TARTU - The Maris, a 600,000-strong Finno-Ugric nationality in the Middle Volga region of the Russian Federation, are increasingly threatened by the “authoritarianism” of the local Russian officials and “the information blockade” the latter have thrown up to hide their activities, according to a new appeal from a Mari NGO.
In an open letter to Finnish President Tarja Halonen timed to coincide with President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Helsinki last week, Nina Maksimova, the head of the Mari Ushem organization, urged the international community to speak up on behalf of the Maris (press release, Information Center of Finno-Ugric Peoples, Tallinn, August 2, ).
In her appeal, Maksimova said that Leonid Markelov, who was elected head of the Republic of Mari El in 2000 and re-elected last year, has succeeded in creating “an authoritarian regime” and concealed what he is doing by establishing “an information blockade” around that region.
“Constitutional rights to the access of information and freedom of expression are violated” in Mari El, she wrote. And “after the last presidential elections in December 2004,” the local government compiled “black lists” of those “who voted for the ‘wrong’ candidate" and “purged them” from their jobs in local institutions.
But even more disturbing, Maksimova continued, is the increasingly desperate situation of the Mari El population as a whole. They are now “among the poorest in Russia:” villages are dying out, “over half the population have incomes below the subsistence level, and over one-third earn less than half of the subsistence level.”
During the last three years alone, her letter said, “average live expectancy in the republic has shrunk by one year” - the result among other things of significant declines in the quality as well as the quantity of foodstuffs. To give but one example, “consumption of fish and other sea foods has fallen by 80 percent” over that period.
“The suicide rate in Mari El is [now] the highest” in the Russian Federation, deaths “considerably” exceed births, “and the population is falling with disastrous speed,” Maksimova said.
All the residents of the republic suffer from these trends, of course, but members of the titular Mari nationality are in a particularly dire situation. As a result of the actions of local Russian officials, she wrote, “all over Mari El, the Mari language is deliberately eradicated from educational institutions.” And even worse things may be ahead.
According to Maksimova, the local Russian government now plans to close down all existing local schools outside the cities and to replace them with consolidated boarding schools where “the only language of instruction” will be Russian, a step that represents a direct attack on the future of the Maris as a national group.
In her letter, the Mari Ushem leader said she hoped that Halonen as the president of a fellow Finno-Ugric nationality would press Putin on all these points, implicitly suggesting that the Moscow leader may not have been told what is going on by Markelov and his minions in Mari El.
Maksimova’s appeal and its distribution via the Estonia-based Information Centre of Finno-Ugric Peoples are the latest in string of efforts this year to call attention to the increasing plight of a nationality few in the Russian Federation or the West have ever paid much attention to up to now.
In February, Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian officials and scholars issued a public appeal to the international community to take up the cause of the Maris. That appeal, available for signature on the Internet at
http://www.ugri.info/mari, has now attracted more than 10,000 signatories from 73 countries.
Later in the spring, representatives from these three Finno-Ugric countries succeeded in gaining the passage at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe of a resolution calling on Moscow to intervene and reverse the policies of the Russian authorities in Mari El. But the Russian government blocked its promulgation.
Now, the Maris are trying again, but the note of desperation in their latest appeal highlights just how desperate their situation now is – a plight that unfortunately is increasingly the lot of other small ethnic groups in the Russian Federation located far from Moscow with its diplomatic corps and foreign journalists.
