Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 13 – In a two
minute 38 second video clip, Aleksandra Garmadzhapova, a journalist who works
for Moscow’s “Novaya gazeta” issues an impassioned plea clearly direct from her
heart about the “absurdity” of Russian attitudes toward and persecution of
citizens of the Russian Federation who are members of other ethnic groups.
Her words capture both the ways in
which attacks on non-Russians are disturbing the members of these national
communities and how such attacks are likely to produce exactly the opposite
result that their ethnic Russian authors intend. As such, they deserve to be marked and remembered
(rosbalt.ru/video/2013/08/10/1162891.html).
Garmadzhapova,
an ethnic Buryat, a Buddhist nation in the Trans-Baikal region of the Russian
Federation, says that “racism in Russia is taking on absurd forms. All those
involved in the persecution of migrants after the conflict in [Moscow’s]
Matveyev market, were citizens of Russia,” both those attacking and those being
attacked.
“And the very
idea that the [ethnic] Russian nation should have priority over others which is
supported by those participating in sociological polls creates perplexity. I,
as a Buryat woman,” she says, “can then say -- let us all go to our own
national apartments and destroy the empire.”
“Is that what
you want?”
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