‘Unusual sentence in racial attack’
Maria Cramer
Boston Globe
August 26, 2006
The scion of a prominent North Shore family avoided jail time yesterday for beating two black teenagers with a metal baton in 2002, but a judge imposed unusual consciousness-raising conditions on the young man for what prosecutors had called a racially motivated assault…
After beating the teenagers, Spaulding pissed off to Europe (Amsterdam) a la Ross Hack, but then — unlike Hack(?) — returned in 2003. His sentence?
Josiah Spaulding III… must remove his tattoos with racist symbols, visit the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and do 200 hours of community service at the Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in the city, or at a veterans’ shelter. He also faces five years of probation.
Meanwhile, in Moscow:
‘Russian Racist Jailed For 16 Years For Killing of Peruvian’
Agence France Presse
August 25, 2006A Russian white supremacist gang leader was sentenced Friday to 16 years’ prison over the brutal murder of a Peruvian student last year in what analysts said was a sign of determination to halt a wave of hate crimes in the country.
The court said that Igor Pavlyuk led a gang of youths in the attack last October on the Peruvian student in Voronezh, a city popular with foreign students southeast of Moscow.
Eleven other members of the gang received sentences of up to five years, some of them suspended, the court in Voronezh told AFP in a telephone interview. One more suspect was acquitted.
Earlier Friday, the court ruled that the slaying of Enrique Angeles Hurtado, 18, had been motivated by racial hatred, underlining what officials say is a growing problem of racist and neo-Nazi skinhead attacks on foreigners in the country.
Three other people — a Peruvian, a Russian and a Spaniard — were hospitalised for their injuries in the October 9 attack by a gang of local youths.
The gang savagely beat the four victims and Hurtado was stabbed eight times before he died from loss of blood.
The trial of 13 suspects was being watched closely as a test of the legal authorities’ willingness to hand down stern punishments for violent attacks by Russian citizens on foreigners, crimes that have often been dismissed as acts of “hooliganism”.
The most high-profile victims have been dark-skinned foreign students, often from Africa, including a Senegalese man shot dead in Saint Petersburg by a neo-Nazi in April. However, many others are immigrants from ex-Soviet Central Asia or the Caucasus, often working as builders or traders.
Alexander Verkhovsky, at the Sova analytical centre in Moscow, which monitors xenophobia across the country, welcomed Friday’s sentencing as “just.”
“It was important that the motives of the crime were declared. If this was done all the time, at every trial, people would begin to feel the effect. In principal, there is a momentum building to that.”
Mohammad Khammal, head of the Voronezh Foreign Students’ Association, also said he was satisfied.
The sentence “showed that our prosecutor and our court can adequately address these kinds of cases. In Saint Petersburg, we only hear ‘hooliganism’,” he said. “Sixteen years is a very significant term.”
“Of course this won’t bring our friend back, but I’m personally satisfied with a term of 16 years.”
The Voronezh court ruled that the convicted men were part of organisations known as White Patrol and Vityaz “whose aim was fighting with representatives of non-Slavic ethnic groups,” ITAR-TASS reported.
Such violent racist groups are especially active in Russia’s capital Moscow and the second city of Saint Petersburg.
On Monday, a bomb at a multi-ethnic market in Moscow killed 10 people, with the death of an 11th victim announced Friday.
Three Moscow students [boneheads] have been arrested and charged with carrying out the bombing, and two of them have admitted to targeting the market because of its largely Asian workforce, the Moscow prosecutor said this week.
According to Sova, 31 people have been killed and 264 injured in racist attacks in Russia so far this year.
Verkhovsky said that police were more active in trying to stem the problem than previously. However, “radical nationalism is just the tip of the iceberg consisting of mass xenophobia.”
And finally, in Berlin, nervous times ahead for Welf Herfurth’s former party the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), as parties prepare for elections. But as his role as MC at this weekend’s Sydney Forum might suggest:
The [far-right] parties have little hope of making serious inroads anytime soon, however. That’s why they are focused on what Glaessner calls “cultural infiltration.” They start clubs and holds events to attract young people, with organizers often not initially identifying themselves as NPD or DVU.
The parties target areas of the former East Germany where unemployment is high and most of the motivated and educated have migrated away. The population left behind is largely young, male, uneducated and angry. Ironically, since all parties in Germany receive money from the state, NPD and DVU are partially publicly funded.
