Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 29 – Vladimir Putin
has given the FSB control of the composition of lists of members of the
numerically small peoples of the North and Far East, thus allowing the siloviki
rather than anyone else to decide who is a member and who thus qualifies for
the benefits of being so and for having a voice in the economic development of
the region.
The Russian constitution specifies
that every citizen of that country has the right to declare the nationality of
his or her choice or to declare none at all. But there is one major exception:
members of numerically small nationalities whose members are granted special
privileges in order to help them survive.
That makes membership in those
communities something valuable and so the Russian authorities have gone to some
lengths to ensure that only those who are really members of these nations are
able to claim those benefits, even going to court to have individuals forced to
prove their nationality or be struck off.
Until a few years ago, regional
officials maintained these lists on their own. There was no all-Russian list.
But as Russian corporations and the government have expanded into the North,
Moscow concluded that it needed to be in control lest numerically small peoples
get in the way of center-favored economic activity.
With the establishment of government
monitoring of ethnic problems in 2016, the task of compiling such lists was
given to the Federal Agency for Nationality Affairs. But now it has been handed
over to an inter-agency committee the FSB chairs, giving that siloviki body far
greater powers (indigenous-russia.com/archives/7213).
Only one other country has a list
like this: China, which maintains one for minorities in the Xinjiang-Uyghur
Autonomous Region and has used the lists to decide who is to be confined in its
notorious concentration camps. There is no sign that Moscow is about to take
such a radical step, but the latest move gives the Kremlin a kind of leverage
it cannot be trusted to use fairly.
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