Paul Goble
Baku, January 23 – The Russian government has asked the Duma to approve a bill that would give prosecutors broad discretion to retry those people juries have found innocent or given sentences to that officials think are too lenient, thus effectively ending the existing ban on double jeopardy.
Not only does the measure threaten to restore the powers prosecutors had in Soviet times, but Russian defense lawyers and civil rights activists say that this attack on what some might view as only a procedural right opens the door to a situation in which officials may feel ever freer to ignore such “a petty thing” as law itself.
On Monday, the Russian government submitted a draft bill to the Duma that amends Article 405 of the Criminal Procedure Code. It would allow prosecutors to retry those whom juries had failed to convict or imposed lighter sentences on than the government had sought (http://www.sobkorr.ru/news/47958851A0901.html)
The draft measure specifies that prosecutors can do so, thus vacating jury decisions and undermining double jeopardy provisions, if they believe there has been an “essential” violation of the rights of those involved. But because the bill does not define the meaning of that term, lawyers say it opens the way for prosecutorial abuse.
Henrikh Padva, a Moscow lawyer, said that all attorneys with whom he had spoken opposed to the measure, viewing it as a return to the situation that existed in Soviet times. Genri Reznik, the president of the Attorneys’ Chamber in the Russian capital agreed.
The United Nations, he pointed out, now prohibits prosecutors from retrying someone a jury has acquitted, although he noted that the corresponding European Convention does allow for certain exceptions. But however that might be, he said, the government’s draft will reduce the number of acquittals in Russia.
A series of Russian court decisions have laid the groundwork for this new measure, several lawyers pointed out. In May 2005, the Russian Constitutional Court ruled that prosecutors could retry those juries had acquitted or given light sentences to if there had been “fundamental” violations of rights.
But just like the current measure, the Court failed to define what those rights were thus allowing prosecutors and officials behind them to ignore the ban on double jeopardy and thus threaten the rights Russian citizens have gained since the collapse of the communist system 1991
As much of a threat as this measure would be in and of itself to the rights of Russian citizens, one commentator, Yuri Gladysh, argues that the latest government proposal in fact represents something worse: “a bomb under the foundation” of the entire Russian legal system.
By sweeping away a procedural protection of a fundamental right, he suggests, Moscow is sending a signal to prosecutors and other officials that from now on they can do whatever they like without “paying any attention at all to such a petty thing as law itself.”
According to former justice minister and United Russia deputy, Pavel Krasheninnikov, the new Duma almost certainly will approve this measure, possibly opening the way for retrying prominent people like Khodorkovskiy as well as ordinary citizens (http://www.apn.ru/news/article18982.htm).
Meanwhile, officials at the Russian interior ministry have come up with another draft law that also could threaten the rights Russian citizens are supposed to enjoy under the constitution. It would allow the police to conduct sting operations against anyone suspected of taking bribes, Gazeta reported (http://www.nr2.ru/policy/159939.html).
The measure, which is already written and is expected to be considered at a ministerial collegium meeting on February 8 that President Vladimir Putin might attend, would drop existing safeguards against the abuse of such police practices, however politically popular they might be in the fight against corruption.
Indeed, remarks by Putin’s designated successor Dmitry Medvedev to the second Civic Forum in Moscow yesterday on the need to step up the struggle against corruption suggest that the country’s leadership is prepared to support almost any measure in this area (http://www.annews.ru/news/detail.php?ID=147936).
Both defense lawyers and civil rights advocates in Moscow have already spoken out against such a step, one that has been anticipated by what the Interior Ministry calls “operational experiments” in this area. They say that it also opens the way to the violation of the Constitutional rights of Russian citizens.
And Yevgeniy Chernousov, a leading lawyer in the Russian capital, even pointed out that the European Court of Human Rights has demanded that the Russian government limit rather than expand the number of such “experiments” and of criminal charges brought on the basis of their findings.
For various reasons, including perhaps a fear that such measures could be directed against them or their friends in the bureaucracy, many members of the Duma are likely to react skeptically to any such proposal by the Interior Ministry should it reach them for consideration.
Gennady Gudkov, deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on Security, said yesterday that the government has failed to win support for similar measures several times over the last few years and may not this time. But others are not so sure that the new Duma will reject what the government wants now.
And that led Chernousov to warn that if the government and then the parliament do approve the elimination of existing limitations on the use of sting operations, there will be more of them and the civil rights of Russian citizens as a consequence will be further eroded.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Window on Eurasia: Muslim Leaders Seek Broad Accord with Russia’s Military
Paul Goble
Baku, January 23 – Russia’s Muslim leaders hope to sign an agreement with the Russian military this year, regularizing their work with service personnel and thus putting it on the same basis that the Russian Orthodox Church has had with that country’s armed services for more than a decade.
Russia’s mullahs and muftis have worked with soldiers for the last 15 years, but up to now, these activities, which include organizing prayers, supplying religious literature, and providing counseling, have depended on agreements between individual religious leaders and individual commanders, often below field grade in rank.
The leaders of some Muslim communities have been very active in this area but others have not, and some officers have been enthusiastic about their participation in military life but many have refused the Muslims access, either from a commitment to Russian Orthodoxy or a belief that no religions should be active among soldiers.
Now, however, with the percentage of “ethnic” Muslims running as high as 30 or 40 percent in some units and with President Vladimir Putin expressing his support for all of Russia’s “traditional” faiths, of which Islam is one, Muslim leaders and senior commanders are exploring the possibility of a kind of concordat between them.
The precedent for such an agreement is the series of accords signed by the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ministry of Defense in the mid-1990s. Those documents give the clergy access to troops regardless of the personnel opinions of junior officers.
The Patriarchate has used these agreements not only to send its priests into units throughout the country and build churches specifically for service personnel but also to press for a government-funded corps of chaplains. And to this end, it has set up a special department for work with the military and security services.
The smaller, poorer, and less centralized Muslim community has lagged behind, but this week, the two largest Muslim groups in the Russian Federation – the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR) under Ravil’ Gainutdin and the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) under Talgat Tajuddin – said that they believe their time has come.
A spokesman for the SMR told the press that it is doing so because “one of the main tasks of Muslim organizations is the strengthening of the defense capabilities of Russia. … Service in the army is one of the basic obligations of a Muslim because in this way he defends” his country (http://www.islam.ru/rus/2008-01-21/#19358).
And a representative of the Central MSD said that the time for a general agreement had arrived because there are now more Muslim soldiers and “our servicemen need spiritual instruction. But officials in that Ufa-based organization indicated that they have another compelling reason for seeking a broader accord.
During the last year, they said, the Central MSD has worked with the defense ministry to “rebury according to Muslim rites the remains of dozens of Muslim soldiers, including those from fraternal graves in Tallinn.” And in the year ahead, he added, “our Islamic organization will increase its work in this direction.”
Neither the SMR nor the Central MSD, however, pointed to an additional reason for their decision to press for an accord now: Both are being pushed by the heads of Muslim groups subordinate to them, and each may fear that they could lose control over them if they do not try to keep in the lead.
One of the subordinate groups that has been particularly active is the MSD of Karelia, whose leadership has worked actively over the last several years to reach agreements with military and security service commanders in that northwestern republic (www.islamrk.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=372&Itemid=12).
But other regional MSDs – including those in Tatarstan, Vladimir, Orenburg, and Sakhalin – and neither Gainutdin nor Tajuddin is interested in seeing any of those groups getting ahead of them or in failing to get an accord with the Russian military before a new shift in the political winds in Moscow might make that impossible.
Baku, January 23 – Russia’s Muslim leaders hope to sign an agreement with the Russian military this year, regularizing their work with service personnel and thus putting it on the same basis that the Russian Orthodox Church has had with that country’s armed services for more than a decade.
Russia’s mullahs and muftis have worked with soldiers for the last 15 years, but up to now, these activities, which include organizing prayers, supplying religious literature, and providing counseling, have depended on agreements between individual religious leaders and individual commanders, often below field grade in rank.
The leaders of some Muslim communities have been very active in this area but others have not, and some officers have been enthusiastic about their participation in military life but many have refused the Muslims access, either from a commitment to Russian Orthodoxy or a belief that no religions should be active among soldiers.
Now, however, with the percentage of “ethnic” Muslims running as high as 30 or 40 percent in some units and with President Vladimir Putin expressing his support for all of Russia’s “traditional” faiths, of which Islam is one, Muslim leaders and senior commanders are exploring the possibility of a kind of concordat between them.
The precedent for such an agreement is the series of accords signed by the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ministry of Defense in the mid-1990s. Those documents give the clergy access to troops regardless of the personnel opinions of junior officers.
The Patriarchate has used these agreements not only to send its priests into units throughout the country and build churches specifically for service personnel but also to press for a government-funded corps of chaplains. And to this end, it has set up a special department for work with the military and security services.
The smaller, poorer, and less centralized Muslim community has lagged behind, but this week, the two largest Muslim groups in the Russian Federation – the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR) under Ravil’ Gainutdin and the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) under Talgat Tajuddin – said that they believe their time has come.
A spokesman for the SMR told the press that it is doing so because “one of the main tasks of Muslim organizations is the strengthening of the defense capabilities of Russia. … Service in the army is one of the basic obligations of a Muslim because in this way he defends” his country (http://www.islam.ru/rus/2008-01-21/#19358).
And a representative of the Central MSD said that the time for a general agreement had arrived because there are now more Muslim soldiers and “our servicemen need spiritual instruction. But officials in that Ufa-based organization indicated that they have another compelling reason for seeking a broader accord.
During the last year, they said, the Central MSD has worked with the defense ministry to “rebury according to Muslim rites the remains of dozens of Muslim soldiers, including those from fraternal graves in Tallinn.” And in the year ahead, he added, “our Islamic organization will increase its work in this direction.”
Neither the SMR nor the Central MSD, however, pointed to an additional reason for their decision to press for an accord now: Both are being pushed by the heads of Muslim groups subordinate to them, and each may fear that they could lose control over them if they do not try to keep in the lead.
One of the subordinate groups that has been particularly active is the MSD of Karelia, whose leadership has worked actively over the last several years to reach agreements with military and security service commanders in that northwestern republic (www.islamrk.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=372&Itemid=12).
But other regional MSDs – including those in Tatarstan, Vladimir, Orenburg, and Sakhalin – and neither Gainutdin nor Tajuddin is interested in seeing any of those groups getting ahead of them or in failing to get an accord with the Russian military before a new shift in the political winds in Moscow might make that impossible.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Window on Eurasia: Russian North Deserves Better Treatment and More Respect
Paul Goble
Baku, January 22 – Not only do the numerically small ethnic groups of Russia’s north suffer from poor services and the absence of links to the outside world, despite their region’s contribution to the economy, but they suffer from abuse in the post-Soviet media which appear to treat them all as one enormous and inappropriate Chukchi joke.
Now, however, their representatives in the parliament and the leaders of their NGOs are fighting back, calling attention to the injustice of the ways they are treated in life and in the press and demanding that the Russian state do more, with explicit threats that if Moscow does not, they will appeal to international agencies to force its hand.
At the end of last week, Gennadiy Oleynik, who represents the Khanty-Mansiisk region in the Federation Council and chairs that body’s Committee on the North and Indigenous Peoples, told Scandinavian journalists that “it’s time for Russia to treat the people of the North better” (http://www.barentsobserver.com, January 18).
He called attention to the growing gap between the contribution that region makes to the Russian economy as a whole and the lives of the people in that region. In 2007, he said, the North attracted a fifth of all foreign investments, generated a quarter of company profits, and paid more than 35 percent of the taxes Moscow collected.
But its population continued to decline – it is down by more than two million since 1990 and now stands at only 10.6 million. Life expectancies are more than ten years lower than the national average. Incomes are lower as well but unemployment is much higher. And more than a quarter of the population consists of impoverished pensioners.
This week, his committee posted on its website, http://severcom.ru/analytics/, a report its staff had prepared on just one of the areas in which the Russian North lags far behind the rest of the country and which leaders like Oleynik hope it can somehow get the assistance the region needs to catch up.
That is its abysmally poor system of roads and highways. Although the northern regions of the Russian Federation cover more than 60 percent the country, they have only 15 percent of highways. More than half of the 140,000 km of roads there are not paved, and many do not link many communities to the outside world year around or even at all.
The committee’s report, which was compiled with the assistance of the RF transportation ministry and regional governments, provides a wealth of detail about the roads in each of the regions and about the consequences of the overall weakness of this sector for the country’s economy and the people who live there.
One point the report stresses is that the roads are so bad that they carry very little cargo even though that is the reason many of them were built. Only seven percent of the vehicles on the road are trucks, a share swamped by the increasing number of private cars.
A second conclusion the report draws is the impact of bad roads on travel costs. Poor quality highways across that region mean that the cost of automobile trips because of breakdowns and accidents is “five to ten times higher” than in central Russia and “1.5 times higher than in analogous districts of other countries.
And yet a third is that the roads, paved or not, do not link the places where people live. In the Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous District, for example, only 35 percent of the 213 population centers have year-round access to the outside world via roads, a pattern that makes it far more difficult for them to get medical treatment or better jobs.
In addition to poverty, cold and the lack of transport, last week the peoples of the Russian North had to suffer the indignity of a snide attack in Russkiy Newsweek on their way of life and their supposed efforts to “blackmail” the Russian government into giving them more money (http://www.runewsweek.ru/them/?tid=149&rid=2310).
According to that magazine, the indigenous peoples in this region are too small to take over the country or pursue separatist agendas and instead “prefer” to engage in “blackmail,” threatening to leave, harm Russia’s economic interests, or to appeal to the UN not because they intend to do so but because Moscow will usually buy them off.
Moreover, Russkiy Newsweek continued, these threats have allowed them to live well by forcing Russian oil and gas companies to pay them enormous royalties and given them disproportionate and totally unjustified influence over the country’s political arrangements.
Three years ago, the journal said, the vice speaker of the Khanty-Mansiisk duma played “a decisive role” in blocking President Vladimir Putin’s plan to unify that small non-Russian region with its larger and predominantly ethnic Russian neighbor, Tyumen oblast.
The vice speaker, Yeremei Aydin, said at the time that Tyumen wanted to get at the wealth of his district and leave it “without a penny.” And he warned that “we indigenous peoples are being deprived of statehood. We will complain to UNESCO and the United Nations.”
In the pre-Internet days, that story, which recalls the racist Chukchi jokes of Soviet times that made often malicious fun of that small ethnic group, would have been the end of it. But now the indigenous peoples are exploiting the web to get their side of the story out and thereby attract attention to their plight.
In an open letter to the editors of Russkiy Newsweek posted on the website of the Russian Association of the Indigenous Peoples of the North (http://www.raipon.org) yesterday, the leaders of that organization denounced the Moscow weekly for its “inaccurate” reporting and “impermissible” behavior.
The magazine’s portrayal of the indigenous peoples of Russia as backward, fat and happy is simply not true and appears designed to cater to the widespread xenophobia in Russian society and to business interests prepared to ride roughshod over the lives of smaller groups in the pursuit of profit.
We are all equal, the RAIPON leaders said; and the peoples of Russia’s North are neither rich nor happy. They do not get anything like a fair share of the wealth that businesses are generating in their region, and they have never been compensated for the destruction of their homelands.
According to official statistics, they note, industrial development of the North now threatens 40 percent of the reindeer pastures, and with their destruction comes the passing of a people’s way of life and hence of the people itself. And members of these communities are twice as likely to kill themselves as are Russians elsewhere.
RAIPON said that it was “confident that the indigenous peoples of the United States, Canada and Australia will be able to defend themselves from the slander” contained in Russkiy Newsweek. But they said that their organization was “obligated to defend the honor and dignity of the indigenous peoples of the North of Russia.”
And in addition to posting their letter on their own site and those of Northern peoples elsewhere, the authors called on the Moscow magazine’s editors “to print our response so that [its] readers can find out the other truth about the situation of the indigenous peoples of Russia.”
Baku, January 22 – Not only do the numerically small ethnic groups of Russia’s north suffer from poor services and the absence of links to the outside world, despite their region’s contribution to the economy, but they suffer from abuse in the post-Soviet media which appear to treat them all as one enormous and inappropriate Chukchi joke.
Now, however, their representatives in the parliament and the leaders of their NGOs are fighting back, calling attention to the injustice of the ways they are treated in life and in the press and demanding that the Russian state do more, with explicit threats that if Moscow does not, they will appeal to international agencies to force its hand.
At the end of last week, Gennadiy Oleynik, who represents the Khanty-Mansiisk region in the Federation Council and chairs that body’s Committee on the North and Indigenous Peoples, told Scandinavian journalists that “it’s time for Russia to treat the people of the North better” (http://www.barentsobserver.com, January 18).
He called attention to the growing gap between the contribution that region makes to the Russian economy as a whole and the lives of the people in that region. In 2007, he said, the North attracted a fifth of all foreign investments, generated a quarter of company profits, and paid more than 35 percent of the taxes Moscow collected.
But its population continued to decline – it is down by more than two million since 1990 and now stands at only 10.6 million. Life expectancies are more than ten years lower than the national average. Incomes are lower as well but unemployment is much higher. And more than a quarter of the population consists of impoverished pensioners.
This week, his committee posted on its website, http://severcom.ru/analytics/, a report its staff had prepared on just one of the areas in which the Russian North lags far behind the rest of the country and which leaders like Oleynik hope it can somehow get the assistance the region needs to catch up.
That is its abysmally poor system of roads and highways. Although the northern regions of the Russian Federation cover more than 60 percent the country, they have only 15 percent of highways. More than half of the 140,000 km of roads there are not paved, and many do not link many communities to the outside world year around or even at all.
The committee’s report, which was compiled with the assistance of the RF transportation ministry and regional governments, provides a wealth of detail about the roads in each of the regions and about the consequences of the overall weakness of this sector for the country’s economy and the people who live there.
One point the report stresses is that the roads are so bad that they carry very little cargo even though that is the reason many of them were built. Only seven percent of the vehicles on the road are trucks, a share swamped by the increasing number of private cars.
A second conclusion the report draws is the impact of bad roads on travel costs. Poor quality highways across that region mean that the cost of automobile trips because of breakdowns and accidents is “five to ten times higher” than in central Russia and “1.5 times higher than in analogous districts of other countries.
And yet a third is that the roads, paved or not, do not link the places where people live. In the Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous District, for example, only 35 percent of the 213 population centers have year-round access to the outside world via roads, a pattern that makes it far more difficult for them to get medical treatment or better jobs.
In addition to poverty, cold and the lack of transport, last week the peoples of the Russian North had to suffer the indignity of a snide attack in Russkiy Newsweek on their way of life and their supposed efforts to “blackmail” the Russian government into giving them more money (http://www.runewsweek.ru/them/?tid=149&rid=2310).
According to that magazine, the indigenous peoples in this region are too small to take over the country or pursue separatist agendas and instead “prefer” to engage in “blackmail,” threatening to leave, harm Russia’s economic interests, or to appeal to the UN not because they intend to do so but because Moscow will usually buy them off.
Moreover, Russkiy Newsweek continued, these threats have allowed them to live well by forcing Russian oil and gas companies to pay them enormous royalties and given them disproportionate and totally unjustified influence over the country’s political arrangements.
Three years ago, the journal said, the vice speaker of the Khanty-Mansiisk duma played “a decisive role” in blocking President Vladimir Putin’s plan to unify that small non-Russian region with its larger and predominantly ethnic Russian neighbor, Tyumen oblast.
The vice speaker, Yeremei Aydin, said at the time that Tyumen wanted to get at the wealth of his district and leave it “without a penny.” And he warned that “we indigenous peoples are being deprived of statehood. We will complain to UNESCO and the United Nations.”
In the pre-Internet days, that story, which recalls the racist Chukchi jokes of Soviet times that made often malicious fun of that small ethnic group, would have been the end of it. But now the indigenous peoples are exploiting the web to get their side of the story out and thereby attract attention to their plight.
In an open letter to the editors of Russkiy Newsweek posted on the website of the Russian Association of the Indigenous Peoples of the North (http://www.raipon.org) yesterday, the leaders of that organization denounced the Moscow weekly for its “inaccurate” reporting and “impermissible” behavior.
The magazine’s portrayal of the indigenous peoples of Russia as backward, fat and happy is simply not true and appears designed to cater to the widespread xenophobia in Russian society and to business interests prepared to ride roughshod over the lives of smaller groups in the pursuit of profit.
We are all equal, the RAIPON leaders said; and the peoples of Russia’s North are neither rich nor happy. They do not get anything like a fair share of the wealth that businesses are generating in their region, and they have never been compensated for the destruction of their homelands.
According to official statistics, they note, industrial development of the North now threatens 40 percent of the reindeer pastures, and with their destruction comes the passing of a people’s way of life and hence of the people itself. And members of these communities are twice as likely to kill themselves as are Russians elsewhere.
RAIPON said that it was “confident that the indigenous peoples of the United States, Canada and Australia will be able to defend themselves from the slander” contained in Russkiy Newsweek. But they said that their organization was “obligated to defend the honor and dignity of the indigenous peoples of the North of Russia.”
And in addition to posting their letter on their own site and those of Northern peoples elsewhere, the authors called on the Moscow magazine’s editors “to print our response so that [its] readers can find out the other truth about the situation of the indigenous peoples of Russia.”
Window on Eurasia: Could Moscow Pay Its Debt to Russia’s Muslims?
Paul Goble
Baku, January 22 – Russian President Vladimir Putin recently promised that Moscow would make restitution to Russia’s “traditional” religions for their losses in Soviet times, but a Muslim scholar suggests that there is no easy way for the Russian government to do so with regard to the losses of the country’s Islamic community.
In an interview posted on the Islam.ru portal this week, Damir Khayretdinov, an ethnographer who specializes on the Islamic community of Russia and writes frequently about contemporary issues, argues that Putin was speaking in the first instance to the Russian Orthodox Church but that Muslims must hold him accountable as well.
He describes three kinds of property that Muslims should seek compensation for – mosques, medressahs, and waqfs (businesses whose earnings support Islamic activities) – and in each case outlines why both Moscow and the Muslims will find it extremely difficult to agree on compensation (http://www.islam.ru/pressclub/vslux/rugodel/ ).
First, Khayretdinov says, Putin’s remarks concerned in the first instance church buildings the Soviet government seized and that the Russian government still owns. And while the Soviets seized and destroyed many mosques, the situation Muslims find themselves in today is very different.
Although “the majority” of these Muslim religious buildings have been restored since 1991, they have been rebuild “not thanks to the state” but “mostly” with funds provided by local communities as well as “with the help of foreign charitable organizations” in Muslim countries abroad.
When Moscow blocked the activities of these foreign groups, Khayretdinov notes, “the financial base of the Muslims of Russia was once again undermined.” That raises a most interesting question: “Who will pay the Muslims for that which has already been reestablished? For that which was forcibly taken away or destroyed by the state?”
That is a very different situation than the one the Russian Orthodox Church finds itself in, he continues, although “in certain regions” of the country, there is still the issue of “the return of the historic buildings of the mosques of believers. That problem also requires its own resolution.”
Second, he says, there is the question of the entire system of Muslim educational institutions like medressahs and mektebs which were “liquidated” by the Soviets and now “also need to be reestablished.” These too have been funded directly by the local communities or from abroad, but now the government is providing some money.
Unfortunately, Khayretdinov argues, “it is still not clear” how the Russian government-backed Foundation for the Support of Islamic Culture, Science and Education is making its decisions, “but in any case, this is a [useful, first] step in the right direction.”
And third, he continues, there is the issue of the restoration of waqf properties. In some ways these are “analogues” to the monasteries of the Orthodox Church. And there is no question that “this system must be reestablished” if the Muslim community is to be put on a sound and independent financial basis.
“But the problem here is that nothing has been done” about creating the necessary legal arrangements at the federal level for waqfs. Some regional governments have allowed Muslim communities to restore waqf properties, but without a federal law, their existence continues to be at risk.
But there is another aspect to the question of restitution for which there is no easy answer. That concerns how to compensate for the Soviet destruction of religious leaders, its destruction of religious literature, and its destruction of “national culture,” including the Arabic script – which “which had linked” Russia’s Muslims to the Arab world.
“To restore all this and especially to try to do it all at once will be complicated,” Khayretdinov says. But Putin has opened the door to the recovery of what the communist regime took from Islam, and Russia’s “Muslim intelligentsia must thus set this [goal] as its maximum program.”
Baku, January 22 – Russian President Vladimir Putin recently promised that Moscow would make restitution to Russia’s “traditional” religions for their losses in Soviet times, but a Muslim scholar suggests that there is no easy way for the Russian government to do so with regard to the losses of the country’s Islamic community.
In an interview posted on the Islam.ru portal this week, Damir Khayretdinov, an ethnographer who specializes on the Islamic community of Russia and writes frequently about contemporary issues, argues that Putin was speaking in the first instance to the Russian Orthodox Church but that Muslims must hold him accountable as well.
He describes three kinds of property that Muslims should seek compensation for – mosques, medressahs, and waqfs (businesses whose earnings support Islamic activities) – and in each case outlines why both Moscow and the Muslims will find it extremely difficult to agree on compensation (http://www.islam.ru/pressclub/vslux/rugodel/ ).
First, Khayretdinov says, Putin’s remarks concerned in the first instance church buildings the Soviet government seized and that the Russian government still owns. And while the Soviets seized and destroyed many mosques, the situation Muslims find themselves in today is very different.
Although “the majority” of these Muslim religious buildings have been restored since 1991, they have been rebuild “not thanks to the state” but “mostly” with funds provided by local communities as well as “with the help of foreign charitable organizations” in Muslim countries abroad.
When Moscow blocked the activities of these foreign groups, Khayretdinov notes, “the financial base of the Muslims of Russia was once again undermined.” That raises a most interesting question: “Who will pay the Muslims for that which has already been reestablished? For that which was forcibly taken away or destroyed by the state?”
That is a very different situation than the one the Russian Orthodox Church finds itself in, he continues, although “in certain regions” of the country, there is still the issue of “the return of the historic buildings of the mosques of believers. That problem also requires its own resolution.”
Second, he says, there is the question of the entire system of Muslim educational institutions like medressahs and mektebs which were “liquidated” by the Soviets and now “also need to be reestablished.” These too have been funded directly by the local communities or from abroad, but now the government is providing some money.
Unfortunately, Khayretdinov argues, “it is still not clear” how the Russian government-backed Foundation for the Support of Islamic Culture, Science and Education is making its decisions, “but in any case, this is a [useful, first] step in the right direction.”
And third, he continues, there is the issue of the restoration of waqf properties. In some ways these are “analogues” to the monasteries of the Orthodox Church. And there is no question that “this system must be reestablished” if the Muslim community is to be put on a sound and independent financial basis.
“But the problem here is that nothing has been done” about creating the necessary legal arrangements at the federal level for waqfs. Some regional governments have allowed Muslim communities to restore waqf properties, but without a federal law, their existence continues to be at risk.
But there is another aspect to the question of restitution for which there is no easy answer. That concerns how to compensate for the Soviet destruction of religious leaders, its destruction of religious literature, and its destruction of “national culture,” including the Arabic script – which “which had linked” Russia’s Muslims to the Arab world.
“To restore all this and especially to try to do it all at once will be complicated,” Khayretdinov says. But Putin has opened the door to the recovery of what the communist regime took from Islam, and Russia’s “Muslim intelligentsia must thus set this [goal] as its maximum program.”
Window on Eurasia: ‘No Guarantee’ Moscow Won’t Ban Koran, Russia’s Muslims Fear
Paul Goble
Baku, January 22 – Moscow’s decision to ban more books of Islamic content at the end of last year without any justification means that Russia’s Muslims “have no guarantee that tomorrow they will not ban the Koran,” according to leaders of the Islamic community there.
But still worse, the new bans put Muslims who want to be law-abiding Russian citizens in an impossible situation: What are they to do with books they may be reading that the courts or other authorities have suddenly and for Muslims unexpectedly declared extremist and whose possession has therefore become a crime?
The bans make no provision for that, and as several Muslim leaders pointed out this week, “not one Muslim in Russia is prepared to burn books” or simply destroy them in other ways if they contain references to Mohammed. Indeed, if they were caught while destroying such books, they might be charged with the crime of possessing them.
In an interview published on the Russian Islamic Heritage site, Fatykh Garifullin argued that “the entire Muslim community of Russia was shocked and revolted by the bans of Muslim literature announced last year both by an Orenburg court and the Federal Registration Service (http://www.islamnasledie.ru/news.php?id=870).
“As far as I know,” the Muslim legal specialist said, “all these books are based on the Koran and the Sunna.” For the last ten years, they have been freely available, “and no one had anything against that.” But now the Russian authorities say they are “extremist” without any apparent justification except that some of them came from Saudi Arabia!
Given the government’s approach, he continued, Muslims in Russia “have no guarantee that [the Russian government] will not ban the Koran” for equally unjustified reasons offered by supposed “experts” who do not know Arabic or anything about the Islamic faith.
But even if that does not happen, the head of the Tyumen kaziyat said, the Russian government has created an absurd situation. No Muslim is ready “to burn books or take them from library shelves,” but none of them know how they should proceed if they have such suddenly banned books in their possession.
And consequently, Garifullin continued, Russia’s Muslims must organize to demand the reversal of these unjustified judicial and administrative declarations by “establishing an expert commission of qualified theologians and scholars who could provide a competent assessment” of books Moscow now says are “extremist.”
In an interview posted on the Islam.ru website this week, Mukkaddas Bibarsov, the head of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of the Volga Region and a leader of the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR), provides some additional insights on these issues (http://www.islam.ru/pressclub/gost/poreska/?print_page).
Because the ban on Islamic literature makes its ownership equivalent to the possession of illegal drugs and thus at least theoretically subject to the same penalties, Muslims who want to be good citizens of the Russian Federation, have been put in an impossible situation.
They can’t throw the books in the trash, burn or bury them, or tear them up into small pieces, the MSD chief said, because if they are caught in the act, they could be charged with a crime. And consequently, he suggested, some of them think they need to act with stealth.
“Each ought to burn the books, let us say those of Nursi [a Turkish theologian many officials view as extremist], all by himself, at night, outside the city, so that no one, and especially militiamen, will see what he is doing,” Bibarsov said, suggesting that this “theater of the absurd” recalls Nazi Germany and medieval inquisitions.
If the Russian government is going to ban books and Bibarsov is open the possibility that some should be, it must establish procedures for those who have them in their possession and are thus at risk of criminal charges to be able turn them in without penalty and also provide better justifications for these bans than it has offered up to now.
Unless it does so, the Russian government will allow radicals in the Muslim world to argue that Moscow is engaged “in a struggle with Islam as such,” a charge that even if it is “without foundation” in most respects, ever more of Russia’s Muslims will take seriously if the authorities do not behave in a more sensible fashion.
Baku, January 22 – Moscow’s decision to ban more books of Islamic content at the end of last year without any justification means that Russia’s Muslims “have no guarantee that tomorrow they will not ban the Koran,” according to leaders of the Islamic community there.
But still worse, the new bans put Muslims who want to be law-abiding Russian citizens in an impossible situation: What are they to do with books they may be reading that the courts or other authorities have suddenly and for Muslims unexpectedly declared extremist and whose possession has therefore become a crime?
The bans make no provision for that, and as several Muslim leaders pointed out this week, “not one Muslim in Russia is prepared to burn books” or simply destroy them in other ways if they contain references to Mohammed. Indeed, if they were caught while destroying such books, they might be charged with the crime of possessing them.
In an interview published on the Russian Islamic Heritage site, Fatykh Garifullin argued that “the entire Muslim community of Russia was shocked and revolted by the bans of Muslim literature announced last year both by an Orenburg court and the Federal Registration Service (http://www.islamnasledie.ru/news.php?id=870).
“As far as I know,” the Muslim legal specialist said, “all these books are based on the Koran and the Sunna.” For the last ten years, they have been freely available, “and no one had anything against that.” But now the Russian authorities say they are “extremist” without any apparent justification except that some of them came from Saudi Arabia!
Given the government’s approach, he continued, Muslims in Russia “have no guarantee that [the Russian government] will not ban the Koran” for equally unjustified reasons offered by supposed “experts” who do not know Arabic or anything about the Islamic faith.
But even if that does not happen, the head of the Tyumen kaziyat said, the Russian government has created an absurd situation. No Muslim is ready “to burn books or take them from library shelves,” but none of them know how they should proceed if they have such suddenly banned books in their possession.
And consequently, Garifullin continued, Russia’s Muslims must organize to demand the reversal of these unjustified judicial and administrative declarations by “establishing an expert commission of qualified theologians and scholars who could provide a competent assessment” of books Moscow now says are “extremist.”
In an interview posted on the Islam.ru website this week, Mukkaddas Bibarsov, the head of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of the Volga Region and a leader of the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR), provides some additional insights on these issues (http://www.islam.ru/pressclub/gost/poreska/?print_page).
Because the ban on Islamic literature makes its ownership equivalent to the possession of illegal drugs and thus at least theoretically subject to the same penalties, Muslims who want to be good citizens of the Russian Federation, have been put in an impossible situation.
They can’t throw the books in the trash, burn or bury them, or tear them up into small pieces, the MSD chief said, because if they are caught in the act, they could be charged with a crime. And consequently, he suggested, some of them think they need to act with stealth.
“Each ought to burn the books, let us say those of Nursi [a Turkish theologian many officials view as extremist], all by himself, at night, outside the city, so that no one, and especially militiamen, will see what he is doing,” Bibarsov said, suggesting that this “theater of the absurd” recalls Nazi Germany and medieval inquisitions.
If the Russian government is going to ban books and Bibarsov is open the possibility that some should be, it must establish procedures for those who have them in their possession and are thus at risk of criminal charges to be able turn them in without penalty and also provide better justifications for these bans than it has offered up to now.
Unless it does so, the Russian government will allow radicals in the Muslim world to argue that Moscow is engaged “in a struggle with Islam as such,” a charge that even if it is “without foundation” in most respects, ever more of Russia’s Muslims will take seriously if the authorities do not behave in a more sensible fashion.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Window on Eurasia: Azerbaijan’s Shiites ‘Nationalize’ an Islamic Holiday
Paul Goble
Baku, January 21 – On Saturday, most Shiite Muslims around the world marked the anniversary of the death of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohamed, in 680 CE by flagellating themselves as a symbolic re-enactment of that event, actions that in Iran at least have led to outbursts of anger against the United States and Israel.
But in neighboring Azerbaijan, two-thirds of whose people are traditionally Shiite, a very different commemoration of Ashura, as this holy day is known among the faithful, is taking root, one that calls on believers to mark this event not by shedding their own blood needlessly but rather by donating it to blood banks for needy children.
Even in the Soviet period, many Shiites in Azerbaijan marked Ashura in the traditional way. And while a few still do, far more have decided to follow the lead of Baku’s Juma community which in 1999 urged its members to “shed” their blood by donating it (http://www.newsazerbaijan.ru/obsh/20080119/42111622.html).
One reason is that this local initiative has since been extended to all the Shiites of Azerbaijan by the head of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of the Caucasus, Sheikh-ul-Islam Allahshukur Pashazade. And at a press conference last Friday, he again called on his fellow Shiites to “shed” blood in this new way.
Donating blood, the Shiite leader said, is “a noble act” which “the spirit of Hussein” will reward by reserving a place for those who do so in paradise. And he noted that many mosques have organized clinics to make it easy for the faithful to help others in this way (http://www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/newstext/news/id/1205994.html).
According to the Baku media, Pashazade led the staff of the MSD to donate blood, and “thousands of [other] Muslims voluntarily participated in this action,” including more than 100 people” at the city’s landmark Blue Mosque alone
(http://www.islam.az/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2626).
The Muslim leader also used this opportunity to call on his fellow Shiites in Azerbaijan to avoid detracting from the meaning of this holy day by “shouting slogans against other states” and instead to take part in the commemoration of the 18th anniversary of the Soviet attack on Baku known in Azerbaijan as Black January.
Because Muslims employ a lunar calendar for religious events, the exact date of Ashura on the more widely used Gregorian calendar varies from year to year. But in 2007, Ashura occurred just one day before yesterday’s national day of mourning to mark losses from the 1990 Soviet action against Azerbaijan.
In this way, to use the words of the Baku journalists, “in contemporary Azerbaijan, the tragic memory about the victims of the battle at Kerbala [where Imam Hussein lost his life] was intertwined with the pain about the shekhid martyrs of the January 1990 tragedy.”
And symbolizing his own commitment to avoiding the anti-American and anti-Israeli excesses of some Shiites in Iran, the Sheikh-ul-Islam yesterday arrived at the commemoration of the victims of the Black January events in the same car with the chief rabbi of the Azerbaijani capital.
Baku, January 21 – On Saturday, most Shiite Muslims around the world marked the anniversary of the death of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohamed, in 680 CE by flagellating themselves as a symbolic re-enactment of that event, actions that in Iran at least have led to outbursts of anger against the United States and Israel.
But in neighboring Azerbaijan, two-thirds of whose people are traditionally Shiite, a very different commemoration of Ashura, as this holy day is known among the faithful, is taking root, one that calls on believers to mark this event not by shedding their own blood needlessly but rather by donating it to blood banks for needy children.
Even in the Soviet period, many Shiites in Azerbaijan marked Ashura in the traditional way. And while a few still do, far more have decided to follow the lead of Baku’s Juma community which in 1999 urged its members to “shed” their blood by donating it (http://www.newsazerbaijan.ru/obsh/20080119/42111622.html).
One reason is that this local initiative has since been extended to all the Shiites of Azerbaijan by the head of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of the Caucasus, Sheikh-ul-Islam Allahshukur Pashazade. And at a press conference last Friday, he again called on his fellow Shiites to “shed” blood in this new way.
Donating blood, the Shiite leader said, is “a noble act” which “the spirit of Hussein” will reward by reserving a place for those who do so in paradise. And he noted that many mosques have organized clinics to make it easy for the faithful to help others in this way (http://www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/newstext/news/id/1205994.html).
According to the Baku media, Pashazade led the staff of the MSD to donate blood, and “thousands of [other] Muslims voluntarily participated in this action,” including more than 100 people” at the city’s landmark Blue Mosque alone
(http://www.islam.az/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2626).
The Muslim leader also used this opportunity to call on his fellow Shiites in Azerbaijan to avoid detracting from the meaning of this holy day by “shouting slogans against other states” and instead to take part in the commemoration of the 18th anniversary of the Soviet attack on Baku known in Azerbaijan as Black January.
Because Muslims employ a lunar calendar for religious events, the exact date of Ashura on the more widely used Gregorian calendar varies from year to year. But in 2007, Ashura occurred just one day before yesterday’s national day of mourning to mark losses from the 1990 Soviet action against Azerbaijan.
In this way, to use the words of the Baku journalists, “in contemporary Azerbaijan, the tragic memory about the victims of the battle at Kerbala [where Imam Hussein lost his life] was intertwined with the pain about the shekhid martyrs of the January 1990 tragedy.”
And symbolizing his own commitment to avoiding the anti-American and anti-Israeli excesses of some Shiites in Iran, the Sheikh-ul-Islam yesterday arrived at the commemoration of the victims of the Black January events in the same car with the chief rabbi of the Azerbaijani capital.
Window on Eurasia: Kremlin Puts Russia’s Health at Risk in Pursuit of Higher Birthrates, Duma Deputies Say
Paul Goble
Baku, January 21 – In its pursuit of higher birthrates by severely restricting the availability of abortions, Moscow is putting the nation’s future health and well-being at risk, according to Russian parliamentarians. Instead, they say, the government should focus on improving the conditions in which ordinary Russians now life.
Last week, the Russian health ministry restricted the ability of doctors to prescribe or perform abortions by eliminating some of what had been considered medical justifications for them. Henceforth, doctors cannot prescribe one for women suffering from mental retardation, chronic alcoholism or a number of major diseases.
The ministry did so, the Regions.ru news portal reported on Friday, not for medical reasons but rather in order to be able to report to President Vladimir Putin that “yet another path of the resolution of [Russia’s] demographic problems” about which he has spoken so often has been “found” (http://www.regions.ru/news/2119599/ ).
At present, there are more abortions in Russia each year than in any country in Europe – some 1.5 million in all or 13 for every 10 live births. Hence, the officials calculate that reducing their number by reducing the number of medical conditions that allow them will “solve” the problem.
In taking this decision, the news service report said, “the bureaucrats [apparently] have not been worried by the fact that their racing after statistics now will have a negative impact on future generations” in the country.” And to reinforce this point, a Regions.ru correspondent interviewed members of the Russian parliament.
Those with whom they talked were unanimous in saying that “the restriction of the list of medical indications for the termination of pregnancies” was not only “a poor means” of resolving demographic problems but also “irresponsible,” given its likely impact on “the nation and on children who [as a result] will be born to sick mothers.”
Khuseyn Chechenov, deputy chairman of the Federation Council’s committee responsible for overseeing health matters, described the ministry’s decision as “strange,” while Senator Valentina Petrenko, who chairs the FC’s social policy committee, said that she did not think the ministry had acted on its own.
“I do not think that the health and social development ministry is so irresponsible that it would propose solving the demographic problem in this way.” In her view, the orders to do so came from more senior politicians, who want result quickly and do not understand that Russia should address its problems in this area “by other means.”
Elena Afanas’yeva, a member of the Duma’s committee on women’s affairs, agreed. Restricting access to abortions in this way, she said, “will not improve the demographic situation in the country.” What the country needs are programs that raise the “material well-being of the population.”
At present, she pointed out, “people cannot afford to maintain their own health” let alone think about having children “because they do not have enough money even to buy the medicines” they themselves need. Other parliamentarians, including Oleg Kulikov of the Duma’s health committee agreed.
But despite money coming in from the sale of gas and oil, the Russian government seems unwilling to spent some of that income to boost the well-being of the population. And as a result,in some key respect, life for the average Russian may be getting worse this winter in the most tangible ways.
Across the country, breakdowns in the supply of electricity, water and heat have left many average Russians cold and in the dark. In Daghestan, problems with such services have prompted angry citizens to go into streets and block traffic. Given the statement of one local official there, they may be even more furious.
On Saturday, Daghestani President Mukhu Aliyev commented that even though there is no heat or light in the homes of many Makhachkala residents, the city’s casinos and gambling houses patronized by the elite have plenty of power and continue “working around the clock” (http://www.riadagestan.ru/news/2008/01/19/61888/ ).
But a more general survey of the situation suggests that such communal services are “at the edge of collapse” throughout Russia. Specialists have been warning about this for some years, but Moscow has not paid attention or sought to correct the problem (ruspro.org/index.php?mod=state_n&fld=state/politic&num=205&mrt=showcoment)
Most of the country’s communal infrastructure was built in Soviet times, but since 1991, officials have not invested “any serious funds” in its overhaul, updating or expansion, the Ruspro.org analyst says. Instead, they have limited themselves to fixing things when they actually break or at most doing “cosmetic” improvements.
But there is one “public” health area that Moscow has been putting some real money into: the development of special medicines to prevent its security personnel who have taken part in Russian combat operations in Chechnya and other hotspots from committing suicide after service there.
In a program on REN TV, researchers working for Russian special services describe not only their efforts to develop poisons to be used against Moscow’s enemies without leaving a trace but also their contribution to preventing suicides among security service personnel (http://msk.vlasti.net/index/news/248362).
“While the percentage of suicides in all special services of the world is very high,” one of the doctors said, Russian officials were shocked when nearly 900 military personnel and security service officers committed suicide during the first year alone after the conclusion of the first post-Soviet Chechen campaign.
To counter the depression that their service in the North Caucasus had caused and that had led them to kill themselves, the doctors say that they came up with a powerful medication that “practically eliminated such a pathological lack of desire to live” and thus allowed these officers to continue to serve the state.
Baku, January 21 – In its pursuit of higher birthrates by severely restricting the availability of abortions, Moscow is putting the nation’s future health and well-being at risk, according to Russian parliamentarians. Instead, they say, the government should focus on improving the conditions in which ordinary Russians now life.
Last week, the Russian health ministry restricted the ability of doctors to prescribe or perform abortions by eliminating some of what had been considered medical justifications for them. Henceforth, doctors cannot prescribe one for women suffering from mental retardation, chronic alcoholism or a number of major diseases.
The ministry did so, the Regions.ru news portal reported on Friday, not for medical reasons but rather in order to be able to report to President Vladimir Putin that “yet another path of the resolution of [Russia’s] demographic problems” about which he has spoken so often has been “found” (http://www.regions.ru/news/2119599/ ).
At present, there are more abortions in Russia each year than in any country in Europe – some 1.5 million in all or 13 for every 10 live births. Hence, the officials calculate that reducing their number by reducing the number of medical conditions that allow them will “solve” the problem.
In taking this decision, the news service report said, “the bureaucrats [apparently] have not been worried by the fact that their racing after statistics now will have a negative impact on future generations” in the country.” And to reinforce this point, a Regions.ru correspondent interviewed members of the Russian parliament.
Those with whom they talked were unanimous in saying that “the restriction of the list of medical indications for the termination of pregnancies” was not only “a poor means” of resolving demographic problems but also “irresponsible,” given its likely impact on “the nation and on children who [as a result] will be born to sick mothers.”
Khuseyn Chechenov, deputy chairman of the Federation Council’s committee responsible for overseeing health matters, described the ministry’s decision as “strange,” while Senator Valentina Petrenko, who chairs the FC’s social policy committee, said that she did not think the ministry had acted on its own.
“I do not think that the health and social development ministry is so irresponsible that it would propose solving the demographic problem in this way.” In her view, the orders to do so came from more senior politicians, who want result quickly and do not understand that Russia should address its problems in this area “by other means.”
Elena Afanas’yeva, a member of the Duma’s committee on women’s affairs, agreed. Restricting access to abortions in this way, she said, “will not improve the demographic situation in the country.” What the country needs are programs that raise the “material well-being of the population.”
At present, she pointed out, “people cannot afford to maintain their own health” let alone think about having children “because they do not have enough money even to buy the medicines” they themselves need. Other parliamentarians, including Oleg Kulikov of the Duma’s health committee agreed.
But despite money coming in from the sale of gas and oil, the Russian government seems unwilling to spent some of that income to boost the well-being of the population. And as a result,in some key respect, life for the average Russian may be getting worse this winter in the most tangible ways.
Across the country, breakdowns in the supply of electricity, water and heat have left many average Russians cold and in the dark. In Daghestan, problems with such services have prompted angry citizens to go into streets and block traffic. Given the statement of one local official there, they may be even more furious.
On Saturday, Daghestani President Mukhu Aliyev commented that even though there is no heat or light in the homes of many Makhachkala residents, the city’s casinos and gambling houses patronized by the elite have plenty of power and continue “working around the clock” (http://www.riadagestan.ru/news/2008/01/19/61888/ ).
But a more general survey of the situation suggests that such communal services are “at the edge of collapse” throughout Russia. Specialists have been warning about this for some years, but Moscow has not paid attention or sought to correct the problem (ruspro.org/index.php?mod=state_n&fld=state/politic&num=205&mrt=showcoment)
Most of the country’s communal infrastructure was built in Soviet times, but since 1991, officials have not invested “any serious funds” in its overhaul, updating or expansion, the Ruspro.org analyst says. Instead, they have limited themselves to fixing things when they actually break or at most doing “cosmetic” improvements.
But there is one “public” health area that Moscow has been putting some real money into: the development of special medicines to prevent its security personnel who have taken part in Russian combat operations in Chechnya and other hotspots from committing suicide after service there.
In a program on REN TV, researchers working for Russian special services describe not only their efforts to develop poisons to be used against Moscow’s enemies without leaving a trace but also their contribution to preventing suicides among security service personnel (http://msk.vlasti.net/index/news/248362).
“While the percentage of suicides in all special services of the world is very high,” one of the doctors said, Russian officials were shocked when nearly 900 military personnel and security service officers committed suicide during the first year alone after the conclusion of the first post-Soviet Chechen campaign.
To counter the depression that their service in the North Caucasus had caused and that had led them to kill themselves, the doctors say that they came up with a powerful medication that “practically eliminated such a pathological lack of desire to live” and thus allowed these officers to continue to serve the state.
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