IWPR's Caucasus Reporting Service, No.81: Repressed peoples demand justice
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Subject: IWPR's Caucasus Reporting Service, No.81: Repressed peoples demand justice
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IWPR's Caucasus Reporting Service, No.81: Repressed peoples demand
justice
WELCOME TO IWPR'S CAUCASUS REPORTING SERVICE, NO. 81, May 8, 2001
.................
REPRESSED PEOPLES DEMAND JUSTICE
The legacy of Stalin's deportations continues to divide communities in
the North Caucasus
By Alexander Dzadziev and Erik Batuev in Magas
Ethnic leaders across southern Russia have accused the Kremlin of
building a new "tsarist" empire which rides roughshod over the rights
of its minority peoples.
Delegates at the recent Congress of Repressed Peoples concluded that
the Russian government had failed to honour a law passed in 1991 to
protect their rights.
And they threatened to appeal to international human rights
organisations unless urgent action was taken to implement the
legislation.
Held in the Ingush town of Magas, the Congress of Repressed Peoples
brought together representatives from the Balkar, Ingush and Chechen
peoples as well as leaders of the Meskhetian, Crimean Tartar, Korean
and German communities in Russia.
All these groups suffered at the hands of the Stalinist government
which, in 1944, accused ethnic minorities from the Ukraine and North
Caucasus of collaborating with the Nazis and deported them en masse to
Central Asia.
Although the repressed peoples were rehabilitated by Nikita Khrushchev
in 1957 and allowed to return home, many found that their former homes
and territories had been occupied by other ethnic groups.
The Law on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples passed by Boris
Yeltsin's government in April 1991 was aimed at redressing the
balance.
However, Yeltsin's failure to implement the letter of the law
undoubtedly sowed the seeds of ethnic violence in Dagestan, Chechnya
and North Ossetia which was the first republic to see armed conflict
in 1992.
The congress was opened by Ingush president Ruslan Aushev who told
delegates that the event had met with strong opposition not just from
the Russian authorities but also from local administrations in
Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia and Karachaevo-Cherkessia.
A Karachai delegation had been detained in neighbouring
Kabardino-Balkaria then sent back to Cherkessk whilst the Kalmyk
delegates had been refused permission to make the trip at all.
"The attitude of the federal authorities to the congress is indicative
of their attitude to the problems of repressed peoples as a whole,"
said President Aushev.
The Moscow government was represented at the congress by Ruslan
Tatiev, a specialist on the Ingush-Ossetian conflict, and Vitaly
Smirnov, head of the Directorate for the Repatriation of Refugees.
The congress was organised around two lectures. The first, entitled
"The Tenth Anniversary of the Federal Law on the Rehabilitation of
Repressed Peoples", was read by Ruslan Pliev, chairman of the Ingush
People's Assembly.
The second -- "From the Russian Empire and the USSR to the Russian
Federation" - was presented by Svetlana Alieva, an ethnic Balkar and a
member of the International Human Rights Assembly.
Pliev described the 1991 law as "a step forward" but the government's
failure to implement it as "two steps back".
He blamed the failure of the legislation on the "criminal inactivity"
of the federal authorities, the stubborn resistance of local regimes
and the absence of a national policy in the Russian Federation.
Pliev focused on current relations between North Ossetia and
Ingushetia where 30,000 Ingush refugees have been waiting for eight
years to return to their homes in the Prigorodny region.
"The Ingush people will always achieve their goals by peaceful
political means," said Pliev. "And they continue to fight for the Law
on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples together with other
repressed peoples across the Federation."
Svetlana Alieva said that the Kremlin was intent on creating a Russian
empire in the tsarist mould - "an empire which became a prison for
entire peoples," she added.
Alieva called on the delegates to demand that the federal authorities
implement all the articles of the 1991 law - including an undertaking
to return ethnic territories to dispossessed peoples.
The lectures sparked a series of heated representations from the
floor.
Rasul Djappuev, chairman of the State Council of Balkaria, claimed
that not only had the Balkars been refused the right to establish an
autonomous republic in the early 1990s, but they had also been unable
to reclaim territories appropriated after the deportations of 1944.
Representatives from Meskhetian peoples said they had been prevented
from returning to their ethnic homelands in Georgia after the
deportations. And the Crimean Tatars who managed to return home after
191,000 were deported to the Urals and Uzbekistan in 1944 complained
of constant civil rights abuse from the Ukrainian authorities.
Gugo Vormsbekher, vice-president of Russia's German community, told
delegates that more than two million Germans had left Russia after the
Kremlin refused to grant them an ethnic republic in Povolzhya.
At the end of the congress, delegates voted to make a series of
official appeals to President Vladimir Putin, the State Duma and the
Russian media. The appeals focused on the need to review the 1991 Law
on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples and to arrange meetings
between ethnic leaders and government ministers.
They also appealed to the government to finance the repatriation of
the Crimean Tartars and the Meskhetians to their historic homeland and
restore their civil rights as citizens of the Ukraine and Georgia
respectively.
An official statement released at the end of the congress concluded,
"Civil accord and the friendship of the Russian peoples are our
greatest concern. We believe that full restoration of the rights and
freedoms of the repressed peoples will lay down a solid foundation for
this friendship as well as the development and prosperity of our
federal state."
Alexander Dzadziev is an independent journalist based in North Ossetia
while Erik Batuev is a Moscow-based expert on post-Soviet conflicts
.................
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IWPR's Caucasus Reporting Service provides the regional and
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Editor-in-chief: Anthony Borden. Managing Editor: Yigal Chazan;
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