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Thursday, September 18th, 2003 Russian human rights group to monitor racism, discrimination MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's leading human rights groups on Thursday announced a project to monitor cases of racism, anti-Semitism and ethnic discrimination that have flourished in Russia. In a three-year project sponsored by the European Union, rights groups will also provide legal advice to victims of persecution and urge authorities to take stronger action against abuses, said Alexander Brod, the director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights. "Xenophobia, racism and ethnic discrimination pose a serious threat to Russian society," Brod told a news conference. "We will share information with the law-enforcement structures to prompt them to take adequate action." Russia's extremist and neo-Nazi groups have targeted dark-skinned immigrants from poverty-stricken former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus Mountains region, as well as Africa, East Asia and other distant regions. Last year, several outdoor food markets in Moscow, which are staffed mostly by traders from the Caucasus and Central Asia, closed on Hitler's birthday to avoid violence. Also last year, a booby-trapped sign reading "Death to Jews" exploded in the face of a woman who tried to remove it from a roadside outside Moscow. Several similar signs, some with real explosives and others with fake bombs, were later found across the country. "Xenophobia has become a routine thing here, like pollution in Moscow's air," said Leonid Stonov of the Union of Councils for Jews in the former Soviet Union, or UCSJ. The attacks have prompted widespread calls for tougher police action. In the past victims have sometimes accused police of ignoring their complaints. President Vladimir Putin recently signed a law aimed to crack down on extremism, but human rights groups said it was flawed and undermined by selective enforcement. The Moscow Helsinki Group said the number of racist attacks against foreigners and minorities continued to increase in 2002 and that police have refused to acknowledge the problem.