In Modern Ukraine, People of Color Need Not Apply

[Purveyor]

Attacks on dark-skinned visitors and Aryan-only pools reveal post-Maidan Ukraine still has some maturing to do
By Mikhail Klikushin | 08/11/15

In the beginning of the year, the Washington Post ran an opinion piece from AlterNet editor Terrell Jermaine Starr with an eye-catching headline: “A Cop in Ukraine said he was detaining me because I was black. I appreciated it.”

According to the Mr. Starr, who visited Ukraine in 2009, back then people with different skin color had routinely faced housing discrimination, police treated them as suspects in drug-smuggling crimes, and occasionally the reporter “encountered young men dressed in black shirts and Doc Martens who would throw up the Nazi salute at my direction.” In other words, “racism in Ukraine was much more blunt [than in the US] – always in my face, unabashed and in plain view.”

--CLIP
In the end of July, a number of Ukrainian newspapers broke the story of 23-year-old Asi, a refugee from the African state of Sierra Leone who came to Ukraine just six months ago. At the bus station at the town of Uzhgorod, which is in West Ukraine, the young woman and her 8-month-old son were trying to board the bus but were violently thrown off by the furious passengers who didn’t want to travel in her company because she “was not like them.” The violent attack was filmed by the angry crowd that was shouting “Tie her to the fence together with the kid!” The bus driver called police, who upon arrival … hand-cuffed and took away the unfortunate victim of racial abuse who was hysterically screaming in English, facing the hostile crowd of Ukrainian “Europeans” who couldn’t understand her pleas.

This was not the first racial incident in Uzhgorod. The town’s local aqua-park denied entrance to the black-skinned students of local university who happened to be from India and Nigeria. The pool’s owner, former mayor of Uzhgorod and deputy to the Supreme Parliament, Serhei Ratushnyak, explained his pool’s policy by mentioning concern about the public health of the town residents in the face of the danger caused by “syphilitic and tuberculosis Gypsyhood of the area and of the whole world.”

“During last year,” he stated, “we had a 14-fold increase in AIDS cases in town. I demand compensation for all my expenses on buying and building [of the pool complex in case the “Gypsies” are allowed into his aqua-park by the authorities]”, he said.

Read more at http://observer.com/2015/08/in-modern-ukraine-people-of-color-need-not-apply/#ixzz3iYUAlQG9