Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 29 – Seventy-six
years ago today, Stalin deported the Kalmyks from their homeland in the North
Caucasus. Today, officials organized memorial ceremonies, but efforts by those
who first marked this date in 1989 was partially blocked by Dmitry Trapeznikov,
the former Donbass official Moscow has installed as mayor of the capital of Kalmykia
Between the Kalmyks’ return in 1957
and 1989, Soviet officials prevented any commemoration of this event. In that
year, the Peoples Front of Kalmykia held its first meeting on this date because
of its centrality to the life of that nation in recent times (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/344089/).
This week, on the 30th
anniversary of that first meeting, the situation in Kalmykia has changed but
not been transformed. Officials now mark the date with their own meetings, but
they have sought to prevent anyone else from doing so lest the messages from
such a commemoration work against Elista or Moscow.
Valery Badmayev, head of the
Congress of the Oyrat-Kalmyk People, said he had applied for permission to hold
the meeting on December 17 but did not receive a response within three days as
the law requires. Then, a few days ago, his attorney, another former Peoples
Front activist, did – and it was negative.
Because the mayor’s office was not
playing by the rules and informing the applicant, thus replicating its effort
to block an earlier meeting, Badmayev and his colleagues appealed to a local
court. They won in the court of first instance,
but then that decision was overturned by the republic’s supreme court.
They decided to go ahead anyway, but
the 30 to 40 people who showed up were fined for participating in an illegal assembly. This action threatens to restart the Kalmyk
protests against Trapeznikov (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/11/kalmyks-now-protesting-about-more-than.html).
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