Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 29 – Reductions in
the number of men drafted from the North Caucasus supposedly to combat
dedovshchina in the ranks and then Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu’s promise to
restore at least part of the draft quota for that region have sparked questions
in that region which have serious political consequenes.
In an article on the FLNKA.ru portal
on Friday, Milrad Fatullayev, the editor of the Daghestani weekly, “Nastoyashchyeye
vremya” and a contributor to Moscow’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” argues that perhaps
the most serious is “do we live in a single country?” -- or at least a common
legal space? (flnka.ru//2136-armiya-esche-odna-liniya-raskola.html).
With regard to
the reduction and then elimination of draft quotas for the North Caucasus
repubics, Fatullayev says, there is an obvious question: “On what basis” was
that decision taken? What were its legal foundations? The answer of course, that there weren’t any,
and no one has explained why this happened.
If draftees violate military rules,
they must be disciplined, and if the military fails to do that or decides that
the only way it can cope with such violations is not to draft people from one
or another region, Fatullayev continues, then it is clear that “the state
system cannot cope with draftees who violate the law.” Moreover, such a step is
“a crude violation of the Constitution and of human rights.”
Such questions are especially urgent
now that Moscow has decided to restore all quotas in whole or in part. That too requires an explanation, the editor
continues, and it is obvious that in this case too “the law isn’t working.” And involving the republics in supervising
draftees from them is not only a diversion but itself a violation of the
constitution and laws.
Daghestanis “want to serve,”
Fatullayev says. If one of them doesn’t or if he will not live according to the
military rules, then he should be discharged from the military and sent
home. Only “those who are required or
those who want to serve” should be in the military. “I don’t see problems here,”
the editor argues.
Those who don’t want to serve and
are sent home certainly know that they won’t get a position in the police or the
force structures or possibly elsewhere in the bureaucracy, but that is their
choice.
Why then did the Russian military
behave in this way? “It is possible,”
Fatullayev writes, “that the former army leadership calculated that if there
were to be a large number of Caucasians in the Russian army this would be a
threat to Russian statehood” because those who served could use the skills they
obtained against the state.
But imposing “such
limitations on the basis of ethnicity is not only a crudely mistaken but also a
criminal decision of the higher leadership of the Army,” Fatullayev argues, but
it represents a clear “path to the segregation of the country along ethnic,
territorial, religious and other lines.”
“A situation when the laws of the Russian
Federation are applied selectively to its territories, nationalities or
confessional groups is one road that leads the country to collapse” because it
is “yet another line of division.” And what makes the whole situation still
worse is that limitations applied to North Caucasians were not applied to the
Muslims of the Middle Volga.
The General Staff took this decision
on its own, without legal basis, and tried to hide it, first cutting back
quotas – seven times, according to Fatullayev’s information -- under the guise of a reduction in overall
force levels and then finally forced to provide some kind of explanation when
the military could not hide what it was doing any longer.
This whole sad story – the reduction
of quotas, the return of quotas, and the establishment of special oversight
responsibilities to North Caucasus governments is not only illegal but “speaks
about the weakness of the state, about the weakness of the administration, and
about laws which do not work.”
Residents of the North Caucasus are
now asking themselves questions like: “Do we live in a single country?” “Do the
laws apply to all alike independently of ethnicity or territory?” “Can we trust
such a state?” and “Does the state trust us or not?” Clear and precise answers
to these questions are absolutely “necessary.”
“If the state does not trust an
entire region,” he says, “that means that the residents of this region have a
logical basis for having doubts about their trust in this state,” which appears
to view them as aliens or worse, good only to be “driven into national,
political or some other reservations.”
The
fact that these questions are being asked represents a serious political
problem, he argues; the fact that they have not yet been answered represents a
potentially even more serious one.
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