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Sunday 05.02.2012

What's the point?

Saami youth from Russia's Kola Peninsula are fed up with the poor living conditions in their region.

Saami youth in Russia's Murmansk Oblast fear that their home villages will be abandoned and closed down as the living conditions deteriorate, the Barents Observe reports.



Problems with electricity, food and water supply and lack of media and communication with other areas is making the youth reconsider the living in their home villages, youth participants at this week’s RAIPON Coordination Council's meeting in Murmansk said.

"You may have to wait 1-1,5 months for the plane to [the Saami village of] Krasnoschelie from Lovozero, and it costs more than going by train to St. Petersburg," a young Saami representative said. "Young people don’t want to stay there, seeing the way their peers live in cities; they simply have no future there."

At the RAIPON Coordination Council's meeting representatives of indigenous peoples from all over Russia discussed their common challenges.

RAIPON is the Russian association for the "small peoples" of the North/

The indigenous population in the Kola Peninsula has also been gradually deprived of its land rights, as sport fishing companies have bought the right to fish salmon in local rivers and guard these with armed personnel.

This means the Saami can't even harvest salmon from their own traditional areas, says Alexandra Artieva from OOSMO, the public organization of Saami in the Murmansk Oblast.