Interethnic Conflicts in the CIS and International Experience

Abstract

The collapse of the totalitarian system in our country has led to a sharp destabilization of interethnic relations, and the exacerbation of old and the appearance of new conflicts of a national and ethnic nature. Differing in scale, social significance, origin, "age," and tension, they nonetheless have the same "ultimate nature." Their deep-lying roots involve violations of the rights of some nation or national group, of justice, and of equal status in interethnic relations. This could be political inequality, when representatives of some ethnic group predominate in a system of state government to the detriment of another one; or it could be linguistic inequality, when the language of one ethnic group is proclaimed to be a state (official) language, even if it dominates in a particular state, to the detriment of other ethnic groups. (For example, the situation with the Romanian language in Moldova, which is provoking discontent in the Dnestr region, where half of the population consists of Ukrainians and Russians.) Or it may be forced assimilation and the rejection of the right to autonomy (the fate of the German population in the CIS, which was deported during World War II to different regions of Siberia and Kazakhstan).