MOSCOW, July 11 (Itar-Tass) - Russian public activists have issued demands to track down the offenders guilty of an outrage at a cemetery in the Perm territory, which ended in a destruction of 77 tombstones and monuments.
“That’s not just an instance of vandalism, that’s something more heinous,” Georgy Fyodorov, a member of Russia’s Public Chamber told Itar-Tass in a comment on the incident. “State organizations should take on the patriotic upbringing of young generations, as well as the fostering of national self-consciousness and respect for the ancestors.”
Along with this, he demanded that the culprits be tracked down and exposed to the public.
“As a member of the Public Chamber, I’ll be sending out queries to the agencies of law and order if I feel procrastinations in the process of investigation,” Fyodorov said.
Those who are guilty should bear the full brunt of responsibility for their crime
“If this was done by adolescents, then the responsibility should be apportioned to their parents,” Fedotov said, adding that it might be reasonable “to introduce compulsory summer labor camps for the teenagers committing crimes of this kind.”
“The problem is cases of the kind don’t always get proper investigations,” said Alexander Brod, a member of the Presidential Council for Development of Civic Society and Human Rights.
“This is far from a solitary case,” he said. “Rampages at cemeteries, memorials to the soldiers fallen during World War II, and other burial sites are committed in many parts of the country.”
“The incident in the Perm territory sends a serious signal to education institutions that have a duty to foster the young people’s morality in addition to simply furnishing them with knowledge,” Brod said. “Simultaneously, this is a signal to the executives of our television channels showing loads of acts of aggression and violence.”
A local woman residing in the Krasnaya Vishera district of the Perm territory called the district police department Wednesday night to tell a duty officer that unknown malefactors had destroyed 77 tombs at a local cemetery by overthrowing tombstones and breaking up ledger plates,
Officials at the Perm territory Interior Department told Itar-Tass, however, there are no grounds yet to claim that the act of vandalism was committed out of the motives of religious or ethnic intolerance.