON, people of colour live in perpetual fear. Xenophobia is on the rise, and violent skinheads don't deserve all the blame By MARK MACKINNON
Globe and Mail, Saturday, January 31, 2004 - Page F3
Even sitting in the campus cafeteria, just steps from his dorm room, Tolessa is afraid.
A 21-year-old Ethiopian whose dark skin and black hair single him out both against the white background of a snowy Moscow winter and among his fair-skinned Russian classmates, he is afraid at first to speak about the racism he has faced, worried about the retribution it may bring. Finally, he agrees to talk, but chooses to sit at a table partly hidden by plastic trees and asks that his last name not appear in print.
"We are afraid even to mention it," the thin physical mathematics student says, dropping his voice as a blond waitress delivers coffee. "This group, the skinheads, they are not small in number. In fact, I sometimes feel as though they are half the population of Moscow. People tell us to leave this country, that Russia is only for the Russians."
Tolessa, who studies at Moscow's famous People's Friendship University, goes on to describe a life dominated by fear. When a Nigerian man was beaten to death by neo-Nazis near the campus recently, every African in the city felt a shiver down the back, he says, knowing it could have been them.
"We stay on the campus and, if we want to go anywhere, we have to organize a group. Maybe in a group they won't attack us," Tolessa says as a friend nods in agreement. "We can't go out after 6 p.m., especially on the metro. When people look at us, they just see our colour -- they call us 'chorniyy' [black]."
It's a long way from the days when the Soviet Union bragged of seamlessly blending its Slavic, Caucasian and Central Asian populations, claiming to have created a non-racial "homo sovieticus," while condemning the United States and other Western countries for their inequalities and racial violence.