Even Russian Delegation Impressed When Ingush Wore Traditional Clothes at UN Meeting on Minority Languages

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 7 – Zarima Sautiyeva, first ever Ingush at the fellowship program of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, says she donned the traditional dress of her nation when she made her presentation at UN headquarters in New York last month on the plight of Ingush and other non-Russian languages.

            Doing so, she told Lidiya Mikhalchenko of the Kavkazr portal, attracted widespread attention and prompted many in the audience not only to ask about her clothes but about her republic and its language.  Even a member of the Russian delegation at the meeting said he was impressed (kavkazr.com/a/30315471.html).

            Although she was forced to make her presentation in English out of concerns that the available translation from Ingush would not have been the best, Sautiyeva said that she was able to describe why Russia must change its laws on education so that young people in the non-Russian republics will be required to learn the language of the titular nationality.

            Unfortunately, that law and the Kremlin’s efforts have cut into the number of non-Russians learning their own languages and hastened the day they will disappear. The situation in Kabardino-Balkaria is especially bad while that in Ingushetia is somewhat better because UNESCO identified Ingush ten years ago as a language at risk.

            Nonetheless, Ingush remains threatened to this day, she continued, “We speak Ingush but after every three words, we put in a Russian one. Children and young people almost don’t read books in Ingush or understand what they have read. The only language in their native language is on the brink of closing.” 

            In her presentation to the UN, Sautiyeva said she raised the issue of the status of Ingush in the Prigorodny District, once part of Ingushetia but now part of North Ossetia. In that region, there are no textbooks in Ingush at all. She urged that Moscow be directed to correct that under the terms of the 1991 law about the rehabilitation of repressed peoples.

            Asked whether she thought her words would have an impact, Sautiyeva said that at a minimum Moscow will have to take them into account when it makes its required report to the UN Human Rights Commission. Whether it will act on them, of course, very much remains an open question.

            The fundamental source of the problem of minorities and minority languages in Russia and other countries is that they are perceived by some among the majority nationality “as a threat.” But “for Russia,” she argued, “we are not a threat but partners. We simply insist on our rights as guaranteed to us by the Constitution.”

            Each month around the world, two languages disappear. The Ingush and other non-Russians do not want to be among that category in the future.  “If we lose our language, we will disappear as a people; we’ll simply dissolve. Many indigenous peoples of Russia will disappear,” Sautiyeva continued.

            The reaction to her presentation in Ingushetia itself was divide. Most supported her words, but some complained that the report wasn’t being made by a man or by a woman wearing a skirt, Sautiyeva said.

            She added that in order to help her language survive, she had helped form a club in which Ingush were required to speak Ingush and had to pay a fine every time they used a Russian word. Unfortunately, that happened often, an indication of “how complicated it is to speak purely in one’s native language.”