Russian guide portrays migrants as spades and brooms

The local authorities in Russia's second city of Saint Petersburg have sparked a huge row by publishing a guidebook for labour migrants that portrays immigrants as spades and brooms. The brochure's avowed aim is to help migrants mainly from Muslim ex-Soviet Central Asia to settle into the city and was published on the site of an official programme to promote inter-ethnic relations. But while the natives of the city are portrayed in the guidebook's cartoon strips as normal human beings, labour migrants are drawn as walking tools like spades, brooms or paint brushes with hardly any face except a huge grin. "I do not see anything criminal, any incitation to ethnic hatred in this," said the local government's human rights ombudsman Alexander Shishlov. "The authors had good intentions but lacked taste." The 50-page brochure aims to give labour migrants information about preventing AIDS and staying in line with labour laws as well as useful addresses like hospitals. As well as Russian, it has been produced in Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz, the main languages of the labour migrants who have come in tens of thousands to Saint Petersburg in the last years. "The implication is that native inhabitants of the city are people of the first category and labour migrants are of a lower category," the deputy head of the city's Azerbaijani community Sabir Masimov told the Vedomosti daily. Hundreds of thousands of labour migrants have come to Russia from other states of the former Soviet Union in the last years, often working as street cleaners or on construction sites and sending their salaries home. However they often endure poor labour and living conditions as well as being regarded with disdain by some sections in Russian society. The brochure -- entitled "A Guidebook for the Labour Migrant" -- was published on the spbtolerance.ru website of a Saint Petersburg government programme called "Tolerance" whose avowed aim is to unite society. The head of the organisation "Look into the Future" which produced the brochure however defended the pictures, saying the illustrations were needed to bring the information material alive. "Before producing this brochure we carried out focus groups with migrants on buildings sites and factories. The pictures have been very popular in the immigrant community. People are taking them and passing them on to their friends," Gleb Panfilov told Kommersant FM.