Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 19 – A meeting of
the working group in the Presidential Council on Inter-Ethnic Relations charged
with coming up with a common draft instead highlighted both the widespread
opposition to the legislation and the lengths to which the bill’s backers feel
they may have to go to put it across.
Reporting on yesterday’s meeting
today, Natalya Gorodetskaya says that the meeting not only didn’t reach an
agreement on the content of the legislation but even on its name. Valery Tishkov, who heads the working group,
suggested dropping the word “Russian” from the title of the draft law entirely (kommersant.ru/doc/3171483).
That might satisfy some who oppose
the legislation because of what they see as an oxymoronic combination in the
title of a political and thus non-ethnic term – rossisskaya – with the ethnically loaded term – natsiya -- a link that both Russians and
non-Russians feel threatened by.
Magomedsalam Magomedov, the former
head of Daghestan who oversees ethnic issues for the Presidential
Administration, said that Moscow could not fail to take note of “the various,
at times extreme positions” about the law that people in the regions and
republics have expressed; and he called analyzing “foreign experience” rather
than racing after any quick fixes.
After all, he said, the drafters
have until August 1st of next year to come up with a satisfactory version,
an indication although he did not say so that the Kremlin likely will try to
drag out this process so that it can quiet some of the opposition to the
measure that has been expressed so far.
Magomedov said that the legislation
must “satisfy all, no one must be offended and no one must receive excessive
preferences,” an indication that the law may not define very much on its own and thus may serve as
Tishkov suggested only as “a federal framework law” which needed refer to
Russians in either the political or ethnic sense in its title.
Some participants in the meeting
said, Gorodetskaya reported, that the law must including information on “the
symbols, the meanings of civic and political nation, ethno-cultural development
of peoples, the principles of inter-ethnic accord, solidarity, and the role of
civic and state institutions in the carrying out of nationality policy.”
Vladimir Zorin, another former nationalities
minister, argued that “the main thing is to strengthen unity in the country.
The [political] Russian nation has almost taken shape, but if must be
reproduced with each new generation.”
That requires not only a law but a broad program in support of its
provisions.
Maksim Shevchenko, the president of
the Moscow Center for Strategic Research on Religion and Politics, told the
meeting that Moscow must introduce special courses on the culture of the peoples
of Russia into the schools But Igor Barinov, the head of the Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs, demurred.
He said that the education ministry
wanted to know what courses would have to be cut to make room for any like
that.
But there was one thing that almost
all the speakers agreed on: there needs to be a series of meetings in the
republics and regions to speak with “the opponents of a single nation” because
they are numerous, especially in the Volga region, Sakha, and the North
Caucasus, Zorin continued.
Magomedov who also called for such
sessions asked that those working on the draft “take their time and concentrate
on what unites us rather than on differences,” a concluding formulation that
suggests there may be more of the latter than the Russian authorities have been
prepared to acknowledge about something Putin says he wants.
No comments:
Post a Comment