[For Dion] Family identifies son in Russian beheading video

Dion, December 12, 2007: “As I stated on the Bombshell forum Andy, you are a liar, a hypocrite and no better than the trash that you fight against.”

In August last year, media reported that a video titled “Execution of a Tajik and a Dagestani” had become available for viewing online. The three-minute video showed the murder of two young men, conducted, apparently, by a Russian neo-Nazi group. Subsequently, in October 2007, a person allegedly responsible for uploading the video to one fascist site, Viktor Milkov, was arrested and charged with being naughty. Convicted, he received a slap on the wrist. Milkov wasn’t the only person to have published the video, and it was circulated (including on Stormfront Down Under) and remains in circulation on numerous Russian and international neo-Nazi websites. Beyond this, the political impact of the footage — aside from a few embarrassed *coughs* by Russian authorities — has been fairly limited, existing, as it does, in a sea of similarly grotesque violence. If anything, it’s merely re-confirmed the ability of the far right in Russia to get away with murder, to film it, and to circulate it among a largely appreciative audience internationally.

By way of context, for several years Russian neo-Nazis have been butchering their enemies — principally dark-skinned Russians, those from neighbouring territories, and anarchists/antifa — with relative impunity; a trend which is increasing. Further, given generalised xenophobia on the part of the Russian population as a whole, they’ve done so with relatively little opposition. Crucially, however, their violent repression has taken place with the implicit support of the Russian state. Thus, as is becoming increasingly widely acknowledged, even by the Western media, perpetrators of fascist violence usually escape capture, and when prosecuted, receive relatively light sentences, their crimes often described as mere ‘hooliganism’. The apparent decision by one group of neo-Nazis to video their murderous crime and to broadcast it online represents a relatively (although not entirely; other assaults resulting in death have been broadcast previously) new development. The sentencing of the murderers of Timur Kacharava, on the other hand, does not.

Above : Damien Ovchynik of Bail Up!, performing at the 2006 Ian Stuart Donaldson gig at The Birmingham Hotel, Cnr. Johnston & Smith Streets, Fitzroy; Bail Up! will also be performing at this year’s mid Winter Fest in Adelaide

Family identifies son in Russian beheading video
Michael Schwirtz
International Herald Tribune
June 9, 2008

MOSCOW: Shamil Odamanov used to call his parents almost daily from Moscow, where he worked as a laborer after moving from his village in Russia’s North Caucasus region in search of a better job. Then, a little more than a year ago, the phone calls stopped.

Now, to the family’s horror, they think they know why. They have identified Odamanov, 24, as the man beheaded in a video of a double execution apparently carried out by members of a Russian neo-Nazi group last year.

“It’s not only that he’s similar – it is him, period,” Umakhan Odamanov, Shamil Odamanov’s father, said by telephone from his home in Dagestan, a Russian republic in the North Caucasus. Investigators have said that Odamanov is likely one of the two victims in the video, dark-skinned men who appear kneeling below a Nazi flag before they are killed.

Though initially considered a fake, the video, which originally appeared on Russian ultranationalist Web sites in August, spread quickly on the Internet and was shown in edited versions on national television. It shoved the problem of race-related violence into the foreground of national discourse, if only for a short time.

The police are investigating several individuals, some from nationalist groups, in connection with the killings, but no suspects have officially been identified, Vladimir Markin, the spokesman for the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office, said in an interview.

In February, a court found Viktor Milkov, a student from Adygei, in southern Russia, guilty of helping circulate the video and sentenced him to a year in prison. He claims that an unknown person e-mailed him the video.

The police have not yet found the victims’ bodies, Markin said, nor have they identified where exactly the murders took place.

Attacks against nonwhites in Russia have steadily increased over the last several years, as more and more immigrants from abroad or from Russia’s poorer ethnic enclaves move into large urban centers in search of work.

Odamanov was among them. He left his home village, Sultanyangiyurt in Dagestan, about two years ago and moved to Moscow to look for a job “and possibly a bride,” his father said.

In his regular calls home, he frequently complained about run-ins with boneheads, who stalk their dark-skinned victims in the low-income residential areas around Moscow.

In late March 2007, Odamanov called “to wish me a happy birthday,” his father said. “That was the last time I heard from him.” The next time he saw his son was in the video. He was tied up, kneeling next to another man and wearing the black Adidas jacket and shirt given to him by his brother, Artur, Umakhan Odamanov said.

Set against a soundtrack of heavy metal music, the video opens with the title “Operation of the National-Socialist Party of Russia to Arrest and Execute Two Colonists From Dagestan and Tajikistan.” There are shots of the countryside that investigators believe is somewhere in the Kaluzhskaya region, about 75 kilometers, or 120 miles, southwest of Moscow.

“We were arrested by National-Socialists,” the two bound men mumble through their gags.

In the next scene, one of the captors, wearing camouflage and heavy black gloves, yells, “Glory to Russia!” then plunges what looks like a large knife into the neck of the man thought to be Odamanov. He is decapitated in seconds [sic].

Then the second man, whom the police have not identified, is shot in the head and crumples face-first into a shallow grave. In the final scene, two men in camouflage, wearing black masks, give Nazi salutes.

There were about 600 reported racist attacks and about 80 murders recorded in Russia in 2007, according to the Sova Center, an organization that monitors hate crimes in Russia. The number of attacks this year reached 232 as of June 1, 57 of which were murders.

Human rights groups have often accused officials of ignoring the problem of racist violence in Russia, although in Moscow, at least, a recent spike in murders of dark-skinned people has prompted a noticeable response among law enforcement agencies.

“Moscow prosecutors have definitely started to more actively engage this problem beginning from last year,” said Aleksandr Verkhovsky, director of the Sova Center.

The Interior Ministry announced last week that this year the police had arrested more than 50 people thought to be involved in xenophobic attacks in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the two cities with the highest levels of racist violence.

Still, the number of attacks nationwide continues to grow steadily by about 15 to 20 percent each year, as it has for about the past five years, Verkhovsky said. Moreover, he said, the percentage of murders is growing as teenagers involved in violent nationalist groups grow into adults.

“They simply take their affairs more seriously,” he said.

See also : SOVA Center for Information and Analysis // UCSJ: Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union // Сообщество антифашистов. Antifa.ru (Антифа.ру)