The President of Bashkiria asked once again to avoid politicizing of the all-Russian population census

“People are watching the census as a sport event and there are many complaints that Tatars are registered by the copyists as Bashkirs and there is the information that some heads of Bashkiria’s regions were instructed to increase the number of Bashkirs. How can you comment this event?”

It was one of the questions for Rustem Khamitov during his open interview to the internet newspaper www.gazeta.ru.

“Since the heads of the regions are my prerogative I can definitely say there were no such instructions concerning Bashkirs. My position is that we have to avoid the politicizing of the population census. I can say the population census-2010 is running in much more peaceful mode than the population census-2002. Today such cases are absent: people question me and I answer these questions. If we see certain mistakes somewhere – we try and correct these mistakes. We have the special procedure, which has to follow the incorrect census registrations”.