Volunteers battle yearly forest fires across vast Siberia
ULAN-UDE, RUSSIA — Half a world away from the wildfires that have devastated the southwestern United States this summer, Andrey Borodin was waging his own battle against the elements, directing a team of a dozen volunteers blasting water into the smoldering Siberian soil.
The cloying stench of burning peat filled the air. His team, ankle-deep in the muck, methodically flipped mounds of soggy earth with shovels, occasionally batting out open flames. Nearby stood a forest of burnt birch.
It was a taste of what will be another Herculean effort to contain Siberia’s vast wildfires this year. A loose partnership of hundreds of emergency workers, smokejumpers, and villagers are defending a vast territory of largely impenetrable evergreen forest, the legendary Siberian taiga, along Lake Baikal.
And as the fire season here grows longer, hotter and drier by the year, Borodin hopes that conditions will persuade officials to accept and expand a volunteer movement that they have never quite embraced.
“For years, the government had said, ‘We’ll take care of you; stay at home and we will handle everything,’ and people learned to be inert,” said Borodin, a former tourism official and founder of a volunteer group called Baikal SOS, as he bumped down a dirt lane in a minibus that resembled a giant toolbox with wheels. “But that started to change last year, when people saw that Baikal and the cities were filled with smoke and there was no information. Nothing about what they could do to help.”
The Russian government has a long history of ambivalence toward unofficial volunteer groups and other forms of self-organization, but record fires and choking smog in 2015 brought out hundreds of volunteers in Buryatia, Irkutsk and elsewhere in Siberia.
Twenty-nine people were killed that April in wild grassfires in the region of Khakassia, prompting several visits by Russian President Vladimir Putin and a ban on the burning of wild grass, a Russian agricultural tradition that causes the vast majority of wildfires in the country.
Forestry and emergency officials say the fires are smaller this year. But Greenpeace Russia pointed to satellite data earlier this month showing that forest fires covered more than 8.5 million acres of Russian land, accusing government officials of underreporting the fires by as much as 80 percent. Much of it was unrecorded because it was located in so-called “zones of control,” areas of forest that are remote enough that they are deemed lowpriority for firefighters and not included in official figures.
Greenpeace claimed that the Forestry Ministry underreported the fires to show that the situation was under control.
But temperatures are rising again in Buryatia, where more than 100,000 hectares — or 250,000 acres — have already burned, according to the official count, and the region is under a state of emergency until the end of the fire season in October.
“The authorities assured us that they’d learned their lesson from last year, everything would be normal and there won’t be any need for volunteers,” said Borodin. “But when the fires flared after the May 9 celebrations, we had to call in parachutists from other regions.”
YEREVAN, Armenia — The world should never forget or minimize the Ottoman-era slaughter of Armenians, Pope Francis declared Saturday even as he urged Armenians to infuse their collective memory with love so they can find peace and reconcile with Turkey.
Turkey, though, didn’t budge. In its first reaction to Francis’ recognition of the 1915 “genocide,” Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli called the comments “greatly unfortunate” and said they bore the hallmarks of the “mentality of the Crusades.”
Francis began his second day in Armenia by paying his respects at the country’s imposing genocide memorial and greeting descendants of survivors of the 1915 massacres, who have been emboldened by his comments upon arrival that the slaughter of Armenians a century ago was a planned “genocide” meant to annihilate an entire people.
Francis presented a wreath at the memorial and stood, head bowed, in silent prayer before an eternal flame as priests blessed him with incense and a choir sang haunting hymns.
“Here I pray with sorrow in my heart, so that a tragedy like this never again occurs, so that humanity will never forget and will know how to defeat evil with good,” Francis wrote in the memorial’s guest book.
Francis also greeted descendants of the 400 or so Armenian orphans taken in by Popes Benedict XV and Pius XI at the papal summer residence south of Rome in the 1920s. Also approaching Francis was Sosi Habeschyan, 68, and her sister; their mother was a genocide orphan adopted and raised by Danish missionary Maria Jacobsen, who worked in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and wrote about the massacre.
Francis returned to the theme of memory during a Mass in Gyumri, where several thousand people gathered in a square for his only public Catholic Mass of his three-day visit to Armenia. Nestled in the rolling green hills and wildflower fields of northwestern Armenia, Gyumri has long been a cradle of Christianity, and Francis came to pay homage to its faith even in times of trial.
“Peoples, like individuals, have a memory,” he told the crowd from the altar. “Your own people’s memory is ancient and precious.”
Francis again raised the importance of memory at an evening prayer in Yerevan’s Republic Square, which drew the largest crowds of his visit, some 50,000 according to Vatican estimates. With the patriarch of the Apostolic Church, Karekin II, by his side and President Serzh Sargsyan in the front row, Francis said even the greatest pain “can become a seed of peace for the future.”
“Memory, infused with love, becomes capable of setting out on new and unexpected paths, where designs of hatred become projects of reconciliation, where hope arises for a better future for everyone,” he said.
He specifically called for Armenia and Turkey to take up the “path of reconciliation” and said: “May peace also spring forth in Nagorno-Karabakh.”