[BRIEF NOTE] Three Demographic Changes

[rfmcdonald]

Writing in The Moscow Times, Lawrence A. Uzzell's explores in his "Bringing Muslims in From the Cold" the future of Muslims and Islam in Russia. He's pessimistic.

Russian ultranationalists dislike being reminded that, unlike Western Europe's Muslims, Russia's are indigenous. Muslim peoples lived in parts of present-day Russia before Christianity appeared there. Some regions, such as Dagestan, are more dominated by Muslim ethnic groups today than a generation ago, thanks to Slavic emigration. The challenge of governing such areas from Moscow increasingly resembles that of governing colonial Pakistan from London.

At the same time, Muslims have been moving en masse into the Russian heartland. It is getting difficult to find a medium-sized city anywhere in the country without a Muslim community. Mosques have sprouted even in far-flung places like Yakutsk in northeastern Siberia. More and more Muslims from varied ethnic backgrounds are living side by side in majority-Slavic towns far from their homelands, sharing stories about police harassment and skinhead attacks. Russian is replacing Tatar in Moscow's mosques as the only language in which Tatars can communicate with Uzbeks and Azeris. This linguistic shift could potentially help integrate Muslims into Russian society and culture, but it could also promote a sense of pan-Muslim identity based explicitly on religion rather than ethnicity.

Elsewhere in the world, writing for Australia's The Age Hamish McDonald reports (in "Disney's a Mickey Mouse venture") that Hong Kong's population has changed significantly since 1997.

The expat population of British, American, Australian and Japanese professionals is actually down 20 per cent on 1997. The native Hong Kong population is dwindling, down 0.7 per cent from 1997, because of emigration and a low birth rate. The total population has managed a bare 0.8 per cent increase since the handover — due mainly to an influx of South-East Asian domestic and catering workers on temporary work permits, and the mainlander wives of Hong Kong's working-class men. This new underclass now makes up nearly 10 per cent of Hong Kong's population.

Finally, here in North America, the Houma first nation of Louisiana is facing extinction as a result of Hurricane Katrina, as reported by Newsday.

Most of the 15,000 Houmas live in isolated towns dotting the edges of the bayou southeast of New Orleans, an area hard hit by Katrina, and Dardar estimates up to 3,400 could have lost their homes.

Brenda Dardar-Robichaux, chief of the United Houma Nation, said she feared the worst, although she has been unable to get in touch with members in several of the most vulnerable towns.

"We're looking at so many people being displaced, it's never going to be the same," said Dardar-Robichaux[.]