Actions in Support of Repatriation of Circassians from Syria Intensify, Spread

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 30 – The murder by sniper fire of an 11-year-old Circassian girl in Damascus has touched the hearts of her co-ethnics in the North Caucasus and sparked an intensification and spread of demonstrations demanding that Moscow change course and allow Circassians to return to the homeland from which their ancestors were expelled in 1864.

            Indeed, since the Sochi Olympiad which took place at the site of that tsarist-era expulsion and genocide, no issue has so united Circassians as has the brutal murder of Judy Maf in the war-torn Syrian capital -- or highlighted the extent to which they are at odds with the government in Moscow (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/09/circassian-girls-murder-in-damascus.html).

             Evidence of this is that demonstrations in support of the return of the Circassians have now spread from Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, to Maykop, the capital of Adygeya, with organizers saying that they “do not exclude the possibility” of mass actions in front of government buildings (natpressru.info/index.php?newsid=9902).

            Initially, individuals went into the main square with posters and pictures of the murdered girl. Now, they are attracting several dozen participants.  Moreover, many Circassian Facebook users have changed their avatars to pictures of Judy, a way of mobilizing still more people in the Internet age (kavpolit.com/articles/v_pamjat_o_dzhudi-20247/).

                More details are emerging about Judy Maf. “Before the beginning of military actions in Syria, she lived with her family in the [predominantly Circassian] settlement of Marj-al-Sultan.” They her family was forced to move to Daahit al-Assad, a suburb of Damascus, where she was shot and killed.

                Yali Kat, a Circassian blogger from Nalchik, posted online that Judy had purchased a new dress for Kurban-Bayram and had gone home to show it off. But before she could get there, she was killed (facebook.com/groups/433298283464889/permalink/748525418608839/).

            Kat’s post sparked a large number of comments, Kavkazskaya politika says, ranging “from expressions of sympathy … to anger about the inaction of the authorities concerning the repatriation of Circassians to their historical motherland.”

            The organizer of the Nalchik action was Abubekir Murzakanov, the head of the Adyge Khekuzh-Circassia who used his Facebook page to call for all people of good will in the republic to assemble and demand that officials help evacuate the Circassians from Syria before more tragedies occur.

            “We do not want war,” he wrote. Rather, we want “that all Circassians who now live abroad feel themselves at home in the Caucasus and that every Circassian has the opportunity to return to his historical motherland. An innocent child has died,” and two months ago, two other Circassian compatriots did as well, Abaza Nart Ramzi and his mother.

            Abaza had studied at the Kabardino-Balkaria State University, he continued, and said “this insanity must be ended.”  That is what the demonstrations are about, and they must be heeded because they represent “a cry of the soul … One must not kill children … Even beasts do not act that way with their young.”

            Murzakhanov said that he and his group “maintain ties with the diasporas” and that is why so many people know about Judy’s murder. Her death “lies on the conscience of those who do not permit the Circassians to return to the motherland, on those who consider themselves leaders of the people but do not have any relation to the resolution of its problems.”

            Up to now, he said, “Russia has been deaf to the problem of the Circassians of Syria. We cannot understand this. An individual of any nation can settle here. The only ones who today do not have that right are Circassians.” And they must come together in that homeland in order for the nation to survive and flourish.

            According to participants in the demonstration, more people will take part in future ones as word spreads of Judy’s death.  Lyudmila Kashirokova, one of their number, said that “we hope that the action will be noted. People are not indifferent to the fate of our compatriots in Syria.”

World’s Response to Putin: More than 100 Countries Now Seek Limits on Veto Power in UN Security Council

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 30 – Two weeks ago, 67 countries said they favored limiting the veto powers of permanent members of the UN Security Council; now, more than 100 do, perhaps the best indication of growing anger in the international community about how Vladimir Putin is using this power to block investigations into his aggression and crimes.

            The right of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council has been in place since the founding of the United Nations 70 years ago, and while some countries have occasionally questioned it, there has never been the kind of groundswell of opposition to this practice as there is today.

            In large measure, this reflects anger at Putin’s vetoing of efforts to investigate the shooting down of the Malaysian airline and more generally at the UN’s ineffectiveness in responding to Russian aggression in Ukraine (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/09/67-countries-now-back-limiting-russias.html).

            Despite the numbers of countries backing change, it is far from clear that this effort will succeed, especially since other permanent members of the UN Security Council view the veto as something they need to defend either themselves or their clients. But the fact that it has gotten this far certainly highlights one of Putin’s greatest negative achievements.

            Yesterday, Yury Sergeyev, Ukraine’s permanent representative to the United Nations, said that “more than 100 UN member countries support the initiative of France concerning the introduction of changes in the UN Charter which would limit the use of the veto” in the UN Security Council (interfax.com.ua/news/general/293333.html).

           

            The Ukrainian diplomat said that “the first hope” for change is that the permanent members themselves will agree “not to apply a veto in cases of open conflict which threaten human life,”  but that in the absence of that, other countries will continue to press for change even though this question is “complex” because it involves the UN Charter itself.

            This week, Sergeyev continued, there will be a special session called by France and Mexico to consider the French initiative. “Ukraine supports” it, as do “already more than 100 countries.”  The task now is to get as many others to join them as possible in order to create “a critical mass” to pressure others.

Totalitarian Survivals Explain Support for Putin But Suggest His Successors May be Even Worse, Gudkov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, September 29 – The high level of popular support for Vladimir Putin despite increasing impoverishment and income differentiation reflects the survival of “not a few major totalitarian institutions” from the Soviet past, and their continuing impact in turn means that those who will come after the current Soviet leader may be even more anti-liberal than he is.

            In a discussion this week at Memorial, the head of the Levada Center polling agency sought to explain what he calls “a unique situation” in which support for the Kremlin leader remains high despite the kind of socio-economic decline that normally costs a leader that kind of backing (lenta.ru/articles/2015/09/29/stabilnost/).

            Gudkov said it would be wrong to suggest that propaganda was responsible for the victory of the television over the refrigerator. Instead, he said, other deeper factors are at work, including the disintegration of the middle class after the Crimean Anschluss, a development that has significantly lowered the potential for protests in Russia.

            In response to the annexation of Crimea, he continued, a major part of what had been the middle class shifted from opposition to support of the government, pushing Putin’s approval rating up from 64 percent to 87 percent and reducing the liberal component of Russian society to only eight or twelve percent.

            That makes it difficult to predict what will happen next, Gudkov said that “it is clear that the era of stability has ended and that the situation in Russia is becoming uncertain,” with some expecting a catastrophe and the rapid collapse of the regime and others believing there will be “a long and slow degradation of the state and its institutions.”

            Clearly involved in this pattern of support are the increasingly repressive measures the government uses against its opponents, Moscow’s exploitation of the trauma many Russians still feel about the disintegration of the USSR, and a shift away from the notion that Russia must  catch up with the West to one that denies such a need.

            Gudkov reported that “the outburst of militant patriotism” over the last year has in many ways was the flip side of the “earlier sado-masochistic self-beating” Russians engaged in when they talked about Russia as “’a backward country,’ ‘an Upper Volta with missiles,’” and the like. Now, feelings of self-respect among Russians have risen markedly.

            But he argued that “the current social-political situation” in Russia “must be explained with the help of the concept of totalitarianism.” Post-Soviet Russia has retained “without any serious changes” the main totalitarian institutions” of the soviet past, including the army, the police, the special services,” as well as the criminal investigation, penal, and educational systems.”

            “All the changes over the last quarter of a century have taken place only I those spheres which were not connected with the reproduction of collective symbols and ideas – in economics, technology, communication, mass consumption and culture.”  That divergence has created in society “strong tensions.”

            “It isn’t surprising,” he said, “that the system functions above all on the unreformed totalitarian institutions of the Soviet past” or that “now the foundation of all social relations has become force (in the sociological sense of this word)” with the authorities prepared to ignore the rights of various groups of the population.

            As a result, Gudkov continued, “the structure of society is degrading and simplifying into an amorphous and voiceless majority, deprived of mechanisms of expressing its interests and forming a resource for the authorities to whom belong all collective values and ideas.”

            As a result, totalitarian ideas continue to inform the populace as well as the government, he said, something that gives rise to enormous dissatisfaction and aggression in all strata of the society, “which has split up into a multitude of petty groups with extremely low levels of mutual trust.”

            That is perhaps most clearly seen in the radical rise in income differentiation where the top ten percent of the population may have as much as 27 times the income of the bottom tenth, controlling 76 percent of all financial assets in the country and making Russia the most socially unequal country on earth.

            That pattern in turn gives rise to a sense of injustice, anomy, frustration and the disintegration of social contacts, and to the growth of suicidal attitudes. He noted that such things are “paradoxically” found more often in the rural areas than in Moscow and the major cities, making them less obvious to outside observers.

            One consequence of these attitudes is that few Russians look very far into the future, the sociologist said. “For 70 percent of the population,” the future is only the next three to five months, and consequently, people “prefer to passively adapt themselves to the gradually worsening conditions of life” than to do anything about them.

            Gudkov warned in conclusion that “the present-day Russian anomy may strongly influence the future of Russia” because it may preclude the coming to power of those who support democratic transformations.  Research shows that the frustration many Russians feel is directed precisely at those groups rather than at the state – even when the political programs of the opposition reflect positions “close to the majority of the population of Russia.”