A Call to Investigate Russian Governor’s Comments
Published: August 4, 2012
MOSCOW — A member of a Kremlin-sponsored civic chamber will ask state prosecutors to investigate racially tinged statements made by the governor of the Krasnodar region, a close ally of PresidentVladimir V. Putin, to see if the remarks violate Russian law on incitement of ethnic hatred.
In a speech to police officers on Thursday, Gov. Aleksandr Tkachev, whose region will host the 2014 Olympics, announced that as of September, 1,000 Cossacks would be paid from the budget to maintain public order. He stressed the importance of controlling the migration of darker-skinned Muslims from the North Caucasus region, and said that the Cossacks — whose paramilitary forces served the czars — could take measures beyond what the police were allowed.
"What you can’t do, the Cossacks can,” he told the officers in the speech, which was widely circulated on the Internet on Friday. "We have no other way — we shall stamp it out, instill order; we shall demand paperwork and enforce migration policies.”
Aleksandr V. Sokolov, a member of Russia’s Public Chamber, said in a statement posted late Friday on the chamber’s Web site that the governor’s comments amounted to incitement of interethnic hatred, a criminal charge punishable by up to two years in prison. Mr. Tkachev, he wrote, "identified the regions of the North Caucasus as foreign, hostile territory and urged residents to fence themselves off using illegal armed formations. The goal of these formations is not supporting law and order, but preventing citizens from migrating from one region to another.”
Mr. Tkachev has said that his enlistment of Cossacks is intended purely to enforce Russian migration laws, but his speech contained incendiary language about relations between ethnic groups in southern Russia.
He said that a neighboring region had stopped performing its traditional function as "a filter” between central Russia and the North Caucasus. Internal migrants from the North Caucasus are often not welcomed by ethnic Russians, who consider them outsiders.
Mr. Tkachev said ethnic Russians there were "already feeling uncomfortable,” and that the people who settled the region, Cossacks among them, "year after year are losing their position.”
"Who will answer when the first blood is spilled, when interethnic conflicts start? And sooner or later it will happen,” Mr. Tkachev said. He offered Kosovo as an example, saying that Albanians "began to destroy churches, forced the dominance of their culture, their religion, began conflicts, imposed pressure, blood, small war, big war. And that was it — there was no country, there were no people, thousands of refugees all over the world.”
Cossacks, the fearsome horsemen of 19th-century Russia, have experienced a revival under Mr. Tkachev, who has provided them with financial support, uniforms and official status. After last month’s floods, Cossacks were deployed to rescue survivors and distribute aid. Seven years ago they drove out a local population of Meskhetian Turks, something their leaders still celebrate, recently telling an American visitor, "We sent them to you!”
Mr. Tkachev was in danger of losing his post last month when local officials were charged with negligence in the catastrophic flooding that killed at least 171 people in the city of Krymsk. Yet he has survived in large part because he is a crucial player in planning the 2014 Olympics, a project that could end up costing as much as $30 billion.
Mr. Tkachev’s speech on Thursday touched on one of the most inflammatory questions in Russian society, which has been racked by two separatist wars and rising tension over internal migration, and it set off heated discussion online. After nightfall, his press office released a conciliatory statement, saying that the speech was meant "exclusively as a recommendation to the police to increase control over migration processes.”
One of the few officials to comment was Gadzhimet Safaraliyev, head of the State Duma’s committee on questions of nationality, who wondered aloud what Mr. Tkachev meant about the unusual powers granted to the Cossacks.
"Why should they have more rights than the police? Is that written somewhere in the Constitution?” Mr. Safaraliyev told the Web site gazeta.ru. He went on to note that several medals had been won at the London Olympics by athletes from the Caucasus.
"When Caucasians win three gold medals, they’re Russians,” he said. "But when they move somewhere, they are unwanted individuals.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/world/europe/a-call-to-investigate-russian-governors-comments.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
