[continued from previous message] 
  
 killed the 44-year-old Nigerian, Godknows Mievi, allegedly shouted in 
 Russian and Ukrainian, "We will save Ukraine from these freaks!" 
  
 Duke, and other sources of racist ideology, such as France's 
 right-wing Front National, the party headed by Jean-Marie Le Pen, have 
 been less instrumental in stoking racial intolerance in Ukraine, 
 Butkevych said. 
  
 According to him, Le Pen has consulted Ukrainian right-wing groups in 
 the past. 
  
 The Ukrainian newspaper Zerkalo Nedeli reported in May 2000 that Le 
 Pen had visited Ukraine to speak at a congress of the ultra-right-wing 
 All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda, also known as the Social-Nationalist 
 Party, headquartered in the Ukrainian nationalist stronghold of Lviv 
 in the country's west. 
  
 According to the Ukrainian Central Election Committee's website, the 
 party ran for parliament with Oleh Tiahnybok at its head in 1998. 
  
 Tiahnybok made it into parliament in 2002 on the ticket of Our 
 Ukraine, the party led by current President Viktor Yushchenko. 
  
 Yushchenko announced Tiahnybok's expulsion from the party for making 
 racist and anti-Semitic statements amid Our Ukraine's politicking 
 during Yushchenko's presidential campaign in the summer of 2004. 
  
 "A Ukrainian patriot is not synonymous with a xenophobe," Yushchenko 
 said at the time. 
  
 Tiahnybok ran for parliament in 2006, again as the head of the 
 All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda, which dropped the Social-Nationalist 
 Party moniker in 2004 due to the negative image associated with the 
 name. The party received 0.36 percent of the vote in the 2006 
 elections, well below the 3 percent barrier needed to make it into 
 parliament. 
  
 According to a November 3 report prepared by London-based Amnesty 
 International for the United Nations, despite appeals to the Ukrainian 
 government to take steps to prevent and punish racist and anti-Semitic 
 tendencies, made back in 2001, such attacks are currently continuing, 
 and the government "unwillingly admits they are racially motivated." 
 The report mentions "at least" eight attacks against Jews that took 
 place in Ukraine in 2005, noting that they have been qualified by the 
 police as "hooliganism." 
  
 Natalia Prokopchuk, Regional Public Information Officer of UNHCR, the 
 UN refugee agency, said that in 2006 her agency registered 
 approximately 50 complaints from refugees and asylym seekers staying 
 in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa and Vinnytsia, primarily of African and Asian 
 origin. She says in addition to racist attacks and battery, this 
 number also includes extortion and other harassments. Prokopchuk 
 notes, however, that only a small percentage of refugees in Ukraine 
 approaches police or makes public complaints about racist attacks or 
 other mistreatment, due to the fear of possible retaliation by the 
 assailants. 
  
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