Dark-Skinned Foreigners in Russia Blighted

Two African students walk past a police officer during celebrations of Russia's national holiday, Day of Spring and Labor, at the People's Friendship University in Moscow, Monday, May 1, 2006. Race-based attacks are rising sharply in Russia, a reflection of the xenophobia that was under the surface in Soviet times. In 2005 alone, 31 murders and 382 assaults were race-connected, according to the Moscow-based Sova human rights center. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko) (Alexander Zemlianichenko - AP)

MOSCOW -- As a black man in Russia, Gabriel Anicet Kotchofa knows life means always being home by 9 p.m., never using public transit and hearing abusive remarks when he goes out in public with his white wife.

"Sometimes I even go to the shop with my wife and we go separately, so nobody knows that we are together," the native of Benin says.

Still, his experience has been milder than that of many blacks, Asians and dark-skinned Caucasians in Russia _ he hasn't been killed, maimed or even attacked.

"I'm a very lucky person. I have never been aggressed, because I know where to go, when to go and how to behave myself," said Kotchofa, an academic.

Race-based attacks are rising sharply in Russia, a reflection of the xenophobia that was under the surface in Soviet times. In 2005 alone, 31 murders and 382 assaults were race-connected, according to the Moscow-based Sova human rights center.

Already this year, 14 people have been killed in racial attacks.

The attacks hit especially hard at natives of Third World countries who have come to Russia to study, because of the country's comparatively low tuition costs or because they are blocked from studying in the West by stringent visa regimes.

A few months after arriving from Gabon in 1999 for studies at People's Friendship University in Moscow, Juldas Okie Etoumbia was shocked by the beating death of a Guinean student in their dormitory. The victim had refused to open the door for a cleaning lady in the early hours of the morning and she returned with several men who bludgeoned him with a hammer.

But Etoumbia, 28, was determined to follow through with studies that he hopes will lead to a career as a diplomat.

"There are times when I think I should have never come to this country. But you realize that you came for a noble cause, to get an education, and you are obliged to go through with it," he said.

Although he said he's never been attacked, he's lost count of the insults tossed at him. Once, traveling on the Moscow subway, he lost his grip and brushed the hand of a fellow-passenger _ who demonstratively took out a handkerchief and wiped his hand clean.

In the Soviet era, when the Kremlin was promoting the worldwide spread of Communism, the government strongly preached racial tolerance and offered generous scholarships that brought tens of thousands of Third World students to Russia to study.