Russia and the Tatars, Divide and Digest

Russia and the Tatars, Divide and Digest

By The Economist online

17 September 2014

THE Mejlis is the governing body of Crimea’s Tatars, the Muslim indigenous group who make up 12% of the region’s population. On September 16th, its headquarters was surrounded and searched by dozens of Russian police (pictured). The raid came just a day after Crimea’s elections, which the Tatars, most of whom opposed Russia’s takeover of the peninsula this spring, largely boycotted. For the Tatars, who have a long history of oppression at Russian hands, it is the latest in a series of incidents that seem to signal a new effort to suppress their political autonomy.

Western sanctions notwithstanding, Vladimir Putin is having it his way in eastern Ukraine at the moment. In Crimea, most of the population has welcomed Russian rule. Nevertheless, the Tatars seem to have Moscow worried. Their suspicion of Moscow has deep roots: in 1944, the entire Tatar population of 180,000 was deported to central Asia in a single night on the orders of Josef Stalin. Almost half died of hunger; the group was not allowed back to Crimea until the late days of the Soviet perestroika reforms in the 1990s.

If the Tatars pose a political threat, it is partly because they are a tight-knit society with clear leadership and a long tradition of non-violent resistance. Their history of protest stretches back to 1969, when five demonstrators in Moscow managed to hold up banners demanding the right to return to Crimea “for almost seven minutes”, as one of the protestors proudly told this correspondent many years later—a remarkable achievement in those totalitarian times. Russia already has its share of troubles with Islamist extremists, and Mr Putin clearly wants to keep this Muslim minority’s grievances under control.

Russia’s history of policital suppression of the Tatars actually dates back farther than Stalin. “Now in the Crimea there are three hundred thousand bourgeois,” Vladimir Lenin wrote in 1920, referring mainly to the Tatar population. “We will take them, divide them, subjugate them, digest them.” That recipe recalls the moves Russian authorities have made since seizing Crimea. Authorities have banned the Tatar community’s two main leaders, Mustapha Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov, both now in Kiev, from entering the peninsula for the next five years. Mr Dzhemilev, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, tried to return to Crimea on May 3rd; police fined a hundred members of the crowd that gathered to greet him for “public disorder”. Mr Chubarov, the current head of the Mejlis, now chairs its meetings via Skype.

Other suspicious incidents have gradually piled up. A Tatar who protested against the Russian takeover in March was found dead with signs of torture, and two others have disappeared. Heavily armed special police have carried out repeated searches of restaurants, madrasas and mosques. In early September, the Mejlis building, which still flies the Ukrainian flag, was defaced with vulgar graffiti.

Meanwhile, Russian authorities have banned a long series of Muslim books considered “religious extremism”, including a Russian translation of the Koran. Displaying the Ukrainian flag, too, is banned. The local government barred a ceremony in Simferopol to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Tatar deportation, calling it “too dangerous”, and claimed the weather was “too hot” to mark the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism on August 23.

Mr Putin has offered the Tatars soothing rhetoric. “I believe we should…restore Crimean Tatars in their rights and clear their good name,” he declared on March 18, shortly after the annexation. These words are unlikely to reassure the Tatars. A senior member of the community, who as a child lost two sisters when his family was deported to Uzbekistan, recently recounted a disturbing incident in the coastal town of Yevpatoria. On August 1, at a gathering of the local religious council, a group of young Tatars waited until the regular meeting ended, and then abruptly elected new authorities. They proceeded to change the locks, take control of almost $13,000 in donations to the mosque, and declare their loyalty to a new, alternative muftiate. For the aged leader, who sheepishly asked that his name not be used, incidents like this seem clearly part of a new campaign of political suppression, and the Tatars know whom to blame.

Featured image: copyright AFP

 


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