Paul Goble
Vienna, September 1 – Daghestanis, the residents of the most multi-national non-Russian republic of the Russian Federation and one where the number of nationalities has varied widely in past censuses, have been told that the upcoming enumeration will not “create or destroy” nations.
Yesterday, Sergey Ilyashenko, the head of the Daghestani statistic committee, said yesterday that the census will only measure the self-declared ethnic identities of the people there, a matter of some importance given that the political system in that republic is based on a careful balance of ethnic groups (www.riadagestan.ru/news/2010/08/31/102368/).
“No peoples in the course of the census will be created or destroyed,” the republic statistics chief said. “The [Russian] constitution enshrines the right of citizens to specify their nationality, and this right is realized during the census. What an individual calls himself, we will right down as his nationality, without any discussion or force from the side of the census taker.”
Because “the census is the single source of reports on the ethnic and linguistic composition of the population,” he continued, “our task is to assemble the maximum amount of correct information and in this way not violate the constitutional rights of the individual.” But he did not mention that the Constitution allows people not to declare their nationality at all.
The 2002 census identified 121 different national and ethnic groups in Daghestan, up from 102 in the 1989 enumeration, the product both of the influx of outsiders like Americans and Arabs and also of the re-appearance for the first time since the 1926 census of sub-national groups which had been included within the larger nationalities.
The return of the latter, of course, had the effect of changing the relative size of the larger groups because the percentage of the members of each who chose to identify not with those nations but with smaller groups varied not only among those nationalities but by region within Daghestan thus triggering political tensions in many cases.
This time around, Ilyashenko suggested, the number of nationalities in Daghestan may increase, a development that if true could further dilute the relative power of the largest groups, the Avars and the Lezgins, and open the way to a new ethnic politics at least in some of the republic’s outlying and often unstable regions.
But that possibility is only one of the issues agitating Daghestanis that Ilyashenko attempted to address. He noted that “among the important innovations” of the 2010 count is that it will be a census “not of families” as was the case in the past but of “heads of household,” something that could also change the counts of some groups.
Moreover, “people will be enumerated on the basis of their place of actual residence and not according to the place where they are registered.” That means that those who have failed to get residence permits will now be counted not where there residence permit was in the past but where they are actually living.
Ilyashenko noted that “an important principle of the census is self-definition.” All the data recorded will be on the basis of oral declarations “without the use of any confirming documents.” That involves not only nationality and native language but also the marital status of those making the declarations.
Another point Ilyashenko made is that the census will be conducted in Russian, but he noted that if someone does not know that language or if the census taker does not know the language of the person he or she is interviewing, then translation services will be offered according to rules already worked out by the State Statistics Committee.
Two other issues involving the census are especially sensitive, Ilyashenko suggested. On the one hand, as he pointed out, the information collected will be both impersonal – that is, it will not be linked to any individual and will not be made available to any official agency be it the courts or the FSB or anyone else.
And on the other, given that many Daghestanis are living outside the republic, Makhachkala is interested in developing ties with them. Students, under the rules of the Russian census, are counted where they are studying rather than where their homes or those of their parents are located.
And the more than 200,000 Daghestanis now living outside Daghestani will be counted where they are living. Census takers are worried about double counting, but Daghestani officials and ordinary citizens are concerned than none of them be lost to the republic lest the republic get less than its due on the basis of numbers.
Such concerns are not unusual either in other regions of the Russian Federation or even in other countries, but they are of particular importance for a place like Daghestan given its complex ethnic mosaic and the way in which positions in the government continue in many cases to be allocated on the basis of nationality.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Window on Eurasia: Tajikistan Headed toward ‘Total Islamization,’ Thus Threatening Russia, Moscow Analyst Says
Paul Goble
Vienna, September 1 – Tajikistan, one of the poorest post-Soviet countries and the victim of a bloody civil war in the 1990s, is now headed toward “the total Islamization of society,” a trend that will negatively affect its neighbors in Central Asia and Russia’s security, given the large number of Tajik gastarbeiters in Russian cities, according to a Moscow analyst.
In an article on the Strategic Culture Foundation portal, Aleksandr Shustov says that this trend is one that should be of enormous concern to the Russian powers that be because nearly a million Tajiks are now in Russia and will bring with them many of the Islamist values now being propagated in their homeland (www.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=3237).
At the present time, he continues, Tajikistan has 27 central mosques, 325 cathedral mosques and 3,334 Friday mosques – or one for every 2,000 residents of that country, a level of Islamic penetration far greater than in other Muslim states in the post-Soviet region and one that is not being countered by the presence of ethnic Russians who have largely departed.
(In 1989, Shustov says, there were 388,500 ethnic Russians in Tajikistan, and they, together with other “European” nations formed nearly 500,000 or 12 percent of the total. Today, the number of ethnic Russians remaining “does not exceed 50,000, less than one percent of the population. [And] many of them are pensioners.”)
Islam, both traditional and radical, have long been strong in Tajikistan, the Moscow analyst continues, but first the efforts of Dushanbe to build authority by making concessions to Islam after the civil war and then the unsuccessful attempts to construct a secular “Aryan” identity have combined to increase all forms of Islamic activity, the Moscow analyst says.
Over the last two years, he writes, the Tajik authorities have tried and convicted several hundred Islamic activists, including members of the radical Jamoat Tabliq, many of whose leaders had received training in the medrassahs of Indonesia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Jamoat Tabliq has Salafi Jihadist goals. It wants to lead all Muslims back to “the true Islam” and ultimately secure “the Islamization of the entire planet.” At the present time, Shustov continues, there are “according to various assessments, “about five to six thousand” of the followers of this movement in Tajikistan.
In order to fight the radical Islamists, the government has sought to promote the growth of traditional Hanafi Islam. It has simplified the registration procedures for mosques and prayer houses, leading to an explosion in the number of the two to 364 during the first eight months of this year.
Moreover, Dushanbe has approved the Saudi-financed construction of the largest mosque in Central Asia and the opening of a new building of the local Islamic University. And it has not cracked down on the often radical messages of the 19 officially permitted medrassahs or gone after the approximately 200,000, often radical Ismailis.
As a result, Shustov says, “Islam is becoming an ever more significant factor in the social-political life of Tajikistan,” as the powers that be there seek to counter the rise of Islamism by the promotion of traditional Islam only to discover that the country and its social life are becoming ever more Islamic as a result.
That might not matter to Russia except for the following considerations, the Moscow analyst says. On the one hand, what is taking place in Tajikistan is already affecting its neighbors in Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in particular, where Islamism is also growing.
And on the other, because the number of Tajik gastarbeiters in the Russian Federation is so large, their Islamization is leading to “the penetration” into Russian territory of an ideology that could easily infect many of that country’s more than 20 million Muslims, a development that Moscow would find it increasingly difficult to contain.
Vienna, September 1 – Tajikistan, one of the poorest post-Soviet countries and the victim of a bloody civil war in the 1990s, is now headed toward “the total Islamization of society,” a trend that will negatively affect its neighbors in Central Asia and Russia’s security, given the large number of Tajik gastarbeiters in Russian cities, according to a Moscow analyst.
In an article on the Strategic Culture Foundation portal, Aleksandr Shustov says that this trend is one that should be of enormous concern to the Russian powers that be because nearly a million Tajiks are now in Russia and will bring with them many of the Islamist values now being propagated in their homeland (www.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=3237).
At the present time, he continues, Tajikistan has 27 central mosques, 325 cathedral mosques and 3,334 Friday mosques – or one for every 2,000 residents of that country, a level of Islamic penetration far greater than in other Muslim states in the post-Soviet region and one that is not being countered by the presence of ethnic Russians who have largely departed.
(In 1989, Shustov says, there were 388,500 ethnic Russians in Tajikistan, and they, together with other “European” nations formed nearly 500,000 or 12 percent of the total. Today, the number of ethnic Russians remaining “does not exceed 50,000, less than one percent of the population. [And] many of them are pensioners.”)
Islam, both traditional and radical, have long been strong in Tajikistan, the Moscow analyst continues, but first the efforts of Dushanbe to build authority by making concessions to Islam after the civil war and then the unsuccessful attempts to construct a secular “Aryan” identity have combined to increase all forms of Islamic activity, the Moscow analyst says.
Over the last two years, he writes, the Tajik authorities have tried and convicted several hundred Islamic activists, including members of the radical Jamoat Tabliq, many of whose leaders had received training in the medrassahs of Indonesia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Jamoat Tabliq has Salafi Jihadist goals. It wants to lead all Muslims back to “the true Islam” and ultimately secure “the Islamization of the entire planet.” At the present time, Shustov continues, there are “according to various assessments, “about five to six thousand” of the followers of this movement in Tajikistan.
In order to fight the radical Islamists, the government has sought to promote the growth of traditional Hanafi Islam. It has simplified the registration procedures for mosques and prayer houses, leading to an explosion in the number of the two to 364 during the first eight months of this year.
Moreover, Dushanbe has approved the Saudi-financed construction of the largest mosque in Central Asia and the opening of a new building of the local Islamic University. And it has not cracked down on the often radical messages of the 19 officially permitted medrassahs or gone after the approximately 200,000, often radical Ismailis.
As a result, Shustov says, “Islam is becoming an ever more significant factor in the social-political life of Tajikistan,” as the powers that be there seek to counter the rise of Islamism by the promotion of traditional Islam only to discover that the country and its social life are becoming ever more Islamic as a result.
That might not matter to Russia except for the following considerations, the Moscow analyst says. On the one hand, what is taking place in Tajikistan is already affecting its neighbors in Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in particular, where Islamism is also growing.
And on the other, because the number of Tajik gastarbeiters in the Russian Federation is so large, their Islamization is leading to “the penetration” into Russian territory of an ideology that could easily infect many of that country’s more than 20 million Muslims, a development that Moscow would find it increasingly difficult to contain.
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