TARTU - Russia's ethnic minorities traditionally have a hard time getting their story out to the world. Most of the time, they are forced to depend on the occasional visits of a Moscow or foreign journalist, on the attention of human rights activists in the Russian capital or the West, or on the activities of co-ethnic groups abroad.
But on August 26 a new champion emerged for these all too frequently neglected peoples: the Sorbs, a 60,000-strong Slavic nationality in Germany. Its major community group, the Union of Lusatian Sorbs "Domowina," dispatched a letter to Udmurtia, a Finno-Ugric republic in the Middle Volga region of the Russian Federation.
The letter, a copy of which was made available to the Information Centre of Finno-Ugric Peoples in Tallinn, said that the Sorbs supported the efforts of Udmurt parents to reverse a decision by the Russian authorities in their republic to close the only school in their capital Izhkar (Izhevsk) with instruction in the Udmurt language.
The Sorbs said that they understand how important it is to preserve the mother tongue of a community, pointing out that "the smaller the nation, the more important the education of children in the mother tongue becomes," but adding that regardless of a nation's size, "every person has the right to education in his mother tongue."
The Sorb group noted that it had learned about the situation in Udmurtia when the Udmurt folk ensemble Aykay performed at a folklore festival in the German city of Lausits (Luzhica in Sorbian) earlier this summer.
Few people have heard of the Udmurts or the Sorbs. The former, who number 637,000, live in and around the Udmurt Republic, about 1200 kilometers east of Moscow. According to the 2002 Russian Federation census, two-thirds of them continue to speak their native Udmurt despite what the Russian authorities are doing.
And the latter are perhaps even less well known. A surviving remnant of a Slavic community, the Sorbs of today live in the former East German lander of Brandenburg and Sachsen and with the fall of communism now have kindergartens, primary school and one secondary school entirely in their own language.
Consequently, many people are likely to dismiss as unimportant the Sorbs' intervention on behalf of the Udmurts and the efforts of the latter to keep at least one school in their capital city in their own language, but there are three compelling reasons why they should not.
First, the issue of native language instruction is an especially important one in the European Union now. The Sorbs, who were officially recognized by the German government as a distinct nationality only in 1997after Berlin signed the EU's Framework Agreement, are thus in a particularly good position to raise this issue.
Second, this is an all-too-rare instance of one ethnic group speaking out on behalf of another with whom it does not have any common ethnic or linguistic ties. This letter thus suggests that other minorities in Europe may now be ready to do the same thing, something that could help to focus the world's attention on neglected groups.
And third, because the Sorbs are a Slavic group and are speaking out on behalf of a non-Slavic group under pressure from a majority Slav country, they cannot be accused of doing so out of a narrow ethnic interest as Moscow has done in recent weeks against Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian intervention on behalf of Finno-Ugric groups in the Middle Volga region.
That will both attract more attention to the cause of both and possibly serve as a model for other smaller ethnic communities to speak out not just for themselves but for other oppressed communities as well. And to the extent that happens, the Russian authorities may come under increasing pressure to respond more positively to such demands, and Western governments may become more willing to speak out against such abuses as well.
Consequently, what one small and largely unknown group has done for another may lead others to speak out as well, something that could help change what has been in recent years an unfortunate silence about the problems of many of the smaller ethnic communities of the Russian Federation.
A new and unexpected champion for Russia's ethnic minorities (1)
Archived Articles | 02 Sep 2005 | Paul GobleEWR
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Kommentaarid on kirjutatud EWR lugejate poolt. Nende sisu ei pruugi ühtida EWR toimetuse seisukohtadega.
We must support the rights of the Urdmurts to give their children an education in their native language if this linguistic group is to survive. Here in North America we have all seen what happens when an entire educational system is taken over by one or two linguistic groups who deny educational rights to all the others. The same thing must not be allowed to happen in Russia.
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