September 10,
2019
IZHEVSK, Russia -- A 79-year-old man
who lit himself on fire protesting against Russia's language policies in the
capital of the Volga region of Udmurtia has died.
Media reports
quoted medical personnel of a hospital in the city of Izhevsk as saying that
the man was pronounced dead hours after hospitalization on September 10.
The man, named
Albert Razin, was holding two signs reading "If my language dies tomorrow,
then I'm ready to die today" and "Do I have a Fatherland?"
He was said to be
in critical condition, with burns to nearly 100 percent of his body.
The Investigative
Committee has launched an investigation, while the Udmurt State Council
postponed its session following the incident, reports said.
Razin, a doctor
in philosophy and an Udmurt activist, was among a group of local experts who
had signed an open letter calling on the Udmurt parliament not to support the
bill on the teaching of "native languages" in schools that has
angered representatives of many of the country's ethnic minorities.
The bill,
approved by Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, last year,
canceled the mandatory teaching of indigenous languages in Russia's so-called
ethnic regions and republics, where there is a relatively high proportion of
non-Russian ethnic groups.
Responding to
complaints from ethnic Russians living in these regions, President Vladimir
Putin said in 2017 that children should not be compelled to study languages
that are not their mother tongues.
The bill is
considered in Russia's so-called ethnic regions, including Udmurtia, as an
existential threat.
The Udmurt
language is of the Uralic stem, which also includes Finno-Ugric languages. The
number of people who speak the language has decreased from 463,000 in 2002 to
324,000 in 2010.
There are some 560,000
ethnic Udmurts living in Russia's Volga region, Kazakhstan, and Estonia.
