VIENNA – Moscow succeeded on June 7th in blocking the release of a Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) report critical of human rights abuses in the Republic of Mari El less than 48 hours after Mari activists were forced to convene an ethnic congress secretly in a rural forest lest officials use force against them.

Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Duma’s International Affairs Committee who lead the Russian delegation to PACE, celebrated what he called Russia’s “success” in blocking the release of that report which the Parliamentary Assembly had unanimously supported on May 12, RIA Novosti reported June 7th.

“The assembly will thus have no special report on the situation in Mari El mainly thanks to Russian participation in the session,” Kosachev continued, citing pro-Moscow Finno-Ugric officials as saying that the resolution was “an act of interference in the domestic affairs of the Republic of Mari El and of the entire Russian Federation.”

The Russian news agency added that these same Mari El officials had said that they could solve their own problems without the assistance of outside advisors “who have no information about developments” there and “who are pursuing goals that do not correspond with the interests of the Mari people” or “the idea of European co-operation.”

Just how officials in the Middle Volga region of Mari El will about “solving” problems on their own was shown two days earlier. On Sunday, ethnic Mari activists had to organize their second congress secretly deep in a forest lest the Russian-dominated government there again use force to block such a session or persecute those taking part.

In a press release put out June 7th on the basis of reports from Mari El, the Information Centre of Finno-Ugric Peoples in Tallinn (Contact: ) said that congress in the forest had denounced the violation of the rights of all residents of that Middle Volga republic and welcomed PACE criticism of those abuses.

Speakers at the session, who included both local activists and foreign visitors, recounted the many ways in which Mari El President Leonid Markelov had abused the constitutional rights of the Mari nation, dramatically cutting back the level of Mari participation in the bureaucracy and of the Mari language in public life.

Moreover, Markelov has not been shy about using force against the Mari. He dispatched heavily armed police to prevent the first Mari congress from taking place in December 2004, and he has sponsored or at least looked the other way when thugs – none of whom has been arrested – have beaten up Mari activists and independent journalists.

Because the Maris are linguistically related to the Estonians, Finns and Hungarians, the three Finno-Ugric independent states, their situation has attracted more attention that many equally isolated groups in the Russian population. And indeed, representatives of the three took the lead in pushing for the May 12 PACE resolution.

But just as Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin signalled his support for Markelov by presenting him with an award for promoting “friendship of the peoples,” so too now, the Russian delegation at the PACE Bureau has shown that Moscow will do what it can to draw a curtain around events there by denouncing any outside attention.

In many ways, this represents a return to the Soviet approach to dissent and international support for dissenters. Once again, Moscow officials say that only they really know what is happening and argue that co-operation between Moscow and Europe is too important to be sacrificed over a small people far away.

Fortunately for the Mari, they have many friends beyond the borders of their republic both within the Russian Federation and abroad. But unfortunately, as the current situation shows, Moscow and Markelov have powerful cards to play and the Maris are thus forced to retreat into the forests just as their ancestors did so many centuries ago.

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