Gay Pride Events in Moscow Erupts in Violence: Moscow Militia Fails to Ensure - ILGA Europe

Gay Pride Events in Moscow Erupts in Violence: Moscow Militia Fails to Ensure
28/05/2006
Detailed account of the events by ILGA-Europe

28.05.06
Maxim Anmeghichean

On 27 May 2006 at the press-conference by the Moscow Pride organisers and
guests, it was announced that there will be no parade, but instead two separate
actions will take place. Nicolas Alexeyev called for the members of the Moscow
LGBT community and guests individually to come to the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier, a monument against fascism right next to the Kremlin walls in the
Alexander Garden, to lay flowers at 14:30. Then later at 15:00 the community
and guests were invited to gather around the monument to an ancient Russian
ruler Iuriy Dolgorukii right across from the Moscow City Hall on Tverskaya
Street, a five minutes walk from the Tomb.


Tells one of the guests of honour of Moscow pride, the nephew of Oscar Wilde Mr.
Merlin Holland: “We were in the car of a German TV station, driving around the
place where we were supposed to lay flowers: I, Nicolas Alexeyev, Peter
Thatchell and a couple of other people. At 14:25 we got out of the car and
started to walk with flowers towards the garden. The three of us, Nicolas,
myself and Ed Murzin [LGBT-friendly parliamentarian from Bashkortostan, an
autonomous republic in Russia] were walking towards the gates, which were
closed. There were journalists with cameras who started to come around. They
were 4-5 meters away from the gates [to the Alexander Garden], and suddenly
everything became closed in, it became very squashed, and then Orthodox
chanting started. We were sort of protected by the cameras, and beyond
journalists neo-nazis were standing. Everyone was coming closer and closer, the
circle became very small. The police came into the circle from the outside,
pushed through to join the people at the gates, and then started to push
everybody back. Then we were all pushed back, and I was still with Nicolas. At
that point the OMON [special police forces] managed to separate off Nicolas
from Ed Murzin and myself. Nicolas was dragged into the van by OMON. I was
totally oblivious of the hatred at that stage, all the hate chanting. The sheer
hate of these people was horrifying. And then I went out into the square and
found Peter Thatchell, who said: “One thing we have to do is keep together,
don’t wonder off to see what happens, let’s stay together. If we stick
together, on the bad side they will recognize you as a group. But on the good
side they will be less able to take one person and beat up. So we stuck
together, and the police separated off all the neo-fascist groups. Then there
was a pause of about 10 minutes, the neo-fascists re-assembled and looked as if
they were going to cause more trouble. People started to head towards Tverskaya
Str., and somebody (a woman) recognized me and threw an egg at me. And then at
the beginning of Tverskaya str. cross with Okhotny ryad neo-nazis fired flares
in the air, there was smoke after that. That created a diversion, and so we were
able to move on. At that point Robert [Wintemute, human rights professor at the
King’s College of London] and I realized that people were going up Tverskaya
str. It was a Saturday afternoon, and there were so many violent people on the
main street of Moscow! And then Sophie [In’t Veld, MEP] and Laetitia [Sophie’s
assistant] joined us. I felt something personally as a non-gay person, how gays
feel. I am leaving the country tomorrow, but people are staying. What is their
life going to be like? The tragedy is that you can’t fight this with reason.
You are dealing with people whose only means of communication is violence.”


In total there were around 30-40 pride event participants at the gates to the
Alexander Garden, mostly foreigners, and anywhere between 200-300 extremist
opponents, and according to the local news reports, over 1,000 OMON to ensure
public order. Pride participants, Russian Orthodox extremists and nationalists
were dragged by OMON into special buses and taken to the police station. No
difference was made by the police between pride participants and opponents in
the way people were treated. The extremists were chanting Orthodox songs,
sprinkling ‘holy’ water, throwing eggs and potatoes at pride participants. They
were shouting “Moscow is not Sodom”, “No Faggots in Russia”, “Clean Moscow for
Russians”, etc. A number of people were detained right away, including Nicolai
Alexeev. The advisor to the mayor of Paris Philippe Lasnier was also dragged to
the bus.


Around 14:50 people started to move towards Tverskaya Street a mixture of pride
participants and neo-nazis started to move towards the monument to Iuriy
Dolgorukii. Very few LGBT people made it. German parliamentarian Volker Beck
was attacked, his face bleeding, and then dragged together with his French
partner by OMON to a special bus. There were at least 50 journalists with
cameras waiting at the monument, but there was no one there to address them on
behalf of the community. Then out of nowhere appeared Russian parliamentarian
Nicolai Kurianovich from the Liberal Democrats Party of Russia, who addressed
the journalists by saying that the parade is a provocation from the West, that
there is no place to sodomites in Russia and it is the start of a campaign for
a ‘clean’ Russia. When journalists asked whom else he plans to clean Russia
from, he could not come up with an answer. The parliamentarian and some of his
supporters started to chant “No sodomites in Russia”, and then Evgenya
Debryanskaya, one of the pride organizers and the first lesbian activists in
the USSR back in the end of the 80’s, appeared and journalists turned towards
her. She spoke only for a couple of minutes, and then someone from the crowd
sprinkled soda at her, and she was roughly dragged by OMON into a bus, at some
point on the way finding herself on the pavement with her face down. Mr.
Kurianovich, and an Orthodox priest with crosses and icons in his hands, who
made his appearance a bit later, continued to give interviews to the
journalists and gather crowds around them. Things continued to be even more
chaotic, and the police started to push people away from the monument. More
people were dragged into the OMON buses, mostly neo-nazis. Two Russian
journalists, from Russian TV channel RTVI and the Russian edition of Newsweek
were beaten and taken to the militia stations. The parade participants were
pushed away from the square next to the monument and the street towards the
crowds of skinheads. The latter were approaching LGBT people and supporters,
shouting right in their face “Faggots, go away from Russia”, and the police
standing right there was just watching and only interfering after the acts of
violence occurred, not to prevent them.


After the picket was dispersed, hundreds of skinheads and Russian Orthodox
extremists were running around the Tverskaya Str. in groups of 10-15 tracing
down and beating up anyone who looked “LGBT” or was a foreigner. Local reports
say that around that time two black men were severely beaten on Tverskaya Str.
despite not having anything to do with the pride. ILGA-Europe board members
Pierre Serne (France) and Kurt Krickler (Austria) were already after the public
events traced down by groups of skinheads and beaten. Pierre was not
hospitalised, but has haematomas almost everywhere, his face is bruised and one
of his legs badly hurt. Kurt has a haematomas on his eye.


All pride participants detained were released the same day from the militia
station. No reports of ill-treatment at the militia stations were received.
Russian TV channels and some news agencies covered the events in a rather
negative way, ridiculing the parade.


The events clearly illustrate that the problem is the opponents. There are a
small number of peaceful demonstrators, attacked by hundreds of aggressive
opponents. The official position of the city of Moscow is that peaceful LGBT
demonstrations are not allowed, because they say the don’t have enough militia
to provide security (they said there are only 400 militia officers in Moscow in
the court on Thursday), secondly they did provide security for an anti-fascist
march in December 2005, and the Moscow pride was to take exactly the same
route, but that march was supported by the majority population. These according
to Robert Wintemute are the two reasons given in the court by the city of
Moscow, which are not valid justifications before the European CHR. Art. 11
specifically protects unpopular demonstrations and political opinions. If the
fact that it is unpopular means that it attracts violent opponents, it is the
duty of the state to provide protection. The problems we saw today were a
result of the lack of preparations. If the city of Moscow had agreed to the
demonstration, then it could’ve been properly protected. But because they
refused, the Moscow pride participants insisted on their “article 11” right,
the police was prepared to deal with the opponents, but not at any one
location, because there was no one designated location. But because there were
two unofficial events separated and people moving between the two places, the
police were dealing with specific incidents they came across, but any LGBT
participant not close to the police had no protection. Walking up Tverskaya
Str., and the gang of extremists kicked Merlin Holland, and there was no police
around. Whatever route was approved could’ve been more easily protected, so the
police could check the safety when the parade is starting and after it ends.
Otherwise the territory to be protected was too wide to be protected. The
police was not making a difference between pride participants and extremists,
all of them were pushed off the main places of events as one crowd. The police
could not make the difference partly because there were no distinctions on LGBT
participants.


Sophie In’t Veld, member of the European Parliament form the Netherlands (D66),
who came to Moscow to support the pride and was part of the street events,
said: “I will make all in my power to make sure that the European Union and the
Council of Europe put pressure on the Russian government for what has happened.
It is unacceptable that only on Thursday EU leaders have met with Mr. Putin for
the EU-Russia summit, and none of them have raised the issue of the banned
parade. The right for a peaceful manifestation is a basic human right. It is
not some sort of a Western value. Everyone in the world wants to leave in
peace, security, speak out for who they are and march down the streets
peacefully”.

モスクワでのゲイプライドの集まりが暴力で制圧される (上記記事の日本語訳 by 細見由紀子)

モスクワ・プライド：モスクワでロシア初のゲイパレード中に１２０人拘束