Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 29 – A meeting of 200
leading intellectuals and officials in Kabardino-Balkaria unanimously denounced
the Kremlin’s proposed language bill, saying that it is another step toward
Moscow’s demolishing of the non-Russian republics and toward the launch of a
new Russian wave of ethnocide against the Circassians and other non-Russian
nations.
The anger of the Kabardins, a
subgroup of the Circassian nation, and of the Turkic Balkars about this measure
was reflected both in that the Nalchik meeting attracted nearly all the leading
intellectuals of that republic and in that two members of the KBR parliament
joined them, Larisa Cherkes says (kavkazr.com/a/yazyk-i-respublik%D0%B0/29325256.html).
Olga Efendiyev-Begret of the
Circassian Zhegu Organization says that “practically all the participants
called this bill an act of ethnocide and compared it to the genocide of the Circassian
people” in the 19th century. Balkar participants in the meeting
agreed and recalled the tragic events in their nation’s history as well.
Aslan Beshto, the head of the
Kabardin Congress, says that the Kremlin measure, one that he describes as “absolutely
illegal and chauvinistic,” should be have been rejected and “killed in its cradle
by the deputies of the national republics in the State Duma.” That was their
responsibility and they failed to meet it.
According to him, the presence of
the two local deputies is a welcome sign because both “expressed a readiness to
cooperate with society and to engage in dialogue,” although as yet “there is no
full recognition [by them and others] of the danger on the brink of which the
republic finds itself.”
Madina Khadkuasheva, a philologist, adds
that the Russian Duma did not expect such “a stormy reaction” to the measure.
It has never faced a situation like this before. But she said that Circassians and other
non-Russian nations plan to continue to fight the measure regardless of what
Moscow does.
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