November 16 is the International Day for Tolerance

The international Day for Tolerance is marked on November 16. It was solemnly declared in “The Declaration of Tolerance Principles”, instituted by UNESCO in 1995. The Declaration understands tolerance as “respect, adoption and correct understanding of rich variety of our world’s cultures, our forms of self-expression and ways for expression of human individuality”. The Declaration declares “the recognition that people are different in appearance, status, speech, behavior and values by their nature and have the right to live in peace, preserving their individuality”. The declaration also considers the threats to mankind, brought by intolerance, and offers methods and programs for struggle with intolerance.

Unfortunately an abrupt growth of the number of cases of manifestation of national intolerance, entailing violence and extremism, is recently observed all over the world. As a result not just separate people but the whole communities become the objects of cruelty only because of their ethnic, religious, national and other originality.

The principles of tolerance in such country as Russia, inhabited by more than 160 nations and nationalities, can’t be formed from zero in every separate national community and step-by-step and purposeful work of many state structures, public and religious organizations is necessary for that. Numerous facts of xenophobia, extremism and manifestations of anti-Caucasian, anti-Semitic and anti-Russian moods, observed in Russia today, prove again that tolerance is not just a subject for philosophical investigations of scientists but severe vital necessity.

Republic of Bashkortostan is the unique Russian region by the variety of ethnoses, cultures and languages, registered here. During hard years of reforms the Republic has undertaken everything possible to make inter-ethnic factors not separating but uniting the nations in the name of common goals. The republic possesses solid legislative base, regulating obligations of the state in sphere of observation of people’s rights for determination of their national belonging, the use of native language and the choice of both language for communication and the language for education, in sphere of provision of freedom of activity of public national-cultural communities, freedom of consciousness and religion.