Paul Goble
Vienna, October 11 – By the middle of the 21st century, Moscow’s ambassador for relations with the Organization of the Islamic Conference said yesterday, Muslims will form a majority of the population in the Russian Federation, up from around 15 percent now and “more than a third” of the total in 2027.
At a Moscow press conference, Ambassador Veniamin Popov said these numbers -- which clearly refer not to the number of active believers but rather to the size of historically Islamic nationalities -- represented current “demographic predictions” which, he continued, “apparently are not far from the truth.”
While he insisted that the number of Russian citizens overall continues to decline, Popov said that the rapid growth of the Muslim communities there reflected the fact that in the traditionally Islamic regions of Russia the population continues to grow rapidly (http://www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/print.php?act=news&id=20767).
A similar pattern holds in Europe as a whole, of course, where the number of native-born residents in many countries is declining while the number of immigrants from Muslim regions and their children continue at high levels. As a result, he said, “in two to three generations, Europeans will be a minority” in their own countries.”
This dramatic change in the religious affiliations in these two places, the ambassador concluded, will have a profound effect both on these countries individually and on the international system, with the next few years in particular featuring sharp conflicts between “the world of Islam and the West.”
At a minimum, he concluded, “conflicts like those in the Middle East today and the war in Iraq and Somalia in the immediate future will only become more numerous.”
Popov’s remarks thus provide a useful context for considering three other events reported this week: President Vladimir Putin’s promulgation of a new concept paper on demographic development, polls highlighting inter-ethnic attitudes there, and a threat by Muslim voters to vote against officials who don’t meet their demands.
This morning, President Putin signed off on a concept paper concerning demographic policy in the Russian Federation to the year 2025. The document, to be given more concrete form in the coming months, calls for Moscow to reverse the country’s ongoing demographic decline (http://www.ami-tass.ru/article/28116.html).
Among its provisions are greater state support for pro-natalist policies, expanded public health campaigns designed to reduce alcohol and tobacco consumption and thus cut deathrates among working age men, and a variety of other measures intended to reverse the declines in life expectancy among the citizenry.
Until more details are made available, of course, it is impossible to say whether the document attempts to treat ethnic Russians and historically Muslim groups in much the same way or in radically different ways.
If it treats these groups the same as many expect, that could increase the demographic divergence to which Ambassador Popov points and about which many ethnic Russians are worried. But if it attempts to treat them differently, that could spark protests from the growing and in that case outraged Muslim community itself.
The second development was the release of data by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion concerning Russian attitudes toward ethnicity and the role it has played in the history of that country and in the daily lives of ethnic Russians and others today (http://wciom.ru/novosti/press-vypuski/press-vypusk/single/8946.html).
The poll highlighted many interesting attitudes: Ninety percent believe that Russia has united the various peoples who live within its borders on a peaceful basis, 78 percent say that relations between ethnic groups have always been based on tolerance, and 71 percent said that the government has always treated members of various groups equally.
Asked whether they had encountered discrimination in their own lives on an ethnic basis, only four percent said that they had, And asked whether they would marry someone of a different ethnic group or allow their children to do so, 59 percent of the total sample said they would.
Intriguingly, the share of non-Russians who said they would was far higher – 75 percent – than the fraction of ethnic Russians – 57 percent.
Fifty-four percent of ethnic Russians said that the president of the country must be an ethnic Russian, while 23 percent said he or she might be someone of another nationalities. Among non-Russian groups, however, 58 percent said that they had no objection to having a president of a different nationality than their own.
Sixty-nine percent of the total sample said that they had colleagues or close acquaintances who were of a different nationality, and 68 percent said that they had friends who were not of their own nationality. But significant percentages said they were not related by blood to anyone of a different nationality.
These figures are already significant as indicators of the ways in which ethnic Russians and non-ethnic Russians interact today. They are certain to become more so as the country’s demographic and cultural mix changes in the ways that Ambassador Popov suggests.
And third, there was an intriguing indication that Russia’s Muslims are beginning to act on the basis of their expanded share of the population. Yesterday, religious news sites posted an open letter from Muslims to Moscow Governor Boris Gromov demanding that he back the opening of more mosques (http://www.muslim.ru/1/cont/8/15/1260).
According to its authors, the governor’s administration has been ignoring the will of the Russian president and the Muslim residents of his region by allowing his staff to “slow or at times simply forbid the construction of Muslim houses of worship which are needed” for their religious duties.
The letter ended with a warning: “Mr. Governor, if you think Muslims of our country will quietly react to this and vote for the party on whose regional list you are, a party which is taking part in the elections under the leadership of Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, you are very much mistaken!”
Such threats may become more numerous, but another event this week suggests few Russian officials will take it too seriously now. When an article from Italy reporting that many Christian churches in Western Europe are being closed with some of them being sold to Muslims, Russia’s Union of Muftis of Russia politely changed the title.
La Republica’s title was “From a Europe of Cathedrals to a Europe of Mosques” (http://ww.inopress.ru/repubblica/2007/10/10/12:31:48/berlin). The SMR report featured a less provocative one: “In Russia [Muslims] are building mosques, not taking over anyone else’s churches” (http://www.muslim.ru/1/cont/20/1261.htm).
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Two-Thirds of Muscovites Favor Expelling Migrants from City
Paul Goble
Vienna, October 11 – Convinced that migrants to their city are behind much of the crime there, nearly two out of every three Muscovites now favor expelling them from the city and blocking any new arrivals, according to a survey conducted by the Academy of Sciences Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology.
But that widespread belief propagated by the media and politicians, according to an article in yesterday’s “Novyye izvestiya,” is without foundation because those arriving in the Russian capital are “more likely to turn out to be victims of crimes than their authors” (http://www.newizv.ru/news/2007-10-10/77731/).
According to an official in the city’s militia establishment, 18 percent of all crimes in Moscow this year were committed by “foreigners and stateless persons,” 90 percent of whom were from the former Soviet republics. But prosecutors disputed this claim.
“No one in fact knows how many crimes foreigners commit and what portion they represent in the criminal world of the capital,” prosecutors said. Moreover, “many crimes are never reported, and the main thing is that no one knows how many I=migrants there are in the city.”
Estimates of the number of Moscow’s migrants, many of whom are in the city illegally, range from three million to eight million for a city that officially has a census-based population of 10.4 million. Consequently, calculating the share of crimes any particular migrant group is responsible for is very difficult.
Compounding the difficulty of coming up with an estimate, prosecutors said, is the fact that most migrants engage in crimes like falsifying documents and work permits, violations that are easy for the authorities to find the guilty party, rather than more major crimes, whose perpetrators often go on without charges ever being filed.
There are, of course, a limited number of professional criminals among the migrant populations, “Novyye izvestiya” notes. But they have little in common with the average guest worker. Instead, they typically consist of ethnic groupings that “specialize” in particular kinds of crime.
Despite these findings and the work of scholars like Emil Pain, who for years has challenged any claim that crime in Russia is primarily ethnically based, many groups – most notoriously, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration and its website, http://www.dpni.org – run lurid stories about a supposed flood of ethnic crimes.
Not surprisingly, politicians have responded to these fears, however baseless they are. Moscow Mayor Luzhkov and his administration have called for imposing tighter controls over new migrants and expelling without much ceremony those who refuse to adapt to urban Russian conditions.
The leaders of migrant ethnic communities have responded by offering to help the authorities track down criminals in their midst while insisting that their number is very small both absolutely and in comparison with the surrounding indigenous population of the Russian capital.
Dzhamil Sadykhbekov, the vice president of the National Cultural Autonomy of Azerbaijanis in Russia, told the paper that his group was prepared to assume responsibility for the behavior of the capital’s Azerbaijanis – a group that now forms the second largest nationality in the city after the ethnic Russians.
But like other ethnic leaders, he stressed that to reduce the amount of crime by migrants, it was essential to also “stop the arbitrary actions” against them by the authorities, actions that frequently lead the migrants to violate the law even if they have no initial interest in doing so.
Not surprisingly, the only group among the Russian majority ready to speak out on behalf of the migrants consists of the small number of human rights activists and some although hardly all journalists. But their voices are generally drowned out by those who denounce the migrants as the source of crime – especially in this electoral season.
Vienna, October 11 – Convinced that migrants to their city are behind much of the crime there, nearly two out of every three Muscovites now favor expelling them from the city and blocking any new arrivals, according to a survey conducted by the Academy of Sciences Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology.
But that widespread belief propagated by the media and politicians, according to an article in yesterday’s “Novyye izvestiya,” is without foundation because those arriving in the Russian capital are “more likely to turn out to be victims of crimes than their authors” (http://www.newizv.ru/news/2007-10-10/77731/).
According to an official in the city’s militia establishment, 18 percent of all crimes in Moscow this year were committed by “foreigners and stateless persons,” 90 percent of whom were from the former Soviet republics. But prosecutors disputed this claim.
“No one in fact knows how many crimes foreigners commit and what portion they represent in the criminal world of the capital,” prosecutors said. Moreover, “many crimes are never reported, and the main thing is that no one knows how many I=migrants there are in the city.”
Estimates of the number of Moscow’s migrants, many of whom are in the city illegally, range from three million to eight million for a city that officially has a census-based population of 10.4 million. Consequently, calculating the share of crimes any particular migrant group is responsible for is very difficult.
Compounding the difficulty of coming up with an estimate, prosecutors said, is the fact that most migrants engage in crimes like falsifying documents and work permits, violations that are easy for the authorities to find the guilty party, rather than more major crimes, whose perpetrators often go on without charges ever being filed.
There are, of course, a limited number of professional criminals among the migrant populations, “Novyye izvestiya” notes. But they have little in common with the average guest worker. Instead, they typically consist of ethnic groupings that “specialize” in particular kinds of crime.
Despite these findings and the work of scholars like Emil Pain, who for years has challenged any claim that crime in Russia is primarily ethnically based, many groups – most notoriously, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration and its website, http://www.dpni.org – run lurid stories about a supposed flood of ethnic crimes.
Not surprisingly, politicians have responded to these fears, however baseless they are. Moscow Mayor Luzhkov and his administration have called for imposing tighter controls over new migrants and expelling without much ceremony those who refuse to adapt to urban Russian conditions.
The leaders of migrant ethnic communities have responded by offering to help the authorities track down criminals in their midst while insisting that their number is very small both absolutely and in comparison with the surrounding indigenous population of the Russian capital.
Dzhamil Sadykhbekov, the vice president of the National Cultural Autonomy of Azerbaijanis in Russia, told the paper that his group was prepared to assume responsibility for the behavior of the capital’s Azerbaijanis – a group that now forms the second largest nationality in the city after the ethnic Russians.
But like other ethnic leaders, he stressed that to reduce the amount of crime by migrants, it was essential to also “stop the arbitrary actions” against them by the authorities, actions that frequently lead the migrants to violate the law even if they have no initial interest in doing so.
Not surprisingly, the only group among the Russian majority ready to speak out on behalf of the migrants consists of the small number of human rights activists and some although hardly all journalists. But their voices are generally drowned out by those who denounce the migrants as the source of crime – especially in this electoral season.
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