The Buryats are an ancient people from the far reaches of Siberia who have inhabited the shores of Lake Baikal since the time of Chinggis Khan. Slavic explorers came to their lands in the 16th century looking for furs and gold, and in the following two centuries the Russian Empire took over those border territories with Mongolia.
The Buryats are racially Mongolian and profess Tibetan Buddhism. Buryatia may be the place outside of Tibet where there are more temples of this branch of Buddhism. But much of the world found out about the Buryats by reading the Pope’s statements, where he describes them as the perpetrators of the most “cruel” crimes that the Russian army is committing in Ukraine.
It was only one sentence, but lapidary. Francis also pointed to the Chechens as the cause of the worst atrocities in the invaded country. Unlike Siberian Buryatia, which is the size of Germany, Chechnya is a tiny republic of the Russian Federation located in the heart of the Caucasus. Its inhabitants are Muslim and have been known worldwide since they defeated the Russian army in the first separatist war in the 1990s. They then invaded Dagestan, sparking a second conflict in which they were crushed by saturation bombing ordered by Vladimir Putin.
The warlike history of this Turkmen people, who descend from the Tatars, has glorious pages such as the fierce resistance offered in the 19th century by the Imamate of the Caucasus to the expansion of the Russian Empire. But it also has dark pages, like those written in blood by the terrorist groups commanded by Shamil Basayev.
The question is why the Pope said publicly that these ethnic groups are perpetrating the cruelest crimes of the invading army in Ukraine. He was questioning the unwarranted aggression ordered by the Russian president. There was no need for the head of the Catholic church to stigmatize an ethnic Buddhist and an ethnic Muslim.
Buyrats and Chechens are part of the Russian army, which is the invading force. It is not clear what the Buryats are doing, but it is clear that Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin’s hit man in the small country where he has persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and murdered supporters of independence from Moscow for years, has sent a legion to Ukraine. of brutal fighters ready to do the dirty work of the Russian army. The Wagner mercenary group also brings criminal rampage to the invading forces, recruiting criminals in prisons and in the Central Asian republics.
But differentiating ethnic groups when pointing out degrees of criminality implies stigmatizing peoples if it is done from a leadership of world visibility, such as that of a head of the church. That is why the last pronouncement of the Pope in an interview was a mess.
The stigmatizing sign recalled the Gurkhas’ reputation as brutal butchers in the British army. The warriors of that people, originally from Rajasthan and the founder of Nepal, were invincible, slitting their throats with the kukri, a traditional curved knife of Nepali origin that Gurkha fighters use with lethal dexterity.
The ideologues of Pantoranism stigmatized the Kurds as mercenaries who savagely slaughtered Armenians forced by the Turkish state to cross the Aleppo desert on foot.
The mention of two ethnic groups that Bergoglio made, trying to establish degrees of cruelty in the invading troops, haunts those dark edges. This does not imply that the other religious leaders are acting as the circumstances require. The majority maintain a silence as or more serious than the stammering of the Pope.
There are also many political leaders who remain silent in the face of atrocities that they should denounce. Some keep silent about the Saudi crimes in Yemen, others justify and even collaborate with the Russian invasion that has already killed hundreds of children among the thousands of Ukrainians murdered in their cities and villages. Almost all the governments of the world have stopped demanding that the Israeli governments restart the dialogue so that a Palestinian state can be born and nobody raises their voices against Erdogan’s bombardments of the Kurds in Iraq and Syria. The person responsible for the invasion is Putin and the one who commits crimes and cruelties against the invaded people is the Russian army.
The head of the church cannot ignore the weight of the stigma on a population. Even if the information that Francis claims to have about the “cruelty of the Chechens and Buryats” towards their Ukrainian victims is reliable, it is inadmissible to distinguish between the Russian Slavs and Orthodox Christians, supposedly more magnanimous, and the “cruel” ones. soldiers who have other races and religions. It is an indication with the power of stigmatization.
So why did he say what he said? Perhaps because she still can’t find a way to stop herself from the conflict. As if something prevented him from speaking freely about this war.
His first pronouncement seemed written in the Kremlin. To affirm that “NATO dogs were barking at the borders” of Russia sounded like a justification for the invasion. In short, it is Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical argument. He only failed to say that “the Nazis rule Ukraine and carry out genocide in Donbass.”
Then the pronouncements began without naming Putin or questioning the support of Kirill, the Orthodox patriarch, for the expansionist war that is destroying Ukraine. At that point, the bulk of the countries pointed to the Russian president as the author of an unjustified aggression for which thousands of Ukrainians die and hunger in the world grows.
Now, with barrages of missiles destroying buildings and energy production and distribution infrastructure, thousands of voices denounce what is in sight: as his unmotivated troops lose battles to motivated Ukrainian troops, Putin seeks to freeze the inhabitants to death of the invaded country to force them to surrender.
The Pope joined this international chorus and evoked the “Holodomor”, the genocide carried out by Stalin in the Ukraine during the 1930s. Although it took time, the pontiff has begun to call things by their name, contrasting with the silence of so many religious leaders. .
What he should not have said are the words “Buryats” and “Chechens”, an obscure mistake that arose, perhaps, from the attempt to antagonize Putin and the Russian Slavs and Christians as little as possible.
