Interview:


A wave of assaults and murders of opposition leaders, journalists and public figures of Mari origin has lately swamped the small Republic of Mari El, an administrative unit of Russia located 500 miles to the east from Moscow. Jaak Prozes, President of the Forum of Estonian Nationalities and founding member of the Estonian Mari Society, has returned to Estonia from a visit to Mari El.


Your impression of the atmosphere in Mari El?

I stayed for three days in Mari El. I wanted to learn whether the situation is really as serious as it looks from reports, and to feel the general atmosphere. I also wanted to give moral support to Vladimir Kozlov, head of the Movement of Mari People who was brutally beaten, and to demonstrate that other Finno-Ugric nations feel uneasy about the events.

For the first time during the fifteen years I have been visiting Mari El I had an impression, at least at the official level, that relations with Estonia were undesirable. An epidemic of illnesses struck the local officials when I asked them for audiences. A low-level official of the ministry of education said he had to ask the head of his department for permission, the department head said he must ask the deputy minister, and the deputy minister said he must consult with the minister. Not only officials but also the common citizens are scared, too.

A wave of fear has flooded the republic. The President of Mari El Leonid Markelov is busily uprooting the opposition. When you talk to locals you feel that people are scared of punishment, reprisals, dismissal and, if things go far, being beaten to death with iron pipes. This has happened to quite a few journalists and editors. Rumours say that telephones are being tapped and that the president is an extremely vengeful person.

How do the local representative assembly and media react?

The local media is silencing the murders of journalists and public figures. The representative body, too, is well under control. Recently it sent a letter to the Estonian parliament cancelling an already agreed-to visit of an Estonian parliamentary delegation planned for this March. The refusal was explained by a very tight schedule, but a member of the body told me in a private conversation that no sittings of the assembly are planned for March and April at all.

There are practically no more private newspapers in Mari El. Local printing houses were instructed to refrain from making contracts with them. The only printing house in private ownership depends on the considerable orders placed by the president's administration. Independent newspapers had attempted to print copies outside Mari El but the police stopped their vans and confiscated all copies. Publishers and journalists are scared. Activists of Mari culture are intimidated. Viktor Nikolayev, former director of the Mari National Theatre, was beaten on several occasions. He was then Chairman of the Mari Congress as Kozlov is now, which seems to be a lesson the Maris are taught now: any person you elect to represent your nation will be assaulted! I met with the local correspondent of Radio Liberty / Radio Free Europe, Yelena Rogacheva, who was beaten this January. As a woman she was the only journalist beaten not with iron pipes but with fists. She said that the investigation in her case was almost hopeless: no witnesses, no evidence.

The situation of Mari language media in the Mari republic is particularly grim. On the radio and TV, the majority of broadcasts are transmitted from Moscow [in Russian]. The total yearly amount of local radio programs has decreased to 540 hours from 1004 in 2004. Only 40% of them are in the Mari language, while the share of Maris among the population is 43%. They are deliberately ignored by the authorities. How else to explain the fact that only a small part of 604 000 strong nation can watch TV programs in their mother language for just some two or three hours a week, that in the years 2001-2003 the Mari El government supported the publication of just 15 books in Mari (in the same period the Finnish-based Castren Society supported the publication of eight books), that the the largest newspaper in the Mari language prints only six thousand copies. And how can we consider the situation normal if the Maris can study their language at only 21% of schools, if it is taught as a subject and that all other subjects are taught in Russian?



VALERI KALABUGIN,
(Information Centre of Finno-Ugric Peoples,
e-mail )

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