Category: Eastern Europe

Vienna, June 12 – A Tatar activist recently given an 18-month suspended sentence for articles protesting Moscow’s Russification policies, says that the Internet activists may have kept him out of jail and, given the government’s increasing pressure on other media, they are often a last line of defense for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities in that country.
In an interview given to an independent Tatar journalist, Rafis Kashapov, a leader of the All-Tatar Social Center (VTOTs), explained that he has simply tried through his articles to attract the attention of society and the government to problems others have said less about (www.rupor.info/analitika/2009/06/09/lidera-oppozicii-v-tatarstane-osudili-k-lisheniju-/).
Among the issues he has raised are “the policy of Russification of national minorities, the restriction of the rights of Muslims, the deportation of peoples, fascism, corruption, drug abuse, alcoholism, depravity, and other social problems” that he believes can only be addressed by open and honest discussion.
If Russia were a normal democratic state, he suggested, “the leadership of the country would react positively” and seek a resolution of them. But in Russia, “instead of that, [the powers that be] opened a criminal case against” him, charging Kashapov with promoting extremism.
While the authorities have been angered by Kashapov for a long time, the last straw appears to have been his essay “Say No to Christianization!” posted online earlier this year in which he protested the actions of officials who allowed an Orthodox priest to baptize Tatar babies without the permission of their parents.
Addressing that issue in particular, Kashapov noted that the authorities had not taken the obvious step of inviting Christian and Muslim leaders to meet with them in order to overcome the problems these baptisms created and that, once they opened a case against him, prosecutors never questioned either the priest who baptized the children or the official who permitted it.
Unfortunately, however, the Russian government had no interest in finding the truth or even in examining his case more or less honestly, the Tatar leader said. Not only were two FSB agents present at every hearing, an indication of the political sensitivities of the case, but the judge routinely ignored protests by his lawyers.
Kashapov suggested that “the Internet possibly played a large role” in keeping him out of jail. Not only did he and his supporters place information about the case online when they had no other way of getting past the government’s information blockade, but “the majority” of those who read these materials “understood on whose side the truth is.”
Moreover, many of those who learned about his case, Kashapov continued, supported him in court, signed appeals, and organized demonstrations and protests on his behalf. And he used this interview to “express gratitude” to these individuals and also to the administrators of the sites of the independent information agencies.”
Kashapov said that their efforts were especially important because “at the present time in Russia is being conducted an unwritten nationality policy based on force over non-Russian peoples which precludes their free development, subjects them to humiliation and Russification and takes away their spiritual and material wealth.”
In Tatarstan, this policy involves the ban on the use of the Latin script, the closure of Tatar schools, and the problem of opening replacement in the Tatar language. And as is the case with many other national minorities, it involves Moscow’s decision to reduce to almost nothing the “national-regional component” in the curriculum of the public schools.
Those legitimate concerns are exacerbated, he said, by the Russian government’s flagrant ignoring of extremist behavior by Russian nationalist groups, like Spartak football fans who displayed pro-Hitler banners at a Kazan match, and by the Russian Orthodox Church, which is trying to baptize or convert the historically Islamic Tatars.
Individuals and groups in Tatarstan who have tried to expose and oppose such things, Kashapov said, have suffered. Indeed, he said, they like those elsewhere who share their commitment to freedom and national rights increasingly find themselves in a situation that is “difficult and dangerous.”
But he added, neither he nor they have any choice but to proceed: “Every time, when we multiply a lie, speak an untruth, or commit wrong actions, then by so doing we recognize and support the authoritarian powers that be of Russia, we work for it, and that means we strengthen it.”
And he added, “playing at democracy in Putin’s Russia has come to an end. It turns out that now the most reliable means [for the government] to resolve a problem is to ‘bury’ an individual just as in Stalin’s time.” According to the calculations of Moscow’s leadership once again, “where there is no person, there is no problem.”
Kashapov said that he has been physically threatened for his activities and that his family and friends had told him that “it would be better if [he] went abroad,” lest the powers that be “put [him] away in jail or still worse kill [him].” But he told his interlocutor, he has no plans to do so, preferring instead to continue his work in and for Tatarstan.
His lawyers have filed an appeal which is scheduled to be heard by the republic supreme court, but Kashapov does not expect to win in any Russian venue, given the politics of his situation. Instead, he — like so many other opponents of the regime — is already looking to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for legal vindication.

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/06/window-on-eurasia-internet-last-line-of.html

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 1 – While some Western analysts argue that it is nearly impossible to “export” moderate Islam to other segments of the Muslim community, an increasing number of scholars have begun to focus on those parts of the Muslim world where “moderate” Islam is practiced and where leaders are interested in the spread of this trend.
Most have focused on Malaysia with its concept of “Islam hadari,” but Ruslan Kurbanov, a senior researcher at Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies who earlier worked at the RAND Corporation, argues in a new article posted online this week that the moderate Islam of Tatarstan could prove to be an equally successful “export” (www.islam.ru/pressclub/tema/exportumer/).
No one should be surprised by this, Kurbanov says, given the commonalities between the two: Both Tatarstan and Malysia “are today among the leaders not only in the economic modernization of traditional Muslim societies but also examples of the achievement by Muslim peoples of high levels of education and integration in a broader and more developed region.”
The Tatars and the Malaysians are also, he continues, “examples of the most successful models of the combination of traditional Islamic values with the demands of the contemporary world and of the promotion [in their respective societies] of the ideas of moderation, tolerance and openness to the external world.”
Moreover, both peoples, Kurbanov notes, “came to Islam by a peaceful path in the course of the adoption of the new faith by an aristocratic hierarchy and the soviet Islamization [of the remainder of their societies] ‘from above.’” And both have lived for many centuries in close proximity to “major non-Muslim communities.”
Not surprisingly, the Muslim leaders of these two societies and in their wake the political leaders of them as well have begun to talk about the kind of Islam their peoples profess as a model for others, even to the point of suggesting this in speeches delivered in Saudi Arabia, the country where Islam began.
Because Malaysia is an independent country, its political leaders have had a greater opportunity than have those in Tatarstan to promote their ideas more internationally, with that country’s prime minister, Najib Razaq, even telling senior US State Department officials that Malaysian Islam represents “a model” for all other a Muslims.
But Tatarstan’s version of moderate Islam, Kurbanov insists, deserves attention too as a possible “export commodity” both within the Russian Federation and CIS and more generally, all the more so since an increasing number of Tatar Muslim leaders and political ones as well have been pushing that idea.
In March of this year, he notes, the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Tatarstan held a roundtable on “The Export of Russian Islam,” a meeting which Kurbanov regrets “did not attract a great deal of attention from the media, although some of the presentations there are beginning to spread through the expert community (www.islamtat.ru/publ/61-1-0-555).
One reason that this session did not attract more attention at the time, the Moscow scholar suggests, is that Russia’s Muslim leaders have insisted for decades that “traditional” Russian Islam is by its very nature “moderate.” Consequently, many observers likely assumed that the meeting in Kazan did not represent an innovation.
But, Kurbanov insists, what makes this meeting and the intellectual ferment that produced it something new and important to attend to is that “until recently practically no one advanced the idea that the traditional Russian version of Islam could and should be exported to the rest of the world.”
The March meeting proposed precisely that, with Rustam Batyr, the deputy head of the Council of the Ulema of the MSD of Tatarstan, saying that “our obligation is to show the entire world just what Russian Islam is and what solutions it offers” to the problems which face the worldwide umma.
Indeed, Batyr continued, “in our republic has already long been found a model of peaceful cooperation [with people of other faiths] and therefore now, Tatarstan is one of the centers where the future of humanity is being decided,” even if many people elsewhere are not yet aware of that reality.
According to Kurbanov, the Tatars believe that a major “channel” for exporting their version of Islam consists of the works of the brilliant pleiade of Muslim theologians who formed what is sometimes called the Jadid movement at the end of the tsarist period. But those who seek to promote these writers are limited by the small print runs of their works.
If that changes or if a new intellectual renaissance begins in Tatarstan, Kurbanov suggests, then the impact of moderate Tatar Islam on the Muslims of the world could quickly become far great than many expect, a development that could justify Batyr’s contention that Kazan is where “the future of humanity” is in fact being decided.

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/06/window-on-eurasia-moderate-islam-of.html