Re: Minorities and Minority Rights in the Balkans

From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 1998 18:08:50 +0300 (EET DST)
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Minorities and Minority Rights in the Balkans

From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]> 

Original sender: Miroslav Mitrofanov <[email protected]>

Re: Minorities and Minority Rights in the Balkans


I would like to express gratitude to Mr. Panayote Elias Dimitras for
posting the well-founded and filled with sincerity paper concerning
the Minority Rights in the Balkans. The major part of its content may
be related to the situation in the Baltic states too, where the local
minorities also have to deal with the attempts of the young states to
implement in practice the concept of "nation-state" and to ignore
interests of minorities. And our minorities also often answer by
rejection to participate in social dialogue and in the development of
the civil society institutions.

In the meantime, it seems necessary to draw attention of the
participants of the discussion to several conclusions of the author.

First, Nafsika Papanikolatos wrote:

> "... it is well know the only thing that saved Western
> societies from the predominance of the nation-state is that they
> established well founded democratic republics which were able to
> resist to the authoritarian conditions of the nation-state. This of
> course was not always a successful story..."
 
May we concider solutions of the ethnic minority problems in such
Western countries with old parliamentary traditions as France and
Great Britain to serve as a model to be followed by our countries?
Have the Corsicans in France more possibilities to receive education
in their language than Albanians in Cosovo? Or may be the dialogue
between communities in Ulster is more peaceful than in Latvia? Not, of
course. And that is more the negative experience of "ethnic alignment"
of some Western European countries is now the main obstacle in the way
towards the comrehensive European system to protect the rights of
minorities.

Second, the author wrote:

> "...there is a significant and particularly conspicuous tendency in
> minorities, that characterizes those who desire to exclude and
> dominate, which can be summed up as the almost complete absence of
> solidarity among minorities themselves. It is not strange therefore
> that at the end they are forced to become vehicles of the so-called
> mother-country's nationalism..."
 
It is a very significant problem: some minorities' leaders refuse to
notice the pain of a "mirror minority" in a neighbouring country. Also
it is not a secret that minority leaders are often used by different
states in order to reach some political goals, including weakening the
positions of other minorities. This practice is so old as the history
itself. In my opinion it could be partly overcome by working out a
kind of what could be called "Charter of Solidarity" - the collection
of moral norms and operation principles which must be followed by
those minority organizations which expect to receive international
support and
recognition.

With respect,
 
Miroslav Mitrofanov,
board member of Daugavpils Center of Russian Culture
[email protected]

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