Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 11 – One of the reasons
Moscow has always had difficulty in setting up a nationalities ministry is that
if it has enough power to do its job, it will threaten other agencies; but if
it doesn’t, it will remain only a largely decorative body that holds meetings
and makes declarations.
The new federal Agency for Nationality
Affairs is no exception. In the Russian capital, it has not yet been able to
gain enough power to become a threat to other ministries; but beyond the ring
road and with Moscow’s approval, it is taking powers away from regional
officials and they not surprisingly are unhappy about that.
Olga Balyuk describes this back and
forth on the Uralpolit.ru portal. She
notes that the new federal agency “has chosen the Middle Urals to test its new
system of monitoring ethnic conflicts” because of the large number of ethnic
groups in Sverdlovsk oblast and because the agency’s head Igor Barinov is from
there (uralpolit.ru/article/sverdl/08-09-2015/65718).
But the agency’s choice of the
region for its pilot project deprives “regional officials of part of their
authority” and consequently they are anything but pleased, an indication of how
regional officials elsewhere may react if the Agency for Nationality Affairs
seeks to extend its network more broadly.
Up to now, regional governments
controlled reporting about the situation in their areas, something that gave
them a chance to put the best spin on things and thus avoid intervention from
the center. But Moscow clearly feels they have hid too much or acted too slowly
and hence has decided on this new system.
In presenting it to officials of
Sverdlovsk oblast, Barinov said that sometimes “the reaction of the authorities”
to conflicts at their early stage has been “inadequate.” That is something that
can no longer be tolerated because, he said, “we see what is happening in
Ukraine where in the course of a short period of time these shattered an
enormous country.”
Vladimir Putin, he continued,
ordered the creation of a new monitoring system which would “not talk about
conflicts only after the fact but warn about them in advance.” He gave that order in 2012, and the regional
development ministry and culture ministry went to work “but nothing came of
their efforts.” Hence the new Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs.”
Barinov said that his agency had
drawn on the work of these two ministries and also on the Russian Academy of
Science, the defense ministry “and other organizations.” It will sign
agreements with regional institutions who will supply data, but it will add its
own and sum up the findings.
“We will relieve the regions of the
task of collecting information which often has been unreliable,” Barinov continued.
And “we ourselves will deal with the information” that will then be sent “upwards.”
In short, while regional officials may supply some information, they will lose
control over how it is processed and evaluated.
Dmitry Savelyev, who heads the agency’s
monitoring administration, says that the new system will focus on “points with
heightened conflict potential.” “Any
public event,” he said, could fall into this category, and his staff will
classify it as being high, medium or low risk of leading to ethnic conflicts.
Had this system been in place in
advance of the Biryulevo events, Savelyev continued, “it would have been
possible to avoid pogroms and mass detentions already at 11:00 am on the
morning of the first day” when there appeared the first reports of people
saying that “’a person from the Caucasus had killed a Russian.’”
Barinov for his part said that he
hoped to have the system up and running in Sverdlovsk by the end of the year.
Then it will be extended to the Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous oblast and Russian-occupied
Crimea.
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