Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 13 – Moscow’s effort
to create a unified civic Russian nation at a time when ethnic Russian national
identity is weakening and the national identities of many non-Russian nations
are intensify is sparking ethnic tensions, according to Oleg Kirichenko, a
senior scholar at the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology.
Kirichenko says that in this situation,
“other peoples have come to feel their superiority over” the ethnic Russians,
something the latter “undoubtedly feel” and thus “react so sharply to
manifestations of well-organized” non-Russian groups “on territories which they
consider their own” (nazaccent.ru/content/8387-s-chego-nachinaetsya-naciya.html).
The Moscow
ethnographer’s observation is just one in a roundup of opinion about why
interethnic relations in the Russian Federation appear to be deteriorating, a
subject that Nazaccent.ru’s Elena Meygun says it is time for “an honest
diagnosis” rather than political posturing.
The range of the answers of those
she queried is truly breathtaking. Omar Ibragimov, an advisor to the permanent
representation of Daghestan in Moscow, says that the media are playing a major
role by focusing on crimes “persons of Caucasus nationality” commit and
ignoring crimes that members of other nations carry out.
But other experts said that Ibragimov
gets it exactly backward: The media focuses on ethnic crimes because members of
some groups such as the North Caucasians, as a result of discussions of ethnic
issues in the media and society, are prone to commit particularly serious
infractions.
Another expert, Mikhail Fedotov,
chairman of the Presidential Human Rights Council, suggests that conflicts
sometimes get out of hand because the population doesn’t trust the police or
prosecutors and feels that it has to take independent action to punish those
who have attacked someone of their own ethnic group.
Aleksey Mikhaylov, a former air
force lieutenant general and chairman of the Council of Patriotic
Organizations, says that a major and often neglected explanation for ethnic
conflicts is the propensity of some political figures to “use ethnic crime for
the solution of their own tasks” regardless of what that means for society as a
whole.
Said-Akhmed Elesov, Chechen
permanent representative to the Middle Volga, agrees with Mikhaylov. He
suggests that those who call for violence after some crime has been committed
almost always are not related to the victims as would be the case in the North
Caucasus but rather “those who have decided to earn dividends” from what has
happened.
Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s human rights
ombudsman, suggests that “the real cause” of ethnic conflicts” lies with social
problems like unemployment and hopelessness, factors that “create ideal conditions
for the rise of aggression.” He notes that many people believe that greater
information is “a panacea,” but that is not always the case.
“Many in the government,” he
continues, “forget or do not want to see how ethnic mobilization takes place alongside
ethno-cultural enlightenment. And they
are very surprised when this is in part transformed into various forms of
nationalism” and the conflicts arising from that process.
Academician Valery Tishkov, the
director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, urges as he has before
“not to dramatize the situation” but instead “to take the multi-national
quality of the country as a given,” a situation in which ethnicity is not the
primary or the only identity.
The creation of a supra-national
identity is not only possible but has a precedent in Soviet times: the USSR
created what it called “’the united community of the Soviet people.’” That country fell apart, however as Elena
Meygun notes, before that experiment could be completed. Time will tell whether the non-ethnic Russian
nation will do better.
She acknowledges that “the idea of
friendship of the peoples for a certain time really kept the country from
fratricidal conflicts, but without constant administrative-ideological support,
this [idea] had disappeared by the mid-1990s.”
And now there is a new trend that is worrisome: inter-ethnic marriages
are declining in number, reflecting mobilization along ethnic lines.
Consequently, Meygun says, the
picture today is not too pleasant: “the main ethos of the country is rapidly
losing its consciousness of itself as a nation; the numerically smaller peoples
are attempting to survive with the help of preferences from the state; and the
national republics are actively pushing their independence on the basis of
budgetary subventions.”
Moreover, she continues, “at the
same time from neighboring countries in a practically uncontrolled fashion are
arriving people for whom work for kopecks and life in what are from our point
of view inhuman conditions is preferable to remaining at home. Can one hope for peace and concord among
participants in a struggle for survival?”
Up to now, she suggests, “the
attempts of the authorities to solve the problem of inter-ethnic conflicts
recall the addressing of the symptoms of the disease and not its causes.” What is happening in Pugachev and elsewhere
shows that the temperature is going up. If that is to be reversed, she says, “an
honest diagnosis” and a struggle with the “real causes” are needed.
Clearly, “it is impossible to create
a single nation in a state here de facto there are not established equal
conditions for the development of various ethnoses or where highly organized minorities seek to employ violence in an
effort to impose medieval norms of behavior on a disoriented majority.”
“The degradation of society in this
direction,” Meygun concludes, “will lead to the collapse of the country. The unification and strengthening of a
multi-national state [like the Russian Federation] is possible only on the
basis of conditions of equality and justie in all spheres of the life of
society without exception.”
“In such conditions,” the Nazaccent.ru
commentator says, “no one will have to be forced to feel himself part of a
single multi-national nation, the [non-ethnic] Russian nation.”
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