Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 16 – Russian law
specifies that those living abroad whose ancestors came from the Russian
Empire, the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, the so-called “compatriots,”
have the right of return and are to get Russian
citizenship on an expedited basis, but in fact, the Putin regime wants only the
Slavic, the young and the well-educated.
For those who aren’t in those
categories, who aren’t Slavic and Russian speaking, who aren’t young, and who
aren’t well-educated and thus capable of making a contribution to the Russian
economy, Moscow is anything but welcoming, human rights activists like Svetlana
Gannushkina of Civic Support say (idelreal.org/a/29928574.html).
The most notorious example of this
racialist treatment of potential returnees, of course, is that of the Circassians
in war-torn Syria. Thousands would like
to return to their ancestral homeland in the North Caucasus, but the Russian
authorities have thrown up all kinds of roadblocks to prevent them from
returning or from gaining citizenship if they do.
Moscow’s approach to the Circassians
is often explains not in ethnic or religious terms but in starkly political
ones: The Kremlin is clearly and some would say justifiably worried that the
return of Circassians to the North Caucasus would change the ethnic balance in
that region, and further destabilize the situation there.
But as Igor Yasin of the IdelReal
portal points out, the Circassians are far from the only Muslim people whose
ancestors fled or were expelled from the Russian Empire or Soviet Union. Others
include the Chechens and various groups of Tatars. And Moscow has adopted the
same discriminatory policy toward members of these communities who want to
return.
That strongly suggests that Moscow’s
approach is a reflection less of geopolitical calculations than of a desire by
the Kremlin to keep out those who are not Slavs, not young and not educated, as
Gannushkina says Vladimir Putin himself once indicated were the groups he
favored returning.
And that in turn means that the
Russian authorities today in their immigration policies have adopted an openly
discriminatory approach, one that violates not only the Russian Constitution and
laws about compatriots but the basic principles of international law on the
treatment of those of different ethnicities or religion.
If Circassian problems in this regard
are relatively well-known – see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/05/moscow-north-caucasus-republics-making.html,
windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/12/circassian-repatriants-from-syria-ask.html
and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/08/moscow-works-hard-to-block-syrian.html
– the
difficulties other non-Slavic groups face are much less so.
Yasin thus performs a valuable
service by focusing on the problems of one such groups, Tatars in China’s
Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region. In the
first years of this century, numerous Tatars from there were admitted to higher
educational institutions in Russia, but when their student visas ran out, they
were compelled to return to China.
Many of them qualified as
compatriots under Russian law – they even spoke Russian well and had
demonstrated their adaptation to Russian realities – but they were Muslims and
the Russian authorities were not interested in having them become permanent
residents let alone citizens of the Russian Federation.
They were thus sent back to a region
where they as Muslims were being repressed by the Chinese powers that be and
were at risk as their relatives already were of being confined to the Chinese “re-education”
camps that rights activists and some in the international community have
identified as concentration camps.
One, Shukezhati Syaokati (Shakhrezat
Shavkat), tells the story of himself and his brother who came to Kazan and are fighting
to avoid being sent back. Their father is a Uyghur; their mother a Tatar. They
spoke a little Tatar but mostly Uyghur but in Russia, they mastered the Russian
language.
“We came to Kazan to study. My
student visa ended and the authorities wouldn’t give me a new registration
document. University officials said we must go to China to get a new visa. But
now the situation there is such and I cannot return and therefore I am seeking
asylum” in the Russian Federation.
Bakhrom Khamroyev, a rights activist
who is providing the two legal assistance says that the best he thinks his
clients can count on will be another extension of temporary residence despite
the fact that they meet all the requirements of the compatriot law. Consequently,
Khramrooyev says, he expects them to try to get asylum in some third country.
Tatarstan, Yasin notes, did not take
part in the compatriot repatriation effort until recently; but Kazan now plans
to take in 450 “compatriots” in the next two years in order to support,
according to the regime, “the social-economic and demographic development of the
Republic of Tatarstan.”
While some of the
people in this program are Tatars, the overwhelming majority of them are people
from the republics of Central Asia and Ukraine. Those from further afield including
China’s Xinjiang remain almost unrepresented apparently because few of them
have a knowledge of Russian and thus show themselves “capable of adapting” to
Russian conditions.
What is true in Tatarstan is true of
the Russian Federation as a whole. Of the more than 830,000 people who have qualified
as compatriots, the vast majority are ethnic Russians or more rarely other Slavs
from former Soviet republics. Indeed, even Russians from elsewhere are rare: the
only significant group of them to be welcomed back are Old Believers from Latin
America.
The situation for non-Slavs is
getting worse: the updated Conception on State Migration Policy for 2019 to
2025, which was adopted last year, says that immigration should be regulated so
as to preserve and defend “Russian culture, the Russian language, and the
historical cultural heritage of the peoples of Russia which form the foundation
of its cultural (civilizational) code.”
Because of this, Yasin suggests, it
will be easier for non-Russians who face difficulties in their countries of
residence to obtain asylum in Western countries than to get it in Russia,
despite Moscow’s much-ballyhooed claims of support for compatriots abroad.
Unfortunately, although he does not say so, doing so is becoming harder in many
of them as well.
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