Crimean Tatars face increased oppression by Russia – Fairplanet

15.Sep

September 15th, 2021

In early September, Crimean resident Nariman Dzhelyal woke up to masked people climbing his fence. A few days prior, his house had been searched, so he quickly realised what was going on. About a dozen Federal Security Service (FSB) officers escorted him to a facility, where he spent the rest of the day handcuffed with a bag on his head, unable to eat, drink or even use the bathroom.

Two men enacted a good FSB, bad FSB'' play with Dzhelyal, accusing him of directing others to blow up a gas pipeline. By 4 am, Dzhelyal was put face to face with another detainee. I managed to ask if he was alright, he shook his head. They beat you? He nodded in response, Dzhelyal recalled in his letter from prison.

The FSB made sure he had no lawyer present, so the full picture became clear to Dzhelyal only later. The authorities claimed that a group of Crimean Tatars blew up a pipeline under Simferopol in August after Ukrainian intelligence trained them and paid them $2,000. Dzhelyal, a respected leader of the Crimean Tatar community, was accused of organising the attack, and now faces up to 15 years in prison.

As with other cases put forward by the FSB, almost no information is available to the public. Locals are unsure if there was even a pipeline explosion. With the lack of evidence, another explanation arises: Dzhelyals arrest is a logical step in the state persecution of Crimean Tatars - an ethnic group that the Russian government perceives as a threat.

Crimean Tatars are a Turkic nation and an indigenous population of the Crimean peninsula. Following the Russo-Turkish war, Crimea became a part of the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century. Decades of Russian colonisation climaxed during World War II, at the end of which Stalin forced the deportation of over 200,000 Crimean Tatars to Central Asia as a collective punishment for perceived collaboration with Nazi forces. Many dozens of thousands died as a result.

The exiled people began to return to their homeland only in the late 1990s. During the subsequent decades, Crimean Tatars gained recognition as native people of the peninsula for the first time in centuries, and as a result, many became loyal to Ukraine. This allegiance became a problem when their homeland was seized and annexed to Russia in 2014.

Following the Russian appropriation of Crimea, the indigenous groups representative body, the Mejlis did not recognise the Russian occupation, causing Russia to label it an extremist organisation in 2016.

According to human rights activists, about 80% of political prisoners from Crimea belong to the Crimean Tatar nation. The pretext for jailing many of them was their supposed ties with Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an Islamist group freely operating in Ukraine and most of Europe.

Nariman Dzhelyals case signifies a drastic change. Up until a few years ago, only a religious fundamentalist or an extremely vocal opposition member was considered a real threat by Moscow. Dzhelyal was always diplomatic and soft-spoken, carefully watching his words; his sole crime was representing his people as a deputy head of the Mejlis, and being one of the last civil leaders of the Crimean Tatars who stayed in Crimea.

In 2014, President Vladimir Putin admitted the wrongdoings of Moscow before the Crimean Tatar nation, and vowed to reinstate their rights and good name in full. Seven years later, Crimean Tatars face 15 years in Russian prison merely for their ethnicity. On World Democracy Day, its worth remembering that the occupation of Crimea was not only the biggest attack on the sovereignty of a European nation in decades, but also a return of state repression of a whole indigenous population.

Image by FreedomHouse

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Crimean Tatars face increased oppression by Russia - Fairplanet