Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 17 – In conformity
with Russia’s new nationality doctrine and President Vladimir Putin’s
subsequent suggestions that regional leaders bear responsibility for ethnic
relations and must prevent the rise of ethnic enclaves, the government of
Moscow Oblast has begun using sociological surveys to try to identify in
advance potential hotspots.
According to a report in today’s
“Izvestiya,” “officials [there] will conduct regular sociological surveys in
order to measure the attitudes of the indigenous population toward labor
mmigrants from abroad and those who have come from other regions” of the
Russian Federation (http://izvestia.ru/news/543079
Mikhail Solomentsev, the deputy
head of the internal policy administration of the oblast, told the paper that
as a result, “we will know in advance where a conflict situation is possible”
and that “if these results show a large percentage of negative attitudes among
the local population toward a definite nationality or toward gastarbeiters,
then this will be a signal” for us to bring in Federal Migration Service (FMS)
officials and representatives of the diasporas.
According to Solomentsev, he and
his subordinates have “already” taken note of “several dangerous places, but he
did not name them in order to avoid exacerbating the situation,” the Moscow
paper said. His immediate superior, Andrey Ilnitsky, said that with this kind
of information, officials could not claim that they do not know what is going
on.
One possible problem location, the
paper said, is in Losino-Petrovsky where “almost one third of the population
consists of people from the outside who live on one territory and in essence
form a national enclave.” But despite
repeated requests that the authorities do something about it, the problem has
not been “resolved.”
Attached to the Moscow oblast
governor’s office is a coordinating council for nationality affairs, the paper
reported, and Andrey Vorobyev who is currently acting as governor, told “Izvestiya”
that his region does have problems with immigrants including with places where
they form separate neighborhoods.
“We have a large number of
territories,” he said, “where unfortunately the life of immigrants in general
is not regulated in any way. This very much disturbs us, and residents at each meeting
demand that the imposition of order. There where enclaves already exist, thre
must be limitations and rules, but often there are no rules.”
The immigrants behave badly and “all
this is incorrect,” the acting governor said. “We know about the problems and
we will solve them according to the law.”
According to the paper, the Moscow
Oblast government has asked Aleksandr Bosykh, a member of the presidium of the
Rodina Party, to help develop means to “prevent inter-ethnic conflicts.” Bosykh for his part says that the situation
in the Moscow region is “complicated” and needs a better system to work things
out than the one provided so far by the FMS.
But not everyone agrees with his
assessment. Karomat Sharipov, the president of the Tajik Working Migrant
Movement, says that there are about 200,000Tajiks there, that they work in
construction and move on when construction projects are finished, and an FSM
official adds that “one should not say that there are enclaves” in the Moscow
Oblast today.
As the Moscow newspaper notes, “in
recent years, the theme of inter-ethnic relations has ceased to be problematic
or forbidden for the authorities. President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister
Dmitry Medvedev frequently talk about the problem. Various proposals have been
made about the resolution of the problem, but there are still no real results.”
And the paper itself a day earlier
explained why sociological surveys may not work either. The FMS has stepped up its deportation
program, and thus many immigrant workers from abroad may be reluctant to talk
to the authorities about anything lest that lead to their being sent home (nazaccent.ru/content/6481-v-moskve-stali-aktivnee-deportirovat-nelegalnyh.html).
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