30.09.2024, Karasjok, Norge
My name is Dmitry Berezhkov, and I am Itelmen from Kamchatka, a vast peninsula in the Russian Far East. The Russian Far East is one of the biggest salmon regions in the world and a homeland of more than a dozen Indigenous nations. I am Itelmen, but I have lived here in Arctic Norway for over 15 years in political exile.
Russia catches the most wild salmon in Kamchatka. In my childhood, I ate salmon every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At that time, the Soviet Union was falling apart, the country’s economy was destroyed, the state abandoned remote indigenous villages, and people had to survive on their own. The indigenous communities, forbidden to fish independently for decades under communist rule, had to return to their roots.
The indigenous population of Kamchatka began to organize into small cooperatives that fished for salmon and provided food for the villagers. The same period became the rebirth of the traditional culture of the indigenous peoples of Kamchatka. They restored ancient rituals, songs, and dances and began to organize traditional celebrations and festivals of indigenous culture.
This period did not last long; since the late 1990s, Russia’s economic situation has begun to improve, there’s been a change of power in Russia, and the state has started to bureaucratize access to water bodies and biological resources.
In 2004, the state adopted the new fishing law, which allowed the organization of small fishing businesses for indigenous communities. That was especially relevant for indigenous peoples of the Russian Far East, where the vast plurality of Russian salmon is harvested.
However, large volumes of salmon, especially in Kamchatka and Sakhalin, have always attracted business. A tremendous number of commercial fishing companies were created in our regions, and they have always viewed indigenous communities as unwanted competitors for quotas and fishing grounds.
A few years after adopting the fishing law, the Government introduced commercial auctions for fishing grounds, and Indigenous communities began to lose their traditional fishing grounds one after another.
Indigenous communities cannot compete with the commercial fishing business for a myriad of reasons, including a lack of financial resources, insufficient education level, the remoteness of Indigenous villages from decision-making centers, inadequate technical communication and many others.
In addition, one of the most significant factors in Russia is corruption and business ties with government and law enforcement agencies. Corrupted bureaucrats may not issue a license, quota or fishing ground, while law enforcement agencies may find violations in any activity or recognize fishing as poaching at any time. In addition, representatives of the fishing business are actively engaging with the Government, and many become deputies and officials to influence further decision-making on the allocation of fish resources. Repeatedly, representatives of Kamchatka’s fishing business have been recognized as the wealthiest civil servants in Russia according to their official income declarations.
In this situation, it is much easier for businesses, whose owners most often live and operate in large cities where administrative decisions are made, to find common ground with the authorities, primarily due to corruption and the massive overfishing of authorized fish quotas. Meanwhile, indigenous communities targeting sustainable fisheries to maintain the ability to fish for generations are losing access to resources.
Another problem is the so-called official lists of indigenous territories. Repeatedly, Russia has emphasized at numerous international forums, including UN meetings, how many millions of kilometers are assigned to indigenous peoples in Russia. However, they forget to mention that this list means little in practice, as these are lands where Indigenous peoples can theoretically get hunting and fishing grounds, for which they have to fight in various competitions and auctions with bureaucracy, oil, coal, fishing, tourism and other businesses.
But that’s not all. In many regions, such as Magadan or Murmansk oblasts, not all areas where indigenous peoples live are included in this list. This means they are deprived of even the theoretical possibility of access to fishing resources as right holders.
In some areas, authorities try to provide Indigenous peoples with preferential paid licenses or social fishing quotas. However, this cannot be called the realization of indigenous peoples’ rights but rather a social handout from the state.
In 2021, thanks to Sami politician Andrei Danilov, who is now also a political refugee in Norway and has been waiting for almost three years for any decision from the Immigration Service, being under permanent stress, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation decided that Indigenous hunters can hunt outside areas officially listed in the list of Indigenous territories.
According to legal logic, this means that the List of Indigenous Peoples’ Territories adopted by the Russian Government is illegitimate. However, no one is going to cancel it, recognizing indigenous hunters and fishermen harvesting in territories outside the list as poachers.
Among other problems of indigenous fisheries in the Far East is the need for more time to allocate to indigenous peoples for fishing. For example, in the Petropavlovsk area in Kamchatka this year, the authorities allocated only two weeks for indigenous fisheries. As you know, salmon fishing luck is ever-changing, and sometimes, it could be enough, but in many cases, you can catch nothing.
Often, Indigenous communities get the most inconvenient, remote and salmon-poor fishing grounds, while commercial companies get the richest ones. There have been cases where Indigenous people who live on a rich river receive grounds far from their homes, while commercial companies receive the right to fish just near the village.
One disturbing trend is the authorities’ desire to legislate the so-called norm of personal fish consumption per person per year, which can sometimes reach several kilograms or sometimes grams and depends on an arbitrary decision of the officials.
The difficulties of indigenous fisheries in Russia can be enumerated endlessly. Fishing is one of the most important sources of food and income for all Indigenous peoples, without exception, including hunters, sea hunters, even reindeer herders and especially salmon fishers of the Russian Far East.
Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more challenging to get any information from Russia. You probably know that this summer, 55 organizations of Indigenous peoples in Russia, including the organization I represent, the Indigenous Russia Information Center and the International Committee of Indigenous Peoples of Russia, were recognized as extremist and added by the Government to the list of extremist and terrorist organizations.
But I would like to end with a most disturbing pattern. We have already received several reports that indigenous peoples are recognized as poachers because of artificial restrictions created by the authorities, and those who are in heavy debt have signed contracts with the Russian army and gone to war with Ukraine. We keep statistics on indigenous deaths in Ukraine, and some of the numbers are staggering. The poorest, most vulnerable and uneducated are going to war. And this is a real threat to the existence of the smallest indigenous nations of the Russian Arctic, Siberia and the Far East.