Window on Eurasia: Soviet-Era Uranium Waste Sites Now Threaten Central Asia

Paul Goble

London, May 19 – Storage sites for uranium tailings that were built in Soviet times in Tajikistan are now leaking radiation into the surrounding atmosphere and ground water supplies, undermining the health and well-being of the people of a republic and a broader region that lack the resources to clean up a problem that it did nothing to create.
At three formerly “closed” locations in Tajikistan -- Taboshar, Chkalovsk and Adrasman -- Soviet state enterprises mined uranium and left enormous piles of radioactive tailings in poorly constructed containment areas. After 1991, the mines closed – in many cases, the veins were running out – but the problems remain (www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=6170).
There are now ten tailings preservation sites, intended to prevent the leakage of radiation and chemical poisons into the surrounding environment, but none of them is working and intended. As a result, Tajik specialists say that they constitute “a serious danger for the environment and human life not only in nearby cities and towns but in Central Asia as a whole.”
A major reason for that conclusion is that they are located near major bodies of water: the Kayrakkum reservoir and the Syrdarya River which flows through the territory not only of Tajikistan but of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan as well. As a result, what many might dismiss as Tajikistan’s problem is a much larger one.
Scholars have determined that the radiation from these tailings in some places is more than 30 times levels that threaten human health. But the problems these tailings pose is not limited to radiation directly. They also are the source of poisonous chemicals which have leached into the ground and now appear in plants, animals, and drinking water.
The impact of the release of radioactive materials on the health of the population is already clear. Not only are the numbers of people suffering from cancer increasing, but the age of onset of cancers is falling, with many local people showing signs of cancer when they are only 15 or 16 years old, something almost unheard of earlier.
Moreover, medical officials from Dushanbe say that the overall health statistics for the areas around the uranium tailings sites are chilling: The number of stillborn children has increased as have the number of newborns with congenital defects. Some 85 percent of women in the region suffer from anemia, as do more than 64 percent of newborns.
And they add that the weakening of the human organism as a result of radiation and chemical poisons has opened the way for an increase in other diseases not normally directly blamed on these sites, including Hepatitis-A and tuberculosis. The medical experts say that they see no sign of these trends being reversed anytime soon.
That is because, Numon Khakimov, the director of the Sogdian branch of the Agency for Nuclear and Radiation Security of the Tajik Academy of Sciences, says, Dushanbe does not have the financial resources to conduct the necessary restoration and improvement of the containment sites for the nuclear tailings.
One way out of the current dilemma, Khakimov and other experts say, is the secondary reprocessing of these tailings, especially since Dushanbe has signaled that it has an interest in the peaceful use of nuclear energy. But the task ahead in that regard is daunting, quite possibly beyond the capacity of Tajikistan or its neighbors alone to meet.
Not only has there been no reprocessing of uranium in the area for more than a decade and not only have most of those with the necessary expertise left – as a result, the population adjoining the containment areas has fallen by half since 1991—but the amount of radioactive leavings is enormous, more than 450 million tons.
As a result, Ferghana.ru concludes sadly, the prospects are not good. “The elites have left the area forever because they know that the supplies of uranium are practically exhausted and that sooner or later all the factories and combines involved with the production of nuclear fuel will stop.”
In the end, the news service suggests, the local population will stand alon, facing “only the ruins of nuclear processing and mountains of ecological problems.”

Window on Eurasia: Could Kabardino-Balkaria Become the Kosovo of the Caucasus?

Paul Goble

Baku, May 18 – Kabardino-Balkarian President Arsen Kanokov is pursuing policies which are boosting the status of his own branch of the Circassian nation and threaten to transform that hitherto relatively peaceful republic into a Kosovo of the Caucasus, according to leaders of the Balkar minority from that republic and academic specialists on the region.
Interethnic tensions have been on the rise in that North Caucasus republic since 2005 when the local parliament stripped the Balkars of their status as “a subject forming” nation, Mikhail Zalikhanov, a Duma deputy and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told a roundtable session in Moscow on Friday (www.sobkorr.ru/news/4A0D618193A06.html).
The scholar added that Kanokov had also been an active supporter of “Greater Circassia,” a project which would re-unite all the Circassian peoples into a single republic in the north Caucasus and ultimately seek its independence, a project which Zalikhanov somewhat incongruously called “a pan-Turkic formation.”
(What makes that formulation strange is that the Balkars are a Turkic-speaking group while the Circassians of whom the Kabards are but one branch are not.)
But Kanokov’s actions have not been limited to this ideological sphere. Ismail Sanchiyev, the chairman of the Council of Elders of the Balkar People, told the Moscow session that Kanokov was pursuing the creation of a “mono-ethnic” republic by confiscating land and thus changing the balance of power there.
According to the Kabardino-Balkaria constitution, republic laws take precedence over federal ones, and the parliament has put a 40 year moratorium on the privatization of land lest such actions remove from the use of one ethnic community territories it has occupied in the past and sharpen ethnic feelings.
But following Moscow which insists on the supremacy of federal laws and ignoring his republic constitution, Kanokov has run roughshod over that limitation and privatized enormous amounts of land, thus effectively confiscating it from the population as a whole and the Balkars and ethnic Russian minorities in particular.
One of the reasons Kanokov has been able to do this, Sanchiyev said, is because he has packed the republic parliament with his relatives: 43 of the 70 deputies are related to the president or his personal friends. And in Balkar regions, there are no people of power who do not fall into that category.
In the past, the Balkar leader said, there were no tensions between Kabards and Balkars, but now they “artificially” exist as a result of the actions of Kanokov. Such actions include, in addition to land grabs and intimidation, efforts by the republic president and attacks to bring charges of extremism against his Balkar opponents.
Like Zalikhanov, Sanchiyev also accused Kanokov of “separatist tendencies” and support for Greater Circassia. And also like the Duma deputy, he said that there is a growing risk of clashes between the Circassian (Adygey-Abkhaz) and Turkic (including Balkar) groups of peoples in the North Caucasus.
At least three aspects of this meeting merit close attention. First, Moscow’s effort to create a common legal space across the country is creating serious problems in places like Kabardino-Balkaria where land, power and ethnic status are so tightly interwoven and where incautious efforts to cut this knot can lead to violence.
Second, increasing activism by Circassians in recent months is rapidly generating a reaction among groups like the Balkars who live among them because they feel genuinely threatened and because they clearly believe that they can gain allies in Moscow against local leaders who may be inclined to support the Circassian national cause.
And third – and far and away the most important – to the extent that the Balkars are right that there is a rift developing between Turkic and Caucasic speaking groups (among whom the Circassians are prominent) in the North Caucasus, that could indeed presage a North Caucasus Kosovo, perhaps even more violent than the original Balkan one.

Window on Eurasia: South Ossetian Leader’s Authoritarianism Posing Problems for Moscow

Paul Goble

Baku, May 18 – South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity’s efforts to make himself president for life has turned that territory into one “free from law,” discrediting his regime in the eyes of the people there, providing excuses for Belarus and other countries not to recognize him, and compromising Moscow’s ability to control the spending of Russian assistance there.
All these problems were highlighted last week when a group of Kokoity’s political opponents came to Moscow to lobby for Russian intervention to guarantee the legality of the May 31 elections and specifically calling on the Kremlin to oppose Kokoity’s plans to change the republic constitution so that he could run for additional terms (www.politcom.ru/8164.html).
Indeed, these opposition figures told anyone in the Russian government who would listen that Kokoity’s drive for personal power is not only discrediting him and his regime at home and abroad but also discrediting the Russian authorities who have found themselves forced to support him despite some obvious misgivings.
The Kremlin, which already has had problems with Kokoity over the appointment of officials in his government, decided to back the South Ossetian opposition: Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Russian presidential administration, saying on Vesti 24 that South Ossetia should preserve the existing term limitations in the South Ossetian constitution.
On the one hand, the Kremlin could not do less. General Anatoly Barankevich, a hero of the August 2008 war, said that as a result of Kokoity’s authoritarianism, “that territory is free from law” and rapidly being discredited in the eyes of the population there because of its falsification of elections, corruption, and attacks on opposition groups.
But on the other, it could hardly do more, at least in public. Since it recognized South Ossetia as an independent country last summer, a step only Nicaragua has followed, Moscow has insisted that Tskhinvali has a democratic government, something that over interference would call into question and reduce the likelihood any other country would grant recognition.
According to reports from Tskhinvali, the upcoming parliamentary elections will be anything but democratic themselves. Kokoity in his drive for personal power has muscled aside the two main opposition parties and planned to push through a constitutional amendment eliminating the restriction on anyone serving more than two consecutive times as president.
Naryshkin’s statement, according to Politcom.ru, is intended to “send a signal” to Kokoity that Moscow won’t interfere in the upcoming parliamentary vote – such interference would likely be counterproductive at this point in any event, but that it does not want him to remain in office after he finishes his second term next year.
Thus, Kokoity was, in the words of the Moscow portal, “politely” asked to find a successor and thus open the way for Moscow to take greater control of the situation than it has at present. But Kokoity’s past behavior suggests that he may equally “politely” ignore the question and push ahead with his own plans.
“What in that case might the Kremlin do with ‘the head of a young independent state?” Politcom.ru asks. And while it provides no answers, there are a number of possibilities ranging from his replacement in a coup, something that would undermine the status of Tskhinvali and Moscow still further, to the absorption of South Ossetia into the Russian Federation.
That latter step is something Kokoity has sometimes suggested he would like, but it too would create problems for Moscow, which would then be forced to explain again how its military actions in Georgia last August could be justified if the resulted not in self-determination of two states as the Russian side claimed but annexation.
At the very least, South Ossetia and its leadership appear set to cause Moscow more headaches in the future than Abkhazia will, even though or perhaps because the regime there has more support domestically and more backing from Circassians and other communities who view Sukhumi as the first step in their effort to restore their homelands in the North Caucasus.

Window on Eurasia: Fall of ‘Southern Berlin Wall’ Opened the Way for Rise of Russia’s Muslims

Paul Goble

Baku, May 18 – Most specialists on Russian affairs have focused on the impact of the opening of the western border of the Soviet bloc, but a Moscow scholar argues that “the fall of the Southern Berlin wall” between the USSR and the Islamic world may prove as fateful because of the role that event played in the development of Russia’s Muslim community.
In an essay published in “Nezavisimaya gazeta” at the end of last week, Aleksey Malashenko, a specialist on Islam at the Moscow Carnegie Center, suggests that a major shortcoming in the study of Islam in Russia is that there is a plethora of works devoted to aspects of that issue but few providing an overview (http://www.ng.ru/ideas/2009-05-15/8_islam.html).
To help begin to correct that problem, he offers a number of “theses about Islam in Russia.” First of all, he argues that Islam, although it had never “died” in Soviet times, began its revival in 1990 with the formation of the Islamic Party of Rebirth, a step that marked the formation of an independent and public face of the faith.
That “Islamic identity,” Malashenko continues, in the years since that time has been “expressed more intensively than Orthodox identity” because Muslims form a minority in the population and consequently “attachment to their religion is for them a natural form of self-defense.”
But in addition to this minority status, the Muslims of Russia for the first time since 1917 began participating in the trans-national process of “’the globalization of Islam,’” the project of reaffirming the existence of an international community of believers of umma that affected Russia’s Muslims with particular intensity.
On the one hand, the Moscow specialist notes, Islam in Russia has always been on “the periphery” of the Muslim world. And on the other, during the Soviet period, Islam there was almost completely cut off from the broader umma and hence largely unaffected by developments in it.
“After the fall of ‘the southern Berlin wall,’” the clash between Islam as it existed in Russia and Islam as it was developing elsewhere was “inevitable both for political as well as for purely religious reasons” -- all the more so because “Tatars, Bashkirs, but especially Caucasians strove to escape the image of ‘bad Muslims’ which they had inherited from Soviet times.”
After the initial shock wore off and after Muslims in Russia began to understand that they shared many views with Muslims elsewhere, the initial hostility wore off and Russia’s Muslims began to display a willingness for “dialogue with ‘the opponent’ if not in the field of religious doctrine then in the sphere of ideology.”
At the same time, there appeared what Malashenko describes as “a new tendency: the politicization of Islam,” especially in Daghestan and Chechnya, and the striving of Muslims in Russia to form “their own kind of ‘Islamic space’” in which Muslim rules would guide the life of the community.
Where Muslims form majorities, the waqf system is being restored Islamic banking is making an appearance, and Islamic dress for women is becoming more common. But when Muslims living in non-Muslim areas pursue these goals, can represent an effort to set themselves apart, something that is “disturbing,” Malashenko continues.
Last year, he notes, some began to begin talking about the creation in Moscow’s Butovo district of a Muslim micro-rayon and “even about the organization in it of ‘Muslim patrols’ for the defense against attacks by non-Muslim nationalists.” If such efforts go forward, it is “horrible to think” what that could mean for the country as a whole.
Because of the speed of these processes, Malashenko points out, there have appeared in rapid succession several competing generations among the leadership of Russia’s Muslims. The first generation, now over 80, was the product of the Soviet experience and was largely unaffected by the umma beyond Russia’s borders. It is largely passing from the scene.
The second, which consists of men in their 50s and 60s, was both formed by the Soviet experience but profoundly affected by the external world after “the fall of the southern Berlin wall.” They were more open to change, and in the main they have been successful in accommodating both sides of this divide.
In addition, there is a third generation, younger still, who are “more dangerous.” “Their level of knowledge is higher” than that of the other two because they have studied abroad, and they spoke Arabic well. To date the second generation has generally held them off, but it is unclear whether it will be able to do so in the future.
And finally, there is a fourth generation, the very youngest, which did not grow up under Soviet conditions and does not see why Russia’s Muslims should be different from the Muslims of other countries. What the members of this group will do when they gain influence and power also remains to be seen.
Just how many Muslim believers there are in Russia now is a matter of dispute, but it is possible to speak about the three major trends – the “non-traditional” including radical, Arab-centric, Wahhabist and so on – the “traditional” Russian Islam “and … religious indifference,” the last a trend few Muslim leaders want to talk about.
By way of conclusion, Malashenko makes three additional observations. First, he says, the number of radicals is reality small “but very active,” especially in the North Caucasus. Second, the Kremlin has given up attempts to create “an ‘Islamic vertical’” recognizing that organizationally Islam in Russia is “polycentric and cannot have a single leader.
And third, he points out, “Islam remains a factor in foreign policy,” not only for Moscow but also and perhaps more importantly for the heads of Muslim republics and regions who see themselves as full members of the Muslim world and regularly interact with religious and political leaders from them.
At present, these two levels of interaction typically work in parallel, but Malashenko warns, “under crisis conditions, when the regions will become more independent, this tendency [of great activity by the Muslim republics and regions in the Russian Federation] could receive an additional impulse,” with unknown consequences for the country as a whole.

Window on Eurasia: 2.5 Million Russian Witnesses Every Year Change Testimony Out of Fear of Reprisals from Criminals

Paul Goble

Baku, May 15 – Even though Russia has a witness protection program, one out of four witnesses in Russian trials – some 2.5 million people – change their stories when called to the stand fearful that criminals will take reprisal against them, yet another obstacle on Russia’s road to a law-based society.
Many countries have long recognized the need to provide protection to witnesses, and in 1985, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on countries without such programs to set them up. Russia did not do so until January 2005, but to date only about 5,000 people are being protected under its terms (www.argumenti.ru/publications/9572).
Some of that relatively small group have been moved to new locations, given new names and biographies, and even provided with plastic surgery to change the way they appear, but that has not proved sufficient to guarantee that witnesses will testify accurately or even that they will testify at all.
A major reason for that is the small size of the program. In 2005, the Russian government budgeted only 10 million rubles (400,000 US dollars) for witness protection, an amount so small, “Argumenty i fakty” suggested that criminals can “sleep quietly” because they have enough money to deal with witnesses against them.
Because of a lack of resources, the number of witnesses who are given protection and the amount of protection they receive are absurdly little. In 2006, the weekly reports, only 505 of 17 million witnesses in Russian courts were granted protection, and none of them were assisted with changing their residence or appearance.
Even Ukraine does better, the Moscow paper says, noting that SBU Mykola Melnichenko, who provided transcripts linking that country’s former president with the murder of a journalist, was recently given plastic surgery to change his image and thus provide him with greater protection.
Moreover, the Russian program must contend with popular attitudes: Sixty percent of Russians prefer not to report crimes lest they get involved with the authorities. 41 percent say they are afraid of be subject to pressure if they do serve as witnesses, and 90 percent say they are prepared to change their testimony or remain silent.
The more serious the charges being heard, the more likely witnesses are to have reason to fear that they will be subject to pressure from the accused or his associates. Every fifth witness in such cases, the authorities say, is subject to threats, and “from 150,000 to 300,000 witnesses are subject to pressure from criminal clans.”
And even though the Russian government in 1998 adopted a law providing for the protection of judges and prosecutors, that legislation has not been completely effective either, with many in both subject to threats, something that in the absence of credible protection raises questions about the honesty of their decisions.
Witness protection programs are hardly the first thing people focus on when they discuss the rule of law, but as the “Argumenty i fakty” article suggests, they may be critical, especially in societies like the Russian where people remain deeply skeptical about the courts and about the willingness of the authorities to protect those who simply do their duty and tell the truth.

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Militia Play Up Ethnic Crime to Justify Crackdown on Minorities

Paul Goble

Baku, May 15 – The Moscow militia, in league with media outlets interested in sensationalism, is vastly overstating the extent and nature of ethnic crime in the Russian capital in order to get approval for a sweeping crackdown against minorities, according to a former interior ministry officer.
Dmitry Berkut told Kavkaz-Uzel.ru this week that the authorities do not keep the kind of ethnically specific statistics on crime many newspapers and websites report and that there is no basis to talk about “the beginning of ‘a major war between ethnic criminal groups,’ … or between clans of one of the national criminal groups” (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/154116).
Of course, there are cases of violence by members of one ethnic group against another, he continued, but any suggestions that these constitute the opening of an ethnic “’apocalypse’ is a “cynical” effort by the militia to secure a green light for the kind of crackdown against these minorities that many members of the many militiamen took part in the North Caucasus.
“As soon as people begin to talk about some kind of ‘ethnic war,’ Berkut said, “I assure you, a directive will come to conduct raids in the marks, construction sites, auto services and other places where people called in the language of the militia ‘persons of Caucasus appearance’ are working.”
At that point, he continued, “the OMON will receive carte blanche for ‘soft cleansings’ in these places,” a kind of official blessing in advance that will allow the militia to operate with even less attention to legality than normally and with their work being celebrated by the media as a valiant defense of public order.
Berkut said that when he worked in the militia it often happened that after a murder or attack on or by a member of a non-Russian minority, the militia would be given unwritten orders to “restore order” and show “who is boss in the city," orders the militiamen on the street interpreted to mean that they were free to act as they pleased.
“As a result, the militia, which hardly famed for its tolerance, simply begins to conduct itself as many of its officers became accustomed to act during the special operations in the North Caucasus,” with the militiamen focusing not on the actions of individuals but on their assumptions about groups.
Such ethnic profiling has become especially common in Moscow, he continued, where specific ethnic groups are typically connected in the public mind with specific sectors of the economy – the Azerbaijanis with construction and markets, for example, and the Armenians with restaurants, clubs, and automobile dealerships.
And this pattern which has some basis in fact, the former interior ministry officer continues, provides the basis for the media reports about “inter-ethnic wars,” conflicts that have supposedly begun because the economic downturn is forcing members of some nationalities to try to take over sectors controlled by members of another nationality.
Some of that may be happening, Berkut concedes, but media reporting about it is vastly overblown. Indeed, such reports about “new ethnic wars” are in almost all cases simply efforts by the interior ministry to justify its call for tougher laws and for more public understanding of and support for the militia’s need to use harsh measures.
To the extent Berkut is correct – and both his own experience and the internal consistency of his argument make that seem very likely – the current upsurge in media reporting about ethnic “crimes” in the Russian capital suggests that more clashes are likely to be ahead not so much between the various nationalities as between the nationalities and the Russian militia.

Window on Eurasia: Ukraine’s Muslims are Part of ‘Muslim European Community’

Paul Goble

Baku, May 15 -- “Ukraine is a European country and the Muslims of Ukraine are part of the Muslim European community,” according to the head of the Federation of Islamic Organizations of Europe (FIOE) – yet another way in which the people of Ukraine are underscoring their attachment to Europe rather than Eurasia.
During a visit to the Islamic Cultural Center in Kyiv last week, Shakib Benmakhlyuf, FIOE president, not only stressed the Europeanness of Ukraine and of Ukraine’s Muslims but “positively assessed” both the speed of Islamic rebirth there and “the public activity” of Islamic community there (www.islam.in.ua/3/ukr/full_news/2801/visibletype/1/index.html).
In response, Mufti Said Ismagilov, the head of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Ukraine, said his community would like to expand its cooperation with FIOE and that he and the Muslims of Ukraine believe that the recent adoption of the Charter of Muslims of Europe can promote more active ties among European countries.
Convinced that religious attachments can underlie cultural and political ones, the Russian government and the Moscow Patriarchate have devoted a great deal of effort to block the formation of a single autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine and its absorption of the more than 12,000 Orthodox parishes there now subordinate to Moscow.
Indeed, Patriarch Kirill has made the maintenance of his patriarchate’s control of those churches in Ukraine a centerpiece of his policy, not only for the entirely selfish reason that the departure of these parishes would leave his Russian Orthodox Church much reduced in size and influence but also because of the contribution his church makes to Moscow’s political goals.
But both because of the relatively small size of the Muslim community in Ukraine and because there is no single MSD in the Russian Federation to which Muslims in Ukraine have subordinated themselves, no one in Moscow appears to have devoted much attention to the question of Russian influence over Muslims.
That may now change, because the integration of the Muslims of Ukraine into European institutions would lessen the influence of Muslims from other parts of the former Soviet Union but also serve as a precedent Kyiv may be quick to invoke in its effort to establish a single national Orthodox church.
This latest development in Kyiv may lead to a new round of calls not by Muslims but by Russian officials for the creation of a single MSD for the Russian Federation with pretentions to unite Muslim communities in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, especially those where Muslims are minorities.
At the same time, however, any move in that direction would likely generate a reaction not only within the Russian Muslim community, many of whose members have never been entirely comfortable with the entire MSD system, which has no religious basis for existing, but also among Muslims in the other former Soviet countries.
Recent polls in Western Europe, however, have shown that Muslims there tend to be more patriotic than other citizens, and given the Islamic injunction for the faithful to support the country in which they live, efforts by Moscow to subordinate the Islamic communities of the other former Soviet republics could generate an unintended backlash.
Moreover, this assertion of the Europeanness of Ukrainian Islam may prompt Moscow officials to try to divide the Muslims of Ukraine and the other countries by playing on existing tensions between Muslim migrants from Central Asia and the South Caucasus and historically indigenous Muslim communities like the Crimean Tatars.
And finally because of the welcome Ukraine’s Muslims gave to FIOE and its assertion of the European nature of their Islam, it is entirely possible that FIOE and other Euro-Islamic groups will seek to reach out to Muslims in the former Soviet West even more than they have up to now, setting the stage for a somewhat unexpected form of the clash of civilizations.