Moscow Foreign Student Dorm Fire Kills 43

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 818, 23 January 2004.

On 24 November 2003, at just past 2:00 in the morning, Moscow’s frozen night lit up into a portal of hell. Fire swept through Dormitory No. 6 of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (PFUR). The foreign student residents of the five-story building awoke to smoke, flames and the screams of neighbors running for their lives. They were trapped. Two of the three stairwells were locked, many of the windows were barred, and the only exit descended right into the source of the fire on the second floor. Cries for help in the languages of 39 countries rang out through broken windows. Soon the students themselves jumped, many aflame and falling to their deaths. Fire trucks and emergency services took up to an hour to arrive. A Cameroonian student from an adjacent dorm described the horror: “There were people jumping from windows who fell right at my feet. It was awful. We helped carry the injured to other buildings, but the ambulances took too long to take them away. There was a Vietnamese girl who died in front of my eyes.”

Forty-three have perished so far, possibly the highest death toll in a Moscow fire in over a quarter century. Over 200 other students were injured—almost all hospitalized—and more could die. Officials quickly pinned the cause of the fire on the students themselves, claiming either misuse of electrical fixtures or arson by dormitory residents. But they were forced to back off after shock, grief and outrage poured in from the students’ homelands around the world. Twelve of those who died were from the Peoples Republic of China. The Chinese ambassador Liu Guchang rushed to the site of the fire; three days later a special delegation from Beijing arrived. Meanwhile, ambassadors from a number of African countries (Gabon, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Burundi, Congo, Chad and Algeria) have formed an investigation commission with Russian authorities to determine the cause of the fire and to monitor the care and compensation of the victims.

In a grotesque insult to the grieving student body, just hours after the fire, classes were ordered to resume! “They put out the fire at 4 or 5 a.m. and students went to school at 9 a.m.... I feel that they do this because most of the victims are foreigners,” said Sydney Ocran, a Liberian student.

The real cause has not been proven, but what has been established is that the PFUR dormitories are horrendous fire traps. In March 2003 the university was cited for 36 violations, including absence of extinguishers, public address system, fire alarms or even an evacuation plan. Dormitory No. 6 was used to pack in newly-arrived students for quarantine; they spoke little if any Russian. Yet there was not even an established plan to alert students in case of emergencies! The acting university rector and another administrator have been charged with criminal negligence, and a local fire inspector with lesser charges—essentially for creating a catastrophe waiting to happen. True enough, but many students say that it was not a matter of the odds, but of arson; according to an Amnesty International report, most students described the fire as “a racially-motivated act of arson.” A Somali student reported, “Skinheads often gather near the dorm” and write racist graffiti. “I have wiped such insults from my door three times” (quoted in Bigotry Monitor, 5 December 2003). Aicha Toure, a medical student from Mali, pointed out that “Skinheads have long been threatening us. Last week [three days before the blaze] there was a bomb threat and students were evacuated from one building. But no bomb was found. This [the fire on 24 November] was no accident either.” Moisus Lopes of Angola, who studies at a Moscow technical university, said, “How can I stay here if they’re setting us on fire. I don’t think it was caused by electrical appliances.” In 1995, seven students were killed by arson in a building adjacent to Dormitory No. 6.

The students’ suspicions stem from the brutal reality of being under constant siege. In 1960, the campus opened as Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University, the USSR’s academy for cadres of Moscow’s Third World allies to come as honored guests for training. Soviet authorities had named the university after the Congolese leader who was a victim of racist murder by the CIA and Belgian imperialists in 1961. However, when the Soviet degenerated workers state was destroyed in 1991-92 by the capitalist counterrevolution led by Boris Yeltsin and U.S. president George Bush Sr., these foreign students became targets of racist terror in capitalist Russia.

On 11 August 1992, Moscow police marked the first anniversary of Yeltsin’s coming to power by shooting dead a Zimbabwean university student, Gideon Chimusoro. The comrades of the International Communist League’s Moscow Station immediately rallied to the defense of the besieged students (see “African Student Murdered by Yeltsin’s Cops,” WV No. 558, 4 September 1992, reprinted in Spartacist pamphlet, How the Soviet Workers State Was Strangled).

The reign of terror has only intensified since then, as skinhead xenophobic terror thrives on Russia’s continuing descent into capitalist chaos and poverty. Fascist vigilantes see themselves, and are widely seen, as folk heroes of a domestic front of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war in Chechnya. They are carrying out his infamous and blood-curdling anti-Chechen incitement to “butcher them in their toilets.” In October 2001, a mob of 250 skinheads rampaged through a Moscow immigrant street market killing three and injuring 30. On 17 September 2003, a three-day-long regional pogrom against Chechen students in the south of Russia culminated in Nalchik, capital city of the Kabardino-Balkarian region, where 54 Chechen students were attacked, one fatally.

But native minorities, particularly Chechens, can fight back. So it is foreign students who are the fascists’ preferred targets. Most report having been attacked many times, some as many as ten. Even the South African ambassador’s wife was beaten and burned with cigarettes in broad daylight in the Russian capital. Attacks by Russia’s estimated 20,000 skinheads concentrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg happen weekly, if not daily. “If you go to the cinema or to a stadium, it means you want to die” said Diboi Kath, PFUR student from Cameroon, who has been abused, beaten and even shot by racist thugs. But there are no hard police report statistics because, as an Ethiopian refugee explained, “The police are just as bad. In fact, I run faster from them than I do from the skinheads.” When a Cameroonian prince, studying in the southern city of Voronezh, tried to report a skinhead attack,

“The police sergeant told me to put my hands up, but I said, ‘Why? I’m the innocent one here. I’m the victim, and a guest in your country, so I’m asking for your help.’ Then one of the other cops just started punching me in the stomach. Really hard, as if I was a boxing bag.... Then I was arrested for wasting police time.”

Students were subjected to racism even by the emergency crews on the night of the November 24 blaze. The ambulances took away injured Russians first, leaving half-naked foreign victims to suffer frostbite. They later took the foreign students only after trying to extort money from them.

The siege of the PFUR international students has not let up since. Just five days after the fire, 25 skinheads arrived in waves on buses, and launched a, by now routine, well-coordinated attack, hospitalizing six students. Colombian student Hernan Muñoz jumped in to save his roommates. He knew the stakes; two years ago skinheads had cut off his finger. In the following month, students were forced to evacuate dorms and classrooms at least nine times because of bomb threats. On December 16, a second fire, of unknown origin, broke out in Dormitory No. 9. The next day, an arsonist started a fire in Dormitory No. 7.

Dormitory student councils have now organized voluntary round-the-clock patrols. “Nobody will defend us but ourselves,” said Chinese female student Lee Sin, who lives in Dormitory No. 11. “So I take my watch shift, even though I have been assigned from 1:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m.”

The Moscow dormitory fire has lit up the ghastly face of capitalist Russia. This is what we warned capitalist counterrevolution would bring, and that is why we fought to the end against it. As we wrote:

“Uniquely, the ICL intervened in the Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s seeking to mobilize the working class against the powerful forces, backed by world (centrally American) imperialism, driving toward capitalist restoration. This was part of our struggle for new October Revolutions around the world.”

— “Why We Fought to Defend the Soviet Union,” WV Nos. 809 and 810, 12 September and 26 September 2003

Students report that survivors are in desperate need of aid, lacking everything from clothes to soap and toothpaste. Donations can be wired to the following account of the Association of African Students of the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia:

International Humanitarian Initiative Fund, Account 40703840700000011024

Beneficiary bank: Badr-Forte Bank, 31/1 Obraztsova St., Moscow, 127018, Russia SWIFT CODE: ICBA RU MM

Intermediate bank: Raiffeisen ZentralBank, A-1030 Vienna, Am Stadtpark 9, Austria SWIFT CODE: RZBA AT WW, Correspondent account 70-55.047.021