Chechen-language textbook being withdrawn from schools and libraries in Chechnya
By Ruslan Isayev
CHECHNYA – A Chechen-language textbook for fifth form pupils is being withdrawn from Chechen schools and libraries. Representatives of the Chechen Republic’s Ministry of Education are making personal visits to the district education departments where the confiscated copies of the book are being taken.
Official information on the reasons for these actions is not available, but teachers and students’ parents are in little doubt that they were prompted by one of the exercises in the volume. Exercise No. 35 is an excerpt from a short story in monologue form by the Chechen author Sayd-Khamzat Nunuyev, in which a young man called Khuseyn addresses his mother:
"I’ll grow up and be a man, and you will never shed tears because of me. I will never steal other people's money. I won’t be like Ramzan. He never paid for that brick house and bought that car with his own salary, did he? Does he think people are blind? They pretend to respect him, but really they hate him. I may be young, but I’m not stupid. I don’t need anything from Ramzan or any of the others like him."
Although the story by Nunuyev is one of the author’s early works, the Ministry of Education took the view that this monologue was seditious, and decided to make sure that readers were not given the chance to make the inevitable association with a well-known political figure, the Moscow-backed Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.
The process of withdrawing the book, which was published under the editorship of Yangulbayev and Makhmayev in 2003, is not yet complete. No one knows how the problem of its use by fifth year classes will be resolved. Many teachers believe the most likely outcome will be that the page with the offending exercise being is simply removed from the volume.
This is not the first time in Chechnya that attempts have been made to withdraw a textbook. Back in the 1980s, a work by the famous nineteenth-century Georgian author Alexander Kazbegi was totally removed from the school curriculum because it did not concord with the authorities’ wish to mark what they claimed was the 200th anniversary of Chechnya’s voluntary incorporation into Russia. (Translation by DM) (T)
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