Paul Goble
Vienna, April 2 – Muslim activists in the Russian Federation are reaching three conclusions from the decision of a Stavropol court to sentence an ethnic Russian imam to the time he has already served in preliminary detention and to free him on one year’s probation after his conviction on what human rights groups say were trumped up charges.
First, the case which over the past year attracted widespread attention not only of Russia’s Muslims but also of Western human rights organizations and governments underscores for many Muslims the unfortunate reality that many Russian officials are openly anti-Islamic whatever senior officials in Moscow say.
Second, the way the Russian authorities conducted this case demonstrated to the satisfaction of most Muslims that the Russian government is prepared in the name of fighting terrorism to employ various illegal and unconstitutional means against Muslims, even if the latter are law-abiding and loyal to citizens. .
And third -- and this may prove the most significant lesson of all -- the Stepanenko case highlights the increasing ability of Russia’s Muslims to reach out to non-Muslim human rights organizations and governments and to force what they are view as superficially powerful but ultimately brittle and weak regime to back down.
On Friday, one Russian news agency (RIA-Novosti) reported that a court in Pyatigorsk had “convicted” imam Abdalla (Anton) Stepanenko of “inciting ethnic and religious hatred,” “promoting Wahhabism” and urging his “followers to wage a holy war.”
But even Russian news outlets had to acknowledge that the outcome of the case was more complicated than that: On Saturday, ITAR-TASS noted that the court had dropped one charge and reduced another, while limiting Stepanenko’s punishment to time served and one year’s probation.
Not surprisingly, Russia’s Muslim leaders viewed that as a victory. Geidar Dzhemal, the head of the Islamic Committee of Russia, told the religious rights website Portal-Credo that the court’s sentence in fact demonstrated that Stepanenko was in fact innocent.
The case against him “collapsed,” Dzhemal said but added that a Russian court could hardly be expected to acknowledge this given how implicated it was in illegal and unconstitutional actions. Consequently, the nominal verdict means that Stepanenko is “innocent” (http://www.portal-credo.ru/site/print.php?act=authority&id=722).
Other Muslim and human rights groups are certain to second Dzhemal’s conclusion, especially since this case and the misbehaviour of Russian officials have attracted so much attention over the past 14 months.
In brief, the facts of the case are these: Stepanenko, who was born in the Russian far eastern city of Khabarovsk in 1980, became a Muslim at the age of 17 after his mother married a Muslim. Seven years later he became the imam of a mosque in Pyatigorsk, where he distinguished himself by his orderly behavior and loyalty to the Russian authorities (http://www.islam.ru/pressclub/tema/freedom/).
Despite that, however, on January 26, 2006, Stepanenko was arrested on the basis of charges made by Boris Martynov, a youth undergoing psychiatric care, that the ethnic Russian imam had illegally detained him and extorted money from him and two of his acquaintances.
Following his arrest, Stepanenko was charged further with disseminating “extremist” Wahhabi literature. He was subjected to beatings and other mistreatment in the holding cells, as were Martynov and two others who were prepared to testify against him.
When Stepanenko was finally tried -- after 14 months under detention -- the three testified that the city prosecutor Dmitriy Deriglazov had over seen the case, that their testimony against Stepanenko had been coerced, and that he was not guilty of any of the crimes with which he was charged.
Even before that, Muslim activists, human rights groups and Western governments protested to Moscow over what was going on. Most notably perhaps, some 3,000 Muslims signed an open letter to President Vladimir Putin that was published in “Izvestiya” on March 5 demanding that the charges against Stepanenko be dropped.
That letter may have led to the outcome in Pyatigorsk, especially since right after its appearance the Russian foreign minister reiterated his and Putin’s view that Moscow cannot afford to get into a serious conflict with the Islamic world given its national interests and the growing number of Muslims in the Russian population.
Clearly, many in Moscow hope that the end of the Stepanenko case is the end of this issue, but as several Muslims in Russia have already pointed out, the Russian imam is “far from the only prisoner of conscience” among the Muslim community of Russia, and this victory “must not be the last.”
Given the lessons that many Muslims in Russia appear to have learned, that commitment seems certain to put new pressure on a Russian government that all too often in recent years has ignored the rights of its citizens in the name of national security and Putin’s vaunted “power vertical.”
Monday, April 2, 2007
Window on Eurasia: A New Kind of Ethnic Politics Emerges in the Russian Federation
Paul Goble
Vienna, April 2 – Two non-Russian nationalities in the Russian Federation took actions last week that point to the emergence of a new form of ethnic politics in that country, one no longer linked to existing territorial units and far more ready to employ tactics and make alliances than most such groups have in the past.
But if these groups constitute a harbinger of change, the two could hardly be more different. On the one hand are the Pomors, a numerically insignificant community in Arkhangelsk oblast now threatened with extinction in large measure because Moscow refuses to acknowledge that they are a distinct nationality.
And on the other are the Azerbaijanis, a rapidly growing immigrant community in Nizhniy Novogorod whose current 160,000 members are projected to more than treble by 2020 and whose leaders are seeking to transform that group from a marginal diaspora into a full-fledged participant in Russian social and political life.
The exact number of Pomors is unknown. Russian officials in tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet times have refused to count them, arguing that these residents of the northern seaside villages in Arkhangelsk are at most a sub-ethnos of the Russians with no rights to aspire to a separate and distinct identification.
But just as was the case at the dawn of the 20th century, many people who do identify as Pomors today are organizing and last week held a congress in order to give voice to three demands the increasingly self-conscious Pomors want to make (see http://www.ann.ru, March 30, March 19, March 6, and February 28).
First, the Pomors want the Arkhangelsk regional administration to create a Council on the Problems of the Pomors, a group that would represent their interests and advise oblast and central Russian officials on the needs and aspirations of this small community.
Second, they want Moscow to officially recognize their nationality and include it in the all-Russian register of the numerically small peoples of the northern regions of the country. Such a listing would guarantee that the Pomors would receive the kind of fishing and hunting quotas that the other groups in that register now get.
And third, they want their own national-cultural center, “Pomor Rebirth,” included in Russian government negotiations with Moscow ecological activists and foreign firms so that the latter are not allowed to close or destroy the fishing fields that have been the basis of Pomor society for centuries.
The Pomors’ prospects do not appear especially bright. Not only do they face resistance from Russian ethnographers like Valeriy Tishkov who see such their being listed separately as a threat to the numbers of ethnic Russians in the census, but they also face problems with both local scholars and even the regional prosecutor.
The local scholars while sometimes supportive appear to have dragged their feet in cooperating with the Pomors. And the prosecutors have intervened against them to block the second volume of a Pomor encyclopedia because it discussed privatization of property during the 1990s in places where the Pomor people live.
The chances for success by the Azerbaijani community in Nizhniy Novgorod in contrast appear much greater – even though it too must overcome the xenophobia of many ethnic Russians there and the indifference or even outright hostility of officials not only in that oblast but also in the Volga Federal District and Moscow.
Despite these problems, the growing Azerbaijani community in Nizhniy has succeeded in registering its own national cultural autonomy organization, keeping in close touch with Baku, and developing ties with the Tatars and other Turkic and Muslim peoples (http://www.nizgar.ru/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1806).
At the end of last week, the regional national cultural autonomy of Azerbaijanis of Nizhniy Novgorod oblast held its first congress. The leader of this group, Zaur Idrisov, said that the Azerbaijanis of Nizhniy must work to transform their community from “a diaspora” into “a full-fledged and significant part of Russian society.”
To that end, he suggested, they must continue to develop their media activities, including the website, http://www.nizgar.ru, and hard-copy publication, “Al Hayat;” develop ties with closely related Turkic and Muslim nationalities, and work toward placing their own members in the regional legislature and even the Russian Duma.
To the extent they do so, Idrisov said, they will be in a position to defend members of their community from attacks by skinheads and from the indifference or hostility of local and regional officials. And they will be able to restore the position Azeris, then known as the Tatars of the Caucasus, had in the Middle Volga a century ago
The meeting approved a draft resolution (http://www.islamnn.ru/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1641) that echoed all of Idrisov’s suggestions, but unfortunately, the media so far has given little attention either to that document or even to the meeting of the Nizhniy Azerbaijanis last week.
That lack of coverage has already led some Azerbaijani activists to comment publicly that some Russian official “from above” had given the order to ignore what they are doing (http://www.islamnn.ru/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1649). But even those Azerbaijanis who think that remain upbeat about the future.
On the one hand, they say, President Vladimir Putin has repeated committed himself to the idea that the Russian Federation is a “multi-national” and not ethnically unitarian state, a view that the Azerbaijanis hope will trump the very different beliefs of lower-ranking Russian officials.
And on the other, they note, the Tatars, a category that includes both those from the Caucasus and those from the Middle Volga, have traditionally “conducted the ‘Eastern diplomacy’” of the Russian state, something no current or future Russian government can afford to ignore.
Obviously, the Azerbaijanis of Nizhniy Novgorod face many obstacles but their optimistic nationalism, one rooted in their growing numbers and a self-confident belief that demography is destiny, suggests they will pursue an increasingly activist approach in politics to advance their cause.
Vienna, April 2 – Two non-Russian nationalities in the Russian Federation took actions last week that point to the emergence of a new form of ethnic politics in that country, one no longer linked to existing territorial units and far more ready to employ tactics and make alliances than most such groups have in the past.
But if these groups constitute a harbinger of change, the two could hardly be more different. On the one hand are the Pomors, a numerically insignificant community in Arkhangelsk oblast now threatened with extinction in large measure because Moscow refuses to acknowledge that they are a distinct nationality.
And on the other are the Azerbaijanis, a rapidly growing immigrant community in Nizhniy Novogorod whose current 160,000 members are projected to more than treble by 2020 and whose leaders are seeking to transform that group from a marginal diaspora into a full-fledged participant in Russian social and political life.
The exact number of Pomors is unknown. Russian officials in tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet times have refused to count them, arguing that these residents of the northern seaside villages in Arkhangelsk are at most a sub-ethnos of the Russians with no rights to aspire to a separate and distinct identification.
But just as was the case at the dawn of the 20th century, many people who do identify as Pomors today are organizing and last week held a congress in order to give voice to three demands the increasingly self-conscious Pomors want to make (see http://www.ann.ru, March 30, March 19, March 6, and February 28).
First, the Pomors want the Arkhangelsk regional administration to create a Council on the Problems of the Pomors, a group that would represent their interests and advise oblast and central Russian officials on the needs and aspirations of this small community.
Second, they want Moscow to officially recognize their nationality and include it in the all-Russian register of the numerically small peoples of the northern regions of the country. Such a listing would guarantee that the Pomors would receive the kind of fishing and hunting quotas that the other groups in that register now get.
And third, they want their own national-cultural center, “Pomor Rebirth,” included in Russian government negotiations with Moscow ecological activists and foreign firms so that the latter are not allowed to close or destroy the fishing fields that have been the basis of Pomor society for centuries.
The Pomors’ prospects do not appear especially bright. Not only do they face resistance from Russian ethnographers like Valeriy Tishkov who see such their being listed separately as a threat to the numbers of ethnic Russians in the census, but they also face problems with both local scholars and even the regional prosecutor.
The local scholars while sometimes supportive appear to have dragged their feet in cooperating with the Pomors. And the prosecutors have intervened against them to block the second volume of a Pomor encyclopedia because it discussed privatization of property during the 1990s in places where the Pomor people live.
The chances for success by the Azerbaijani community in Nizhniy Novgorod in contrast appear much greater – even though it too must overcome the xenophobia of many ethnic Russians there and the indifference or even outright hostility of officials not only in that oblast but also in the Volga Federal District and Moscow.
Despite these problems, the growing Azerbaijani community in Nizhniy has succeeded in registering its own national cultural autonomy organization, keeping in close touch with Baku, and developing ties with the Tatars and other Turkic and Muslim peoples (http://www.nizgar.ru/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1806).
At the end of last week, the regional national cultural autonomy of Azerbaijanis of Nizhniy Novgorod oblast held its first congress. The leader of this group, Zaur Idrisov, said that the Azerbaijanis of Nizhniy must work to transform their community from “a diaspora” into “a full-fledged and significant part of Russian society.”
To that end, he suggested, they must continue to develop their media activities, including the website, http://www.nizgar.ru, and hard-copy publication, “Al Hayat;” develop ties with closely related Turkic and Muslim nationalities, and work toward placing their own members in the regional legislature and even the Russian Duma.
To the extent they do so, Idrisov said, they will be in a position to defend members of their community from attacks by skinheads and from the indifference or hostility of local and regional officials. And they will be able to restore the position Azeris, then known as the Tatars of the Caucasus, had in the Middle Volga a century ago
The meeting approved a draft resolution (http://www.islamnn.ru/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1641) that echoed all of Idrisov’s suggestions, but unfortunately, the media so far has given little attention either to that document or even to the meeting of the Nizhniy Azerbaijanis last week.
That lack of coverage has already led some Azerbaijani activists to comment publicly that some Russian official “from above” had given the order to ignore what they are doing (http://www.islamnn.ru/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1649). But even those Azerbaijanis who think that remain upbeat about the future.
On the one hand, they say, President Vladimir Putin has repeated committed himself to the idea that the Russian Federation is a “multi-national” and not ethnically unitarian state, a view that the Azerbaijanis hope will trump the very different beliefs of lower-ranking Russian officials.
And on the other, they note, the Tatars, a category that includes both those from the Caucasus and those from the Middle Volga, have traditionally “conducted the ‘Eastern diplomacy’” of the Russian state, something no current or future Russian government can afford to ignore.
Obviously, the Azerbaijanis of Nizhniy Novgorod face many obstacles but their optimistic nationalism, one rooted in their growing numbers and a self-confident belief that demography is destiny, suggests they will pursue an increasingly activist approach in politics to advance their cause.
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