Paul Goble
Vienna, October 2 – A Russian-language newspaper on Cyprus provides some important additional details on the September 21-23 Prague meeting – described in yesterday’s Window – at which senior Russian officials sought to organize their “compatriots” in Western Europe.
Russkiyi Kipr reported that the session drew “compatriots” of various kinds from 30 countries as well as a large collection of senior Russian officials who are leading the Moscow effort to set up umbrella-like coordinating councils in seven regions of the world (http://narodru.ru/smi13373.html).
Among these “honored guests,” the paper said, were Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of the Duma’s International Affairs Committee, Aleksandr Chepurin, the diretor of the Foreign Ministry’s Department for Work with Compatriots Abroad, and Aleksei Sazonov, the deputy director of the ministry’s Information Department.
Others part of this official delegation were Tat’yana Poloskova, the head of the Administration for Work with Compatriots of the Center for Russians Abroad, Anatoliy Sorokin, the deputy head of the Moscow City government’s International Relations Department, and Yuriy Kaplun, the director of the Moscow House of the Compatriot.
The Cyprus paper reported that those in attendance listened to a message from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who assured them that “support of compatriots in the near and far abroad always will be a priority direction of the foreign policy of Russia.”
Some of the compatriots in turn indicated that “part of their organizations are trying to actively maintain close ties with the Foreign Ministry Department on Work with Compatriots Abroad and with the Department of International Relations of the Moscow City government, and also with the Center for Russians Abroad,” the paper said.
By the end of the three-day session, “Russkiy Kipr” suggested, the participants could feel “that relations of Russia with the Russian diasporas of Europe, which today number six million people are gradually becoming ever more diverse and multi-dimensional.”
And that, the Russkiy Kipr journalist implies, fully justifies the title she selected for her article about this meeting about Russians abroad: “Feel Yourselves More Confident.”
Today also brought news that the Russian government is helping some Russian compatriots in the post-Soviet states to make appeals to the European Human Rights Court concerning efforts by some of these states to modify Russian names to conform to the national languages of these states (http://www.nr2.ru/society/142860.html).
This problem is widespread, the report said, in Ukraine and Latvia, but in all the discussion of the difficulties these Russian compatriots face, there is no mention of the violence done to the spelling of the names of non-Russians in Soviet times – or to the fact that even now Russians refuse to spell Tallinn with two Ns as the Estonians always have.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Private Land Ownership Destroying Russia’s Smallest Peoples
Paul Goble
Vienna, October 2 – Taking advantage of new laws that allow them to purchase land formerly held in common, Russian businessmen are doing more than tsarist or Soviet officials ever did to destroy the foundations of the life of the numerically small peoples of the Russian North, according to one of the leaders of those communities.
In an interview in Moscow’s Tribuna yesterday, Pavel Sulyandziga, a leader of Russia’s Association of Numerically Small Indigenous Peoples and a member of the Social Chamber, argued that these laws are likely to push some of these groups over the edge to extinction soon (http://www.tribuna.ru/articles/2007/10/01/article9973).
Many “negative things,” of course, happened in tsarist and Soviet times, Sulyandziga said, but both the tsarist government and its Soviet successor “supported the traditional economic activities” of these groups – hunting and fishing – by allowing them to continue to use the land and water areas that had traditionally been theirs.
However, in the years since 1991, he continued, the Russian government has allowed private businessmen to purchase land throughout the Russian North, Siberia and the Far East, something that has given the owners the right to dictate to these small communities and forced the latter to use them as if they were poaching.
“We have reduced to the status of poachers on our own land,” he said, noting that in at least two cases – in Primorskiy kray and Magadan oblast, the government’s own forest service has tried to copy the private owners of land elsewhere and to collect rents from the small peoples of the North when they went to hunt in their traditional areas.
The letter of the law specifically gives the local peoples the right to bid on the land, he stressed, but local officials, either corruptly or out of a belief that their regions will benefit economically if private businesses move in, have done everything they can to prevent the Northern peoples from having a chance even to bid.
Because these small peoples live predominantly in rural areas, Sulyandziga said, it is easy for officials in these regions to keep them from finding out about such auctions. “And if by chance they do learn about them,” he noted, then local officials typically do whatever they can to rule the bids by these communities out of order.
When the businessmen owners then arrive, they behave approximately in the following matter, he added. ”’Comrade aborigines,’” they say, “the land is now mine: continue to hunt, but already [not for yourselves but] for me.” And even Russian officials set smaller limits on hunting and fishing than did the tsars or communists.
This is destroying these communities quickly, Sulyandziga said. Some 60 percent of the men and 90 percent of the women are without jobs. Life expectancy over all stands at 48 years, and in one Evenk village in the Amur region, officials say that it is only 27 – as a result of suicides and accidents.
These social pathologies highlight an important aspect of life among these peoples that Russian officials do not seem to understand, he continued. There is no possibility that any of these aboriginal groups would revolt like the Chechens did. Instead, when offended, many of their members simply kill themselves from shame.
When leaders of these communities complain about false Russian claims concerning the aid they have been given, Sulandziga added, “bureaucrats respond that apparently the aborigines want to seize” this or that region and make it an independent country.
To such absurdly hyperbolic suggestions, the activist said, he responds by querying “How do you imagine this will take place? By armed force perhaps?”
Although the 45 ethnic communities generally groups as the numerically small peoples of the Russian Federation live in more than 30 regions of the country, most are concentrated in Yamalo-Nenets, Khanty-Mansiisk, Taymyr, and the Chukchi autonomous formations and in Kamchata oblast, Khabarovsk kray, and the Sakha Republic
And they are very small: Altogether they make up fewer than 280,000 citizens of the Russian Federation, and some groups are now so few in number – there are, for example, only 8 Kereks, 12 Alyutors, and 237 Entsy -- that the impact of Russian land ownershi law means they will likely die out with this generation. .
Even the larger groups in this category – the 41,000 Nentsy, the 35,000 Evenks, and the 28,000 Khanty – are at risk if not in this generation then in the next, especially as their traditional ways of life are made impossible by the spread of private ownership of land and its control by outside business interests.
For many people, of course, the loss of such small groups is the price of civilization and progress, but Sulyandziga’s lament is a reminder that the death of such communities takes away from everyone a significant and irreplaceable part of the human family, one that can’t be restored even if Russian land use laws are eventually changed.
Vienna, October 2 – Taking advantage of new laws that allow them to purchase land formerly held in common, Russian businessmen are doing more than tsarist or Soviet officials ever did to destroy the foundations of the life of the numerically small peoples of the Russian North, according to one of the leaders of those communities.
In an interview in Moscow’s Tribuna yesterday, Pavel Sulyandziga, a leader of Russia’s Association of Numerically Small Indigenous Peoples and a member of the Social Chamber, argued that these laws are likely to push some of these groups over the edge to extinction soon (http://www.tribuna.ru/articles/2007/10/01/article9973).
Many “negative things,” of course, happened in tsarist and Soviet times, Sulyandziga said, but both the tsarist government and its Soviet successor “supported the traditional economic activities” of these groups – hunting and fishing – by allowing them to continue to use the land and water areas that had traditionally been theirs.
However, in the years since 1991, he continued, the Russian government has allowed private businessmen to purchase land throughout the Russian North, Siberia and the Far East, something that has given the owners the right to dictate to these small communities and forced the latter to use them as if they were poaching.
“We have reduced to the status of poachers on our own land,” he said, noting that in at least two cases – in Primorskiy kray and Magadan oblast, the government’s own forest service has tried to copy the private owners of land elsewhere and to collect rents from the small peoples of the North when they went to hunt in their traditional areas.
The letter of the law specifically gives the local peoples the right to bid on the land, he stressed, but local officials, either corruptly or out of a belief that their regions will benefit economically if private businesses move in, have done everything they can to prevent the Northern peoples from having a chance even to bid.
Because these small peoples live predominantly in rural areas, Sulyandziga said, it is easy for officials in these regions to keep them from finding out about such auctions. “And if by chance they do learn about them,” he noted, then local officials typically do whatever they can to rule the bids by these communities out of order.
When the businessmen owners then arrive, they behave approximately in the following matter, he added. ”’Comrade aborigines,’” they say, “the land is now mine: continue to hunt, but already [not for yourselves but] for me.” And even Russian officials set smaller limits on hunting and fishing than did the tsars or communists.
This is destroying these communities quickly, Sulyandziga said. Some 60 percent of the men and 90 percent of the women are without jobs. Life expectancy over all stands at 48 years, and in one Evenk village in the Amur region, officials say that it is only 27 – as a result of suicides and accidents.
These social pathologies highlight an important aspect of life among these peoples that Russian officials do not seem to understand, he continued. There is no possibility that any of these aboriginal groups would revolt like the Chechens did. Instead, when offended, many of their members simply kill themselves from shame.
When leaders of these communities complain about false Russian claims concerning the aid they have been given, Sulandziga added, “bureaucrats respond that apparently the aborigines want to seize” this or that region and make it an independent country.
To such absurdly hyperbolic suggestions, the activist said, he responds by querying “How do you imagine this will take place? By armed force perhaps?”
Although the 45 ethnic communities generally groups as the numerically small peoples of the Russian Federation live in more than 30 regions of the country, most are concentrated in Yamalo-Nenets, Khanty-Mansiisk, Taymyr, and the Chukchi autonomous formations and in Kamchata oblast, Khabarovsk kray, and the Sakha Republic
And they are very small: Altogether they make up fewer than 280,000 citizens of the Russian Federation, and some groups are now so few in number – there are, for example, only 8 Kereks, 12 Alyutors, and 237 Entsy -- that the impact of Russian land ownershi law means they will likely die out with this generation. .
Even the larger groups in this category – the 41,000 Nentsy, the 35,000 Evenks, and the 28,000 Khanty – are at risk if not in this generation then in the next, especially as their traditional ways of life are made impossible by the spread of private ownership of land and its control by outside business interests.
For many people, of course, the loss of such small groups is the price of civilization and progress, but Sulyandziga’s lament is a reminder that the death of such communities takes away from everyone a significant and irreplaceable part of the human family, one that can’t be restored even if Russian land use laws are eventually changed.
Window on Eurasia: Chechnya’s Kadyrov Wants to ‘Impose Order’ on Islam in Russia
Paul Goble
Vienna, October 2 – Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov says that he wants to “impose order” on Russian Islam by reducing the functions of the existing Muslim spiritual directorates (MSDs) and setting up a Council of Learned Elders to oversee the religious life of the faithful.
Kadyrov, who regularly presents himself as the defender of Chechens everywhere and as the defender of Islam within his republic, made this broader proposal in an interview featured in Medina al-Islam, the biweekly newspaper of the Nizhniy Novgorod MSD (http://www.islam.ru/rus/2007-10-01/#17896).
The Chechen leader argued that the creation of a Council of Ulema, an assembly of recognized Islamic theologians on the model of one created at the end of the imperial period but suppressed by the Soviets, not only could block the spread of harmful ideas but also could “develop a general strategy for the entire Muslim umma of Russia.”
Such an institution would immdiately assume many of the duties and almost all of the authority that the now numerous MSDs have, limiting these bodies to the disbursement of some funds and thus “imposing order” on the leadership of Russia’s Muslim community.
Kadyrov’s proposal is likely to be welcomed by the Muslim rank and file and by Muslim theologians, neither group of which has been pleased by the MSD system and especially by its evolution and expansive claims in the period since the end of Soviet power.
The MSD system originally grew out of a tsarist state institution – the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly -- set up by Empress Catherine the Great to select mullahs and control the financing of mosques and medressahs across the Russian empire – to create in short a clerical hierarchy for a religion that has neither clergy nor hierarchy.
After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks retained this structure, ultimately elaborating four MSDs for the major Muslim regions of the USSR. But during the Soviet period, these institutions were entirely controlled by the secret police and their leaders known to be KGB officers.
Because of Soviet anti-religious policies and because of the reputation MSD leaders had among ordinary Muslims and underground mullahs, the four MSDs at that time played only a marginal role in the lives of the faithful, seldom speaking out on religious issues or playing any independent role in the selection of mullahs and imams.
With the collapse of the USSR, however, the MSD system exploded in a double sense. On the one hand, the number of MSDs in Russia increased dramatically to a current 64, with some continuing to work for the state, others against it, and almost all competing for control of mullahs, mosques, and medressahs in particular territories.
And on the other hand, MSD leaders, such as the Central MSD head Talgat Tajuddin, who recently was in the news for “withdrawing” his fetwa against the United States for invading Iraq, spoke out regularly on a wide variety of religious and political questions, even though Islam gives them no warrant to do so.
Because of these twin developments since 1991, Muslim theologians in Russia and abroad, Muslim missionaries who have come there from the Middle East, and most frequently of all, mullahs and believers at the mosque level have called for scrapping what they see as an unnecessary and unfortunate survival of the Soviet and tsarist past.
But precisely for those same reasons, the Russian government, along with the leaders of the most important of the MSDs have opposed doing away with these structures, the first because it would make it more difficult for the regime to control the country’s Muslims and the second because it would eliminate their rice bowls.
Consequently, Kadyrov’s proposal is unlikely to go anywhere quickly, but because he has made it and apparently made it with impunity vis-à-vis the state, he has gained another constituency and demonstrated that he is someone to be reckoned with not only in Chechnya but in many other parts of the Russian Federation as well.
Vienna, October 2 – Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov says that he wants to “impose order” on Russian Islam by reducing the functions of the existing Muslim spiritual directorates (MSDs) and setting up a Council of Learned Elders to oversee the religious life of the faithful.
Kadyrov, who regularly presents himself as the defender of Chechens everywhere and as the defender of Islam within his republic, made this broader proposal in an interview featured in Medina al-Islam, the biweekly newspaper of the Nizhniy Novgorod MSD (http://www.islam.ru/rus/2007-10-01/#17896).
The Chechen leader argued that the creation of a Council of Ulema, an assembly of recognized Islamic theologians on the model of one created at the end of the imperial period but suppressed by the Soviets, not only could block the spread of harmful ideas but also could “develop a general strategy for the entire Muslim umma of Russia.”
Such an institution would immdiately assume many of the duties and almost all of the authority that the now numerous MSDs have, limiting these bodies to the disbursement of some funds and thus “imposing order” on the leadership of Russia’s Muslim community.
Kadyrov’s proposal is likely to be welcomed by the Muslim rank and file and by Muslim theologians, neither group of which has been pleased by the MSD system and especially by its evolution and expansive claims in the period since the end of Soviet power.
The MSD system originally grew out of a tsarist state institution – the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly -- set up by Empress Catherine the Great to select mullahs and control the financing of mosques and medressahs across the Russian empire – to create in short a clerical hierarchy for a religion that has neither clergy nor hierarchy.
After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks retained this structure, ultimately elaborating four MSDs for the major Muslim regions of the USSR. But during the Soviet period, these institutions were entirely controlled by the secret police and their leaders known to be KGB officers.
Because of Soviet anti-religious policies and because of the reputation MSD leaders had among ordinary Muslims and underground mullahs, the four MSDs at that time played only a marginal role in the lives of the faithful, seldom speaking out on religious issues or playing any independent role in the selection of mullahs and imams.
With the collapse of the USSR, however, the MSD system exploded in a double sense. On the one hand, the number of MSDs in Russia increased dramatically to a current 64, with some continuing to work for the state, others against it, and almost all competing for control of mullahs, mosques, and medressahs in particular territories.
And on the other hand, MSD leaders, such as the Central MSD head Talgat Tajuddin, who recently was in the news for “withdrawing” his fetwa against the United States for invading Iraq, spoke out regularly on a wide variety of religious and political questions, even though Islam gives them no warrant to do so.
Because of these twin developments since 1991, Muslim theologians in Russia and abroad, Muslim missionaries who have come there from the Middle East, and most frequently of all, mullahs and believers at the mosque level have called for scrapping what they see as an unnecessary and unfortunate survival of the Soviet and tsarist past.
But precisely for those same reasons, the Russian government, along with the leaders of the most important of the MSDs have opposed doing away with these structures, the first because it would make it more difficult for the regime to control the country’s Muslims and the second because it would eliminate their rice bowls.
Consequently, Kadyrov’s proposal is unlikely to go anywhere quickly, but because he has made it and apparently made it with impunity vis-à-vis the state, he has gained another constituency and demonstrated that he is someone to be reckoned with not only in Chechnya but in many other parts of the Russian Federation as well.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Posts
