Paul Goble
Baku, February 11 – Moscow’s plans to build an enormous hydroelectric dam on the Lower Tunguska River in Krasnoyarsk kray will flood the lands on which the Evenk nationality has traditionally hunted and fished and thus put at risk the survival of that 35,000-strong community.
But instead of accepting that fate, the Evenks have mobilized support first among their fellow numerically small peoples of the North, then from Russian environmental protection groups, and now by international organizations like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) (http://www.iamik.ru/?op=full&what=content&ident=39444).
And last week, these groups assembled in Moscow at the office of the European Commission to denounce what one of their number, Svyatoslav Zabelin of the Russian Social-Ecological Union, called a “return” to the period of Soviet “gigantist” projects that destroyed so much of the land and so many of the people living on it.
Yevgeniy Shvarts, the director of the WWF’s environmental protection effort, echoed Zabelin’s concerns. “We do not understand how it is possible to launch such projects if there are alternatives” that would be less expensive and do less harm to the environment of the region and the people who live there.
Also adding his voice to this effort was Aleksei Zimenko, the head of the Center for the Protection of Wildlife. He said that “at a time when the world community is honoring [those] who are calling attention to climate change, the money of Russian taxpayers is being spent in such a dangerous and absolutely irresponsible way.”
And speaking for the Evenks and other ethnic communities in the region, Pavel Sulandziga, the first vice president of the Association of the Numerically Small Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation, was even more scathing.
Sulandziga suggested that if the authorities go ahead with their plans to build this giant hydroelectric dam as he suggested they seem inclined to do, then that will be further “evidence of the slide of the country toward an administrative-government monopoly with elements of ethnocide and ecocide.”
This press conference, which organizers said was directed at Russia’s presidential candidates, follows their January 24th appeal to the RF Security Council in which they argued that what some may involves only the fate of a small people far away about which many Russians know little is in fact one affects the entire country.
According to Gazeta on February 7th, Russian officials are now working hard to put out the message that Moscow can go ahead with this project because it has already come up with ways to “compensate” the Evenks and any other peoples whose way of life might be affected (http://www.gzt.ru/society/2008/02/06/220011.html).
Aleksandr Zhuravskiy, the director of the international relations department of the Russian Federation’s Ministry for Regional Development, noted that “in Russia now live 160 people with fewer than 50,000 people” and that these groups are being affected by the exploitation of natural resources on their traditional homelands.
“But,” Zhuravskiy continued, that should not block such projects which promise to bring needed energy to all the residents of the Russian Federation because Moscow officials “are already working up a method for calculating and paying compensation to the indigenous residents for the use of their land.”
The Evenks and their backers, however, believe that Moscow’s approach misses the point. Galina Volkova, vice governor of Khabarovsk kray, noted that “it is extremely complicated to preserve the integrity of a people” when its members lose their traditional habitat, just as when they “do not receive literature in their national languages.”
It is far from clear whether this project will go forward and become a death knell for the Evenks or whether, like the resistance to plans for Siberian river diversion in the 1970s and early 1980s, this latest gigantist plan will be derailed by those who see it as the same kind of threat Valentin Rasputin described so famously
Monday, February 11, 2008
Window on Eurasia: CIS Now an Optional Alliance for Its Members, New Russian Study Says
Paul Goble
Baku, February 11 – The Commonwealth of Independent States has the same number of members it had at its start, something its backers always note, but each of them now decides which of its activities to participate in and to what degree, according to a detailed new study prepared by a historian in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
And because its members exercise those options regularly, Lev Moskvin argues, the CIS has not been able to solve “the overwhelming majority of the problems standing before it” or make progress toward becoming an effective alternative to the European Union (http://exlibris.ng.ru/koncep/2008-02-07/9_sng.html).
But the fact that it has survived for more than 15 years, he writes in The CIS: Disintegration or Rebirth? The Review 15 Years Later (in Russian, Moscow, 2007), means that the CIS must be serving someone’s interests and that it thus could under certain conditions develop in the direction that its creators hoped.
The comparison with the EU that informs Moskvin’s study is not entirely fair, as reviewer Yevgeniy Grigor’yev points out in the current issue of Nezavisimaya Gazeta-Ex Libris. On the one hand, the EU of today is the product of more than 50 years of efforts while the CIS has not yet reached 20.
And on the other, the EU reflects a desire on the part of its members, all of whom were independent before joining it, to find a basis for cooperation, whereas the CIS was created in response to the collapse of empire, with some of the new states wanting to work to develop closer relations but others hoping only that it would be a divorce court.
Nonetheless, Grigor’yev concurs with Moskvin’s point that because the CIS has not yet had any “cardinal successes” in integrating its members and thus has not entered “into the consciousness” of people living in them, there is not much reason to expect that it will become Eurasia’s answer to the EU
As Moskvin shows, all “the arguments, contradictions, and conflicts” among the CIS countries that existed 15 years ago survive and in many cases have intensified or even increased in number. And that means that celebrations of its survival are just that – of its survival and not its development.
“Officially,” there are 12 member countries, just as there were in the first years, Moskvin writes, and “their leaders from time to time” continue to get together. But that much ballyhooed public face of this grouping conceals the freedom each has to define what its participation means at any particular time.
“Depending on their interests, the particular features of their develop, their situation, views, policies and a multitude of other considerations,” Grigor’yev sums up Moskvin’s argument, “each participant of the CIS decided in which integration processes and forms to take part in or not and if yes then to what degree.”
But nonetheless, it has “survived.” In part this reflects simple inertia. Many of its members find it easier to continue to take part in CIS meetings and ignore any decisions they don’t like than to risk the reaction they might provoke by actually leaving an institution for which some of them have so little respect.
In addition, the survival of the CIS reflects the attitudes of Western governments which in general believe that efforts at regional integration are almost always a good thing. Indeed, the United States took the lead in forcing Georgia to join the CIS against the will of its government and people at the time.
But the fate of the CIS “depends” to a remarkable degree on Russian policies. In the past, as Moskvin shows, the Russian government regularly insisted that its relations with “the near abroad” were a priority, but it was far less active there than many Western governments have been and thus allowed the CIS to drift.
Over the last three or four years, Moskvin insists, that has begun to change, and the Russian government is now devoting more “pragmatic” attention to its neighbors, something that has facilitated the rise of a number of smaller but more tightly integrated groupings within the post-Soviet region.
There is “the Union state” of Russia and Belarus, a collective security group and the European-Asian Economic Union, and there will soon be a customs union. None of these include all 12 of the CIS members, but the continuing existence of the alliance means that Moscow and those who share its views can push for their expansion.
Given the clearly expressed views of Ukraine, Georgia and several other CIS members about their desire to join NATO and the EU, many analysts have argued that these partial groupings of CIS states are an indication not of its vitality but rather its death throws.
But Moskvin argues that this “multi-level system of integration” now on view could, under just the right circumstances, lead to “a single fully-formed Eurasian Union” – something like the EU. But in saying this, Grigor’yev concludes, Moskvin is displaying “optimism but no conviction.”
Baku, February 11 – The Commonwealth of Independent States has the same number of members it had at its start, something its backers always note, but each of them now decides which of its activities to participate in and to what degree, according to a detailed new study prepared by a historian in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
And because its members exercise those options regularly, Lev Moskvin argues, the CIS has not been able to solve “the overwhelming majority of the problems standing before it” or make progress toward becoming an effective alternative to the European Union (http://exlibris.ng.ru/koncep/2008-02-07/9_sng.html).
But the fact that it has survived for more than 15 years, he writes in The CIS: Disintegration or Rebirth? The Review 15 Years Later (in Russian, Moscow, 2007), means that the CIS must be serving someone’s interests and that it thus could under certain conditions develop in the direction that its creators hoped.
The comparison with the EU that informs Moskvin’s study is not entirely fair, as reviewer Yevgeniy Grigor’yev points out in the current issue of Nezavisimaya Gazeta-Ex Libris. On the one hand, the EU of today is the product of more than 50 years of efforts while the CIS has not yet reached 20.
And on the other, the EU reflects a desire on the part of its members, all of whom were independent before joining it, to find a basis for cooperation, whereas the CIS was created in response to the collapse of empire, with some of the new states wanting to work to develop closer relations but others hoping only that it would be a divorce court.
Nonetheless, Grigor’yev concurs with Moskvin’s point that because the CIS has not yet had any “cardinal successes” in integrating its members and thus has not entered “into the consciousness” of people living in them, there is not much reason to expect that it will become Eurasia’s answer to the EU
As Moskvin shows, all “the arguments, contradictions, and conflicts” among the CIS countries that existed 15 years ago survive and in many cases have intensified or even increased in number. And that means that celebrations of its survival are just that – of its survival and not its development.
“Officially,” there are 12 member countries, just as there were in the first years, Moskvin writes, and “their leaders from time to time” continue to get together. But that much ballyhooed public face of this grouping conceals the freedom each has to define what its participation means at any particular time.
“Depending on their interests, the particular features of their develop, their situation, views, policies and a multitude of other considerations,” Grigor’yev sums up Moskvin’s argument, “each participant of the CIS decided in which integration processes and forms to take part in or not and if yes then to what degree.”
But nonetheless, it has “survived.” In part this reflects simple inertia. Many of its members find it easier to continue to take part in CIS meetings and ignore any decisions they don’t like than to risk the reaction they might provoke by actually leaving an institution for which some of them have so little respect.
In addition, the survival of the CIS reflects the attitudes of Western governments which in general believe that efforts at regional integration are almost always a good thing. Indeed, the United States took the lead in forcing Georgia to join the CIS against the will of its government and people at the time.
But the fate of the CIS “depends” to a remarkable degree on Russian policies. In the past, as Moskvin shows, the Russian government regularly insisted that its relations with “the near abroad” were a priority, but it was far less active there than many Western governments have been and thus allowed the CIS to drift.
Over the last three or four years, Moskvin insists, that has begun to change, and the Russian government is now devoting more “pragmatic” attention to its neighbors, something that has facilitated the rise of a number of smaller but more tightly integrated groupings within the post-Soviet region.
There is “the Union state” of Russia and Belarus, a collective security group and the European-Asian Economic Union, and there will soon be a customs union. None of these include all 12 of the CIS members, but the continuing existence of the alliance means that Moscow and those who share its views can push for their expansion.
Given the clearly expressed views of Ukraine, Georgia and several other CIS members about their desire to join NATO and the EU, many analysts have argued that these partial groupings of CIS states are an indication not of its vitality but rather its death throws.
But Moskvin argues that this “multi-level system of integration” now on view could, under just the right circumstances, lead to “a single fully-formed Eurasian Union” – something like the EU. But in saying this, Grigor’yev concludes, Moskvin is displaying “optimism but no conviction.”
Window on Eurasia: One in Seven in Mordvinia Now Attempts Suicide
Paul Goble
Baku, February 11 – One in every seven residents of Mordvinia currently attempts suicide at one point or another, law enforcement and medical officials there say, a measure of just how bad life has become over the last several years for people in that Finno-Ugric republic in the Middle Volga.
In the last two weeks alone, nine of them -- all men between the ages of 19 and 57 -- succeeded in killing themselves, Mordvin media reported yesterday. Saransk officials said they were concerned because people there try to commit suicide not in the winter but rather in the fall and spring (http://www.rosbaltvolga.ru/2008/02/10/455023.html).
In discussing this trend, the officials told Rosbalt that they blamed it on the extended winter holidays this year, sharp and unpredictable changes in the weather, and “various social factors” -- a euphemism for high rates of unemployment, alcoholism and despair among many people there.
Mordvin doctors said that 14 percent of the residents of their Republic will try to commit suicide at some point. Only half of those who try, the doctors continued, suffer from diagnosed psychological problems, and the authorities are currently able through prompt intervention to save about 80 percent of those who attempt to kill themselves.
Despite this high rate of successful intervention, some 330 Mordvinia residents now succeed in ending their lives each year, a disturbing statistic that local doctors involved in efforts to save such people have sought to publicize through the local media, even though these deaths rarely attract broader attention.
Last month, officials at Moscow’s Serbsky Institute held a meeting on suicides in the Russian Federation as a whole. They reported with regret that Russia ranks second in the world in the number of suicides per capita, and they pointed to especially high rates of death from this cause among Finno-Ugric groups like the Mordvins.
But beyond offering this “ethnic” explanation, the Serbsky officials did not seek to explain this pattern, although reports from Finno-Ugric areas in the Middle Volga in recent years suggest that socio-economic factors rather than ethnic ones are the primary cause of this unfortunate development.
It is thus inappropriate to suggest that members of these groups should be blamed for these suicides. Instead, they are being killed off by those who have created the conditions that have driven so many members of these Finno-Ugric nationalities in the Russian Federation to make this last, desperate act of protest.
Baku, February 11 – One in every seven residents of Mordvinia currently attempts suicide at one point or another, law enforcement and medical officials there say, a measure of just how bad life has become over the last several years for people in that Finno-Ugric republic in the Middle Volga.
In the last two weeks alone, nine of them -- all men between the ages of 19 and 57 -- succeeded in killing themselves, Mordvin media reported yesterday. Saransk officials said they were concerned because people there try to commit suicide not in the winter but rather in the fall and spring (http://www.rosbaltvolga.ru/2008/02/10/455023.html).
In discussing this trend, the officials told Rosbalt that they blamed it on the extended winter holidays this year, sharp and unpredictable changes in the weather, and “various social factors” -- a euphemism for high rates of unemployment, alcoholism and despair among many people there.
Mordvin doctors said that 14 percent of the residents of their Republic will try to commit suicide at some point. Only half of those who try, the doctors continued, suffer from diagnosed psychological problems, and the authorities are currently able through prompt intervention to save about 80 percent of those who attempt to kill themselves.
Despite this high rate of successful intervention, some 330 Mordvinia residents now succeed in ending their lives each year, a disturbing statistic that local doctors involved in efforts to save such people have sought to publicize through the local media, even though these deaths rarely attract broader attention.
Last month, officials at Moscow’s Serbsky Institute held a meeting on suicides in the Russian Federation as a whole. They reported with regret that Russia ranks second in the world in the number of suicides per capita, and they pointed to especially high rates of death from this cause among Finno-Ugric groups like the Mordvins.
But beyond offering this “ethnic” explanation, the Serbsky officials did not seek to explain this pattern, although reports from Finno-Ugric areas in the Middle Volga in recent years suggest that socio-economic factors rather than ethnic ones are the primary cause of this unfortunate development.
It is thus inappropriate to suggest that members of these groups should be blamed for these suicides. Instead, they are being killed off by those who have created the conditions that have driven so many members of these Finno-Ugric nationalities in the Russian Federation to make this last, desperate act of protest.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Window on Eurasia: Chechens Paid a High Price for Putin’s ‘Stability’
Paul Goble
Baku, February 10 – President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that the Russian Federation had stabilized during his time in office, almost eight years to the day that the forces he sent into a Chechen village committed what one human rights activist says was “the most terrible event “ of the second post-Soviet Chechen war.
And in an article about that crime which appeared on the “Caucasus Times” site even as Putin was delivering his speech, Aleksandr Cherkasov of Memorial reminded the world about the terrible price Chechens had paid for the stability for which the Russian President was then taking credit (www.caucasustimes.com/article.asp?id=13675).
What happened in the Chechen village of Novye Aldy on February 5, 2000, has been extremely well-documented by Western human rights organizations despite the fact that Moscow attempted to throw a blanket of silence over it at the time and has refused to bring any of the perpetrators to trial.
Human Rights Watch issued an extensive report shortly after the events took place (www.hrw.org/reports/2000/russia_chechnya3/) entitled “February 5: A Day of Slaughter in Novye Aldy,” and lawyers for the families of the victims have provided additional information as they have sought compensation for what was done.
But in the Russian media in the first months of Putin’s time in office, Cherkasov points out, “people spoke about [Moscow’s] victories” in Chechnya and did not offer much in the way of honest reporting about how those victories were achieved, a pattern that Putin continued in his speech last week.
On that February day, Russian military units passed through Novye Aldy in the course of their advance on the Chechen capital. As they left that village, they warned the people there that “terrible people are coming behind us,” a reference to the Russian interior ministry’s OMON units.
When the latter arrived, Cherkasov writes, “they moved through the village, going into each household, killing, stealing, extorting money (in certain cases it was possible to buy one’s life), [and even] pulling out gold fillings from the teeth of those who were not in a position to pay off” the OMON soldiers.
This group killed 55 of the villagers, and that number would doubtless have been far higher had it not been for the quick thinking of a local nurse who urged people to gather in the streets in the hopes that even the OMON would not be willing to shoot down people in front of a crowd of witnesses.
Over the next several years, the families of the victims tried with little success to get Russian prosecutors to investigate what happened and to bring charges against those who had violated the Russian constitution, common decency, and international agreements Moscow has committed itself to fulfill.
But Russian prosecutors and other officials cut short the few investigations they did launch and have never charged any of the OMON soldiers or officers with a crime, despite the fact that officials know exactly what unit was in Novye Aldy on that date and have been given extensive forensic evidence on the victims.
As a result, the Novye Aldy families took the only other step left to them: they appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. And in a unanimous decision last July, that court ordered Moscow to pay them almost 200,000 U.S. dollars (http://www.enews20.com/news_Russia_Must_Pay_Chechens_for_Civilian_Deaths_01790.html
More important than the money both to the families and to history was the Court’s stinging indictment of Russian prosecutors and by implication the Russian government as a whole. “The astonishing ineffectiveness of the prosecuting authorities in this case,” the Court said, “can only be qualified as acquiescence in the events.”
“The killings” in Novye Aldy, the Court continued in far harsher language than it has used in most of the cases from Russia that have come before it, “had been committed in broad daylight, and a large number of witnesses, including some of the applicants, had seen the perpetrators face to face.”
But “despite all that and notwithstanding the domestic and international public outcry caused by the cold-blooded execution of more than 50 civilians … no meaningful result whatsoever had been achieved [before the case came to Strasbourg] in the task of identifying and prosecuting the individuals who had committed the crimes.”
Echoing the European Court’s ruling, Memorial’s Cherkasov argues that “all Russia ought to be interested in finding and punishing the criminals.” But for the last eight years, “we have heard [only] about the victories [of Russian arms in Chechnya] and the glorious operations of ‘the hunt for wolves.’”
One can only hope along with Cherkasov that both Russians and the international community will both find out about and condemn other crimes that Moscow has visited upon the Chechens and their neighbors in the North Caucasus as President Putin, often to the applause of Western leaders, has pursued “stability” there.
Baku, February 10 – President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that the Russian Federation had stabilized during his time in office, almost eight years to the day that the forces he sent into a Chechen village committed what one human rights activist says was “the most terrible event “ of the second post-Soviet Chechen war.
And in an article about that crime which appeared on the “Caucasus Times” site even as Putin was delivering his speech, Aleksandr Cherkasov of Memorial reminded the world about the terrible price Chechens had paid for the stability for which the Russian President was then taking credit (www.caucasustimes.com/article.asp?id=13675).
What happened in the Chechen village of Novye Aldy on February 5, 2000, has been extremely well-documented by Western human rights organizations despite the fact that Moscow attempted to throw a blanket of silence over it at the time and has refused to bring any of the perpetrators to trial.
Human Rights Watch issued an extensive report shortly after the events took place (www.hrw.org/reports/2000/russia_chechnya3/) entitled “February 5: A Day of Slaughter in Novye Aldy,” and lawyers for the families of the victims have provided additional information as they have sought compensation for what was done.
But in the Russian media in the first months of Putin’s time in office, Cherkasov points out, “people spoke about [Moscow’s] victories” in Chechnya and did not offer much in the way of honest reporting about how those victories were achieved, a pattern that Putin continued in his speech last week.
On that February day, Russian military units passed through Novye Aldy in the course of their advance on the Chechen capital. As they left that village, they warned the people there that “terrible people are coming behind us,” a reference to the Russian interior ministry’s OMON units.
When the latter arrived, Cherkasov writes, “they moved through the village, going into each household, killing, stealing, extorting money (in certain cases it was possible to buy one’s life), [and even] pulling out gold fillings from the teeth of those who were not in a position to pay off” the OMON soldiers.
This group killed 55 of the villagers, and that number would doubtless have been far higher had it not been for the quick thinking of a local nurse who urged people to gather in the streets in the hopes that even the OMON would not be willing to shoot down people in front of a crowd of witnesses.
Over the next several years, the families of the victims tried with little success to get Russian prosecutors to investigate what happened and to bring charges against those who had violated the Russian constitution, common decency, and international agreements Moscow has committed itself to fulfill.
But Russian prosecutors and other officials cut short the few investigations they did launch and have never charged any of the OMON soldiers or officers with a crime, despite the fact that officials know exactly what unit was in Novye Aldy on that date and have been given extensive forensic evidence on the victims.
As a result, the Novye Aldy families took the only other step left to them: they appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. And in a unanimous decision last July, that court ordered Moscow to pay them almost 200,000 U.S. dollars (http://www.enews20.com/news_Russia_Must_Pay_Chechens_for_Civilian_Deaths_01790.html
More important than the money both to the families and to history was the Court’s stinging indictment of Russian prosecutors and by implication the Russian government as a whole. “The astonishing ineffectiveness of the prosecuting authorities in this case,” the Court said, “can only be qualified as acquiescence in the events.”
“The killings” in Novye Aldy, the Court continued in far harsher language than it has used in most of the cases from Russia that have come before it, “had been committed in broad daylight, and a large number of witnesses, including some of the applicants, had seen the perpetrators face to face.”
But “despite all that and notwithstanding the domestic and international public outcry caused by the cold-blooded execution of more than 50 civilians … no meaningful result whatsoever had been achieved [before the case came to Strasbourg] in the task of identifying and prosecuting the individuals who had committed the crimes.”
Echoing the European Court’s ruling, Memorial’s Cherkasov argues that “all Russia ought to be interested in finding and punishing the criminals.” But for the last eight years, “we have heard [only] about the victories [of Russian arms in Chechnya] and the glorious operations of ‘the hunt for wolves.’”
One can only hope along with Cherkasov that both Russians and the international community will both find out about and condemn other crimes that Moscow has visited upon the Chechens and their neighbors in the North Caucasus as President Putin, often to the applause of Western leaders, has pursued “stability” there.
Window on Eurasia: Aaland Islands Arrangement Won’t Work for Karabakh, Aaland Expert Says
Paul Goble
Baku, February 10 – Almost since the Karabakh conflict began two decades ago, outside observers have suggested that the arrangements the League of Nations made for the Aaland Islands in the 1920s could serve as a model for the peaceful resolution of the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Given the League’s decision, which has stood the test of time for more than 80 years, it is easy to see why so many analysts and policy makers have done so. After all, it maintained the territorial integrity of Finland while providing almost unlimited autonomy to the Swedish-speaking population of this archipelago.
But in an interview posted on the Analitika.az portal at on Friday, Sia Spiliopoulou Akermark, the director of the Aaland Islands Peace Institute, dismissed those suggestions as unworkable because the two cases are fundamentally different (www.analitika.az/articles.php?item_id=20080208043550685&sec_id=69).
To understand his reasoning, it is important to recall the history of the Aaland Islands issue. Sweden ceded these islands to Russia in 1809, and Russia made them part of the Grand Duchy of Finland. Twenty years later, Russia began to fortify them, but after the Crimean war, the Treaty of Paris required that they be demilitarized.
Then in 1918, in the midst of fighting in Finland that had used the collapse of the Russian Empire to declare independence, Sweden intervened in the islands to separate Red and White Finnish forces, something an overwhelming majority of the islands’ residents welcomed as a step toward their reincorporation into Sweden.
But Finland objected, and the League of Nations, committed both to the defense of the territorial integrity of states and to the rights of minorities, was asked to resolve the conflict. In one of its few obvious successes, the League directed that the islands should remain part of Finland but be fully autonomous on most issues.
That is how things have remained since that time, with Finland still counting the islands as part of its territory but the islanders allowed to conduct their affairs in their own language, pay their own taxes, fly their own flag and avoid service in the Finnish army. And recently, they even obtained their own Internet domain, dot AX.
Not surprisingly, many view this arrangement as a model for the resolution of a variety of other territorial disputes. After all, it promises to square the circle by giving both sides much of what they want. And in the past, Aaland islanders have not been shy about offering their good offices to those involved.
Indeed, last December, the Aaland Islands Peace Institute conducted a training session for journalists from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Daghestan about how things have been arranged in their territory and what guidance that might provide for others in disputes elsewhere. (See the report on that session at http://www.peace.ax).
But now, Sia Spiliopoulou Akermark, the director of that institute, has suggested that what was done by the League 80 years ago for the island chain on which he lives, cannot serve as a model for the resolution of the dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Karabakh.
“There are hundreds of models of autonomy,” he began, adding that in his view, many of them have been “insufficiently studied.” But he suggested that everyone should avoid the use of the word “model” because that implies that some outside force should impose it elsewhere.
Instead, the Aaland Islands expert said, policy makers should look at these cases as “examples” of how things have been done. If they do that, then they will recognize that no two situations are the same and consequently a solution that worked one place will not work unless local conditions are taken into account somewhere else.
Akermark then pointed to a number of conditions that he said existed in the Aaland Islands that do not exist in the Karabakh situation. First, they are islands and so have a tradition of being relatively isolated; they are not embedded within one country or the other.
Second, the population has long been mono-cultural and mono-linguistic, and its members overwhelmingly want to protect that longstanding situation. If Karabakh is mono-ethnic now, it is so only because of the flight of most Azerbaijanis because of the fighting.
And third, the conflict between Swedes and Finns nearly a century ago “was not so sharp” as the one between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Their war, he said, not only led to massive refugee flows but also large number of dead and wounded, something that neither side can be expected to forget.
All those differences, Akermark said, make the Aaland Islands “model” less useful for the possible resolution of the Karabakh dispute than many think.
Asked whether he had anything to say to Baku and Yerevan about what they should do, he said that he encouraged them to avoid any future violence and to explore all the autonomy relations that other countries have developed and then come up with one of their own.
Baku, February 10 – Almost since the Karabakh conflict began two decades ago, outside observers have suggested that the arrangements the League of Nations made for the Aaland Islands in the 1920s could serve as a model for the peaceful resolution of the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Given the League’s decision, which has stood the test of time for more than 80 years, it is easy to see why so many analysts and policy makers have done so. After all, it maintained the territorial integrity of Finland while providing almost unlimited autonomy to the Swedish-speaking population of this archipelago.
But in an interview posted on the Analitika.az portal at on Friday, Sia Spiliopoulou Akermark, the director of the Aaland Islands Peace Institute, dismissed those suggestions as unworkable because the two cases are fundamentally different (www.analitika.az/articles.php?item_id=20080208043550685&sec_id=69).
To understand his reasoning, it is important to recall the history of the Aaland Islands issue. Sweden ceded these islands to Russia in 1809, and Russia made them part of the Grand Duchy of Finland. Twenty years later, Russia began to fortify them, but after the Crimean war, the Treaty of Paris required that they be demilitarized.
Then in 1918, in the midst of fighting in Finland that had used the collapse of the Russian Empire to declare independence, Sweden intervened in the islands to separate Red and White Finnish forces, something an overwhelming majority of the islands’ residents welcomed as a step toward their reincorporation into Sweden.
But Finland objected, and the League of Nations, committed both to the defense of the territorial integrity of states and to the rights of minorities, was asked to resolve the conflict. In one of its few obvious successes, the League directed that the islands should remain part of Finland but be fully autonomous on most issues.
That is how things have remained since that time, with Finland still counting the islands as part of its territory but the islanders allowed to conduct their affairs in their own language, pay their own taxes, fly their own flag and avoid service in the Finnish army. And recently, they even obtained their own Internet domain, dot AX.
Not surprisingly, many view this arrangement as a model for the resolution of a variety of other territorial disputes. After all, it promises to square the circle by giving both sides much of what they want. And in the past, Aaland islanders have not been shy about offering their good offices to those involved.
Indeed, last December, the Aaland Islands Peace Institute conducted a training session for journalists from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Daghestan about how things have been arranged in their territory and what guidance that might provide for others in disputes elsewhere. (See the report on that session at http://www.peace.ax).
But now, Sia Spiliopoulou Akermark, the director of that institute, has suggested that what was done by the League 80 years ago for the island chain on which he lives, cannot serve as a model for the resolution of the dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Karabakh.
“There are hundreds of models of autonomy,” he began, adding that in his view, many of them have been “insufficiently studied.” But he suggested that everyone should avoid the use of the word “model” because that implies that some outside force should impose it elsewhere.
Instead, the Aaland Islands expert said, policy makers should look at these cases as “examples” of how things have been done. If they do that, then they will recognize that no two situations are the same and consequently a solution that worked one place will not work unless local conditions are taken into account somewhere else.
Akermark then pointed to a number of conditions that he said existed in the Aaland Islands that do not exist in the Karabakh situation. First, they are islands and so have a tradition of being relatively isolated; they are not embedded within one country or the other.
Second, the population has long been mono-cultural and mono-linguistic, and its members overwhelmingly want to protect that longstanding situation. If Karabakh is mono-ethnic now, it is so only because of the flight of most Azerbaijanis because of the fighting.
And third, the conflict between Swedes and Finns nearly a century ago “was not so sharp” as the one between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Their war, he said, not only led to massive refugee flows but also large number of dead and wounded, something that neither side can be expected to forget.
All those differences, Akermark said, make the Aaland Islands “model” less useful for the possible resolution of the Karabakh dispute than many think.
Asked whether he had anything to say to Baku and Yerevan about what they should do, he said that he encouraged them to avoid any future violence and to explore all the autonomy relations that other countries have developed and then come up with one of their own.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Window on Eurasia: ‘Islam of the Basements’ Comes to Russia, Leaving Security Services at a Loss
Paul Goble
Baku, February 9 – “Islam of the garages and basements,” a term French President Nicolas Sarkozy coined to describe radicalized, violent but largely undirected Muslim young people, has now appeared in the Russian Federation, according to a leading Moscow specialist on inter-ethnic violence.
But because Russia’s law enforcement agencies have no experience with this phenomenon, Irina Borogan says, they are falling back on what they do know and treating the acts of such individuals as if they were part and parcel of “a powerful Islamist militarized organization” (http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/09/10.html).
In doing so -- and this is something that the Kremlin itself has encouraged, the Agentura.ru analyst says -- police and prosecutors not only have discredited themselves and exacerbated inter-religious tensions but also have overstated one kind of Islamist threat while distracting attention from another that ultimately may prove more dangerous.
In an article entitled “Jamaat in Two Moves” published in Novaya gazeta on Thursday, Borogan traces how this happened in one case now being reviewed in Tatarstan and discusses why the “Islam of the garages and basements” that Europeans have been dealing with for some time is likely to spread in the Russian Federation.
Several years ago, a young Tatar named Khafiz Razzakov killed several couples in a park because their amorous behavior offended his sense of Islamic morality. He confessed to most of these crimes, and that might have been the end of it except for official interest in his religious motivation.
Because Razzakov had invoked Islam as an explanation and because in the late 1990s he had gone to Chechnya to fight against Russian forces, government investigators assumed his actions had to be more than those of a simple criminal and focused first on other Tatars who had fought in the Caucasus and then on their contacts in Tatarstan.
This group, which prosecutors and the media dubbed “the Tatarstan jamaat,” is “not at all like the jamaats of the North Caucasus,” Borogan notes. In Islam, “jamaat” simply means “community.” But Russian officials and the media typically say that it means a radical underground group prepared to use violence.
But in this case, such an extrapolation is clearly wrong, Borogan writes. There is no indication that the jamaat in the Middle Volga was in “open conflict with the official Muslim community” there, and “none [of its members] studied Islam in Arab countries,” the source of many radical ideas in Muslim groups in the North Caucasus.
Nor did the Tatarstan jamaat “have any support from abroad,” she says. It was not financed by foreign charitable foundations whose activities Russian officials have worked so hard to block. And it is “even doubtful” that any of its approximately 50 members maintain “any kind of ties with the Caucasus underground.”
Its “members” included people of various ages living in various cities and villages of Tatarstan, many of whom do not appear to have known one another until they were charged and some of whom appear to have been more interested in the group’s sports activities, something prosecutors presented as especially sinister, than in anything else.
That some of the members of this group had radical ideas, owned weapons or engaged in criminal activities is beyond question, Borogan points out. But instead of focusing on specific statements and crime, prosecutors felt they had to uncover a radical Islamist conspiracy in Tatarstan on the North Caucasus model.
To get the evidence for their theory of a jamaat-type conspiracy, local human rights groups and the relatives and lawyers for the accused say, the police used torture to get the members of this “group” to provide the “evidence” the authorities needed to make such charges.
“Potentially” groups of young Muslims like this are extremely dangerous: “they are autonomous, can arise in any region of the country, act without financing from outside,” and have some access to weaponry and explosives, Borogan argues, it is “far from being true that all of them [are or] will become terrorists.”
And the appearance and rise of such alienated young Muslims, as the experience of European countries with “Islam of the basements and garages” has shown, may constitute a serious threat to the Russian Federation. But the Moscow analyst argues, “our special services do not know what to do” about them.
Instead of focusing on this new-to-Russia danger, police and prosecutors there find it easier to imagine that what they are facing now in the Middle Volga is what they have confronted in the North Caucasus, an underground Islamist militant formation” and then make everything fit into that model.
Because of the unwillingness of officials to recognize that they are dealing with something new in the Russian Federation, they are sending to jail “people who are ‘guilty’ only of having been members of a certain structure and who did not commit a single terrorist act,” Borogan continues.
Such actions will not make “other spontaneous communities of religiously illiterate young who do not trust the official spiritual leaders less radical.” Instead, it will contribute to the rise of a new and dangerous “myth” about how the Tatarstan jamaat’s members have become “martyrs of the faith.”
And as the experience of European countries has shown, the spread of such ideas could lead to the appearance and growth of “real terrorist organizations” in the Russian Federation, she concludes, the product less of the efforts of the Muslim community there than of the mistaken actions of Russian police and prosecutors.
Baku, February 9 – “Islam of the garages and basements,” a term French President Nicolas Sarkozy coined to describe radicalized, violent but largely undirected Muslim young people, has now appeared in the Russian Federation, according to a leading Moscow specialist on inter-ethnic violence.
But because Russia’s law enforcement agencies have no experience with this phenomenon, Irina Borogan says, they are falling back on what they do know and treating the acts of such individuals as if they were part and parcel of “a powerful Islamist militarized organization” (http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/09/10.html).
In doing so -- and this is something that the Kremlin itself has encouraged, the Agentura.ru analyst says -- police and prosecutors not only have discredited themselves and exacerbated inter-religious tensions but also have overstated one kind of Islamist threat while distracting attention from another that ultimately may prove more dangerous.
In an article entitled “Jamaat in Two Moves” published in Novaya gazeta on Thursday, Borogan traces how this happened in one case now being reviewed in Tatarstan and discusses why the “Islam of the garages and basements” that Europeans have been dealing with for some time is likely to spread in the Russian Federation.
Several years ago, a young Tatar named Khafiz Razzakov killed several couples in a park because their amorous behavior offended his sense of Islamic morality. He confessed to most of these crimes, and that might have been the end of it except for official interest in his religious motivation.
Because Razzakov had invoked Islam as an explanation and because in the late 1990s he had gone to Chechnya to fight against Russian forces, government investigators assumed his actions had to be more than those of a simple criminal and focused first on other Tatars who had fought in the Caucasus and then on their contacts in Tatarstan.
This group, which prosecutors and the media dubbed “the Tatarstan jamaat,” is “not at all like the jamaats of the North Caucasus,” Borogan notes. In Islam, “jamaat” simply means “community.” But Russian officials and the media typically say that it means a radical underground group prepared to use violence.
But in this case, such an extrapolation is clearly wrong, Borogan writes. There is no indication that the jamaat in the Middle Volga was in “open conflict with the official Muslim community” there, and “none [of its members] studied Islam in Arab countries,” the source of many radical ideas in Muslim groups in the North Caucasus.
Nor did the Tatarstan jamaat “have any support from abroad,” she says. It was not financed by foreign charitable foundations whose activities Russian officials have worked so hard to block. And it is “even doubtful” that any of its approximately 50 members maintain “any kind of ties with the Caucasus underground.”
Its “members” included people of various ages living in various cities and villages of Tatarstan, many of whom do not appear to have known one another until they were charged and some of whom appear to have been more interested in the group’s sports activities, something prosecutors presented as especially sinister, than in anything else.
That some of the members of this group had radical ideas, owned weapons or engaged in criminal activities is beyond question, Borogan points out. But instead of focusing on specific statements and crime, prosecutors felt they had to uncover a radical Islamist conspiracy in Tatarstan on the North Caucasus model.
To get the evidence for their theory of a jamaat-type conspiracy, local human rights groups and the relatives and lawyers for the accused say, the police used torture to get the members of this “group” to provide the “evidence” the authorities needed to make such charges.
“Potentially” groups of young Muslims like this are extremely dangerous: “they are autonomous, can arise in any region of the country, act without financing from outside,” and have some access to weaponry and explosives, Borogan argues, it is “far from being true that all of them [are or] will become terrorists.”
And the appearance and rise of such alienated young Muslims, as the experience of European countries with “Islam of the basements and garages” has shown, may constitute a serious threat to the Russian Federation. But the Moscow analyst argues, “our special services do not know what to do” about them.
Instead of focusing on this new-to-Russia danger, police and prosecutors there find it easier to imagine that what they are facing now in the Middle Volga is what they have confronted in the North Caucasus, an underground Islamist militant formation” and then make everything fit into that model.
Because of the unwillingness of officials to recognize that they are dealing with something new in the Russian Federation, they are sending to jail “people who are ‘guilty’ only of having been members of a certain structure and who did not commit a single terrorist act,” Borogan continues.
Such actions will not make “other spontaneous communities of religiously illiterate young who do not trust the official spiritual leaders less radical.” Instead, it will contribute to the rise of a new and dangerous “myth” about how the Tatarstan jamaat’s members have become “martyrs of the faith.”
And as the experience of European countries has shown, the spread of such ideas could lead to the appearance and growth of “real terrorist organizations” in the Russian Federation, she concludes, the product less of the efforts of the Muslim community there than of the mistaken actions of Russian police and prosecutors.
Window on Eurasia: Russia’s Regions to Have Greater Role in Ethno-Cultural Policy?
Paul Goble
Baku, February 9 – Three events over the last ten days suggest that Moscow wants the regions and municipalities of the Russian Federation to play a greater role in the elaboration of religious and nationality policies, a reversal of the center’s position in recent years and one that could promote the further differentiation of the country.
On February 1, Education Minister Andrei Fursenko told a meeting in Novocherkassk that local and regional governments should work with religious groups in their areas to develop school courses that could promote “the spiritual and moral training” of the young (www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=22670).
Fursenko did not say but his audience certainly understands that such a region by region approach to this highly sensitive issue might get Moscow off the hook politically in the short term but only at the price of ever greater cultural and religious differentiation of the country.
In some places, like Belgorod, regional officials are already working hand-in-glove with the Russian Orthodox Church, and in others, like Chechnya, the government is requiring Islamic instruction in the schools – even though in both places, there are members of other faiths or no faith at all whose Constitutional rights are being ignored.
If Fursenko’s proposal is acted upon, other regions would be tempted to play to the largest local group rather than adopt a religion- or nationality-blind approach. Not only would that exacerbate tensions within regions, but it would create new conflicts among them, a development that could weaken Moscow’s control.
Then on February 5, Vladimir Zorin, the former minister for ethnic and religious policy who now is the Presidential plenipotentiary in the Volga, told a Moscow roundtable that local and regional governments must adapt general policies to local conditions if the country is to make progress (http://azerros.ru/index.php/articles/2105).
“Russian laws permit organs of local administration to spend budget funds on the carrying out of ethno-cultural programs,” he pointed out, a provision that allows officials at those levels to increase their “role in the realization of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional relations.”
Indeed, he said, “a stable multi-national state” requires the joint efforts of government organs at all levels, institutions of civil society and national and religious organizations.” If even one of these groups is not involved, Zorin concluded, “nationality policy cannot be developed” as it should.
And then today and tomorrow, the Ministry of Regional Development is holding an all-Russian conference on “Government-Confessional Relations in the Regions of Russia: The Experience of Social Partnership and the Prevention of Religion-Political Extremism” (http://www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=22746).
According to the ministry’s press service, “the goal of the conference is to discuss the practice of joint work by the organs of government power of the subjects of the Russian Federation and religious organizations” and the ways that cooperation between them can promote tolerance and prevent extremism from emerging.
The meeting is scheduled to be addressed by a large group of officials from both Moscow and the regions, and while none of their comments has yet been published, this meeting too appears intended to send a message that the Russian government wants the regions to play a greater role and is prepared to tolerate more inter-regional variations.
If these meetings are not simply an accidental conjunction and the arguments about a greater regional role in this policy not simply the product of the nature of these particular sessions, there are three possible explanations for what appears to be a trend very much at odds with Russian policy making under Vladimir Putin.
First, Moscow must be sufficiently worried about the rising tide of interethnic tensions and even violence across the country that it is looking for allies in the fight against it and has decided to turn to those officials who are closest to the situation for assistance.
Second, some officials both in Moscow and in the regions may be taking advantage of the uncertainties inevitable even in such a managed transition as the one from Putin to Medvedev to push their own ideas in the hopes that the new president may pick up on them as he seeks to demonstrate that he is in some sense at least his own man.
And third, these proposals may reflect the further rise of Dmitry Kozak, who as regional development minister has oversight responsibilities here and who, as his recent proposal to divide the country into ten new economic zones shows, is not shy about trying out even radical ideas.
But whatever the explanation, at least some regional and local officials are certain to pick up on these ideas in order to boost their own power if nothing else. And that in turn means that the regions and the municipalities are likely to be the seen of more real politics than most of them have been in the final years of Putin’s second term.
Baku, February 9 – Three events over the last ten days suggest that Moscow wants the regions and municipalities of the Russian Federation to play a greater role in the elaboration of religious and nationality policies, a reversal of the center’s position in recent years and one that could promote the further differentiation of the country.
On February 1, Education Minister Andrei Fursenko told a meeting in Novocherkassk that local and regional governments should work with religious groups in their areas to develop school courses that could promote “the spiritual and moral training” of the young (www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=22670).
Fursenko did not say but his audience certainly understands that such a region by region approach to this highly sensitive issue might get Moscow off the hook politically in the short term but only at the price of ever greater cultural and religious differentiation of the country.
In some places, like Belgorod, regional officials are already working hand-in-glove with the Russian Orthodox Church, and in others, like Chechnya, the government is requiring Islamic instruction in the schools – even though in both places, there are members of other faiths or no faith at all whose Constitutional rights are being ignored.
If Fursenko’s proposal is acted upon, other regions would be tempted to play to the largest local group rather than adopt a religion- or nationality-blind approach. Not only would that exacerbate tensions within regions, but it would create new conflicts among them, a development that could weaken Moscow’s control.
Then on February 5, Vladimir Zorin, the former minister for ethnic and religious policy who now is the Presidential plenipotentiary in the Volga, told a Moscow roundtable that local and regional governments must adapt general policies to local conditions if the country is to make progress (http://azerros.ru/index.php/articles/2105).
“Russian laws permit organs of local administration to spend budget funds on the carrying out of ethno-cultural programs,” he pointed out, a provision that allows officials at those levels to increase their “role in the realization of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional relations.”
Indeed, he said, “a stable multi-national state” requires the joint efforts of government organs at all levels, institutions of civil society and national and religious organizations.” If even one of these groups is not involved, Zorin concluded, “nationality policy cannot be developed” as it should.
And then today and tomorrow, the Ministry of Regional Development is holding an all-Russian conference on “Government-Confessional Relations in the Regions of Russia: The Experience of Social Partnership and the Prevention of Religion-Political Extremism” (http://www.interfax-religion.ru/islam/?act=news&div=22746).
According to the ministry’s press service, “the goal of the conference is to discuss the practice of joint work by the organs of government power of the subjects of the Russian Federation and religious organizations” and the ways that cooperation between them can promote tolerance and prevent extremism from emerging.
The meeting is scheduled to be addressed by a large group of officials from both Moscow and the regions, and while none of their comments has yet been published, this meeting too appears intended to send a message that the Russian government wants the regions to play a greater role and is prepared to tolerate more inter-regional variations.
If these meetings are not simply an accidental conjunction and the arguments about a greater regional role in this policy not simply the product of the nature of these particular sessions, there are three possible explanations for what appears to be a trend very much at odds with Russian policy making under Vladimir Putin.
First, Moscow must be sufficiently worried about the rising tide of interethnic tensions and even violence across the country that it is looking for allies in the fight against it and has decided to turn to those officials who are closest to the situation for assistance.
Second, some officials both in Moscow and in the regions may be taking advantage of the uncertainties inevitable even in such a managed transition as the one from Putin to Medvedev to push their own ideas in the hopes that the new president may pick up on them as he seeks to demonstrate that he is in some sense at least his own man.
And third, these proposals may reflect the further rise of Dmitry Kozak, who as regional development minister has oversight responsibilities here and who, as his recent proposal to divide the country into ten new economic zones shows, is not shy about trying out even radical ideas.
But whatever the explanation, at least some regional and local officials are certain to pick up on these ideas in order to boost their own power if nothing else. And that in turn means that the regions and the municipalities are likely to be the seen of more real politics than most of them have been in the final years of Putin’s second term.
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