Ukarain: Muslim Tatars are under threat from ethnic violence under new separatist administration in Crimea

On May 18, 1944, Joseph Stalin deported 218,000 Crimean Tatars to Central Asia.Using personal testimonies, this film tells the story of the Tatars' expulsion from their homeland and their long struggle to return. It was only in 1989, with the opening up of the Soviet Union, that they were able to come back in large numbers. Most, finding Russians living in their former homes, built shacks in which to live.Today, 300,000 Tatars live in Crimea - 5,000 of them still in shacks. Even those with houses suffer because they only have minority status. Despite this, 150,000 more are still hoping to return home.

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Ukraine crisis: 

For one who is likely to be among the first to be taken away at gunpoint if the new men in power here have their way, Fazil Amazayev, was being remarkably calm. Such actions, he insisted “will unite all the Muslims here; they will make enemies of us all”.

Mr Amazayev is a senior member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Islamic political organisation which is legal in Ukraine. However, among the first pronouncements made by the new separatist Prime Minister of Crimea and the security chief he has appointed is that it is a “dangerous terrorist organisation” which will have to be dealt with.

Hizb ut-Tahrir has been blamed in many countries for promoting radicalism; but violent militancy caused by it is hard to find in Ukraine. And the fear of becoming sectarian targets is not just confined to activists among the Tatars: many in the community are staying away from city centres where Russian-speaking vigilantes hold sway, and some are leaving for other parts of the country.

Percentage of Crimean Tatars by region in Crimea according to 2001 Ukrainian census

Mr Amazayev says he is confident that the Tatars of Crimea will not let him and others from his group be picked off by the new head of security, Petr Zima, who was promoted from his previous post in Sevastopol, the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. “Zima built up a reputation in Sevastopol for carrying out raids, accusing people of being involved in extremism. But, if he starts doing that now, he will make a big mistake. The people in the [Tatar] establishment, the Mufti and the Mejlis [representative council] criticised us in the past, but now we are all facing the common enemy. And, if they do start persecuting us, we know how to survive, we have done it in Syria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia.”

Nevertheless, Mr Amazayev has started to be very cautious, not straying outside his home town, Bakhchisarai, a historic place of mosques where Muslims form a sizeable portion of the population. “I don’t think it will be safe for me to travel, not at this time,” he said.

The larger Tatar community is in friction with the Russian nationalist population over the issue of secession from Ukraine. The new Crimean administration of Sergei Aksenov is organising a referendum on the issue, clearing the way to rule by Moscow – anathema to the Tatars who were deported from here, en masse, to Siberia and the central Asian steppes by Stalin at the end of the Second World War.

Today the head of the Russian republic of Tatarstan arrived in Crimea. Many, however, view Rustam Minnikhanov as an emissary of the Kremlin sent to persuade the Mejlis to change its policy of refusing to recognise the new separatist Crimean administration. “He is not someone we see as our protector,” said one of its officials.

The sense of being under threat has led to the formation of self-defence groups in Tatar neighbourhoods: the growing prevalence of fear in a people who have lived, on the whole, amicably with those of Russian and Ukrainian extraction since they returned from exile in the 1990s.

The current tensions emerged quickly. A demonstration against secession drew 10,000 from Ukraine’s largest Muslim community to the streets of the Crimean capital, Simferopol, last week. There were chants of “Allah hu Akhbar” from a small band of Tatars which some among an opposing protest by Russian speakers complained they found intimidating.

There were no serious acts of violence by either side or the police; but two people were reported to have died in the crush as the crowd converged outside the state parliament. 

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That night the parliament buildings were taken over by Russian-speaking gunmen in balaclavas. The following morning Vladimir Putin’s forces had begun taking over strategic locations. Soon the actual numbers of those killed in the rally rose to four or six. All the victims were, it was claimed, Russians who had been murdered by Tatars using iron bars, knives and  noxious sprays.

Street collections were soon under way for the bereaved families, and passing Tatars often found themselves subjected to abuse. Adem Suleymanov was hurrying home in the evening through Simferopol’s Lenin Square when he was accosted by three young men wearing orange and black ribbons of the Russian military order of St George.

“They were quite drunk. They demanded that I should give money for the families of those who died. I did,” he recalled. “Then one of them swung me around and started shouting ‘Why do you want to destroy that?’ And then he started kicking at me.” Mr Suleymanov was being pointed by his attackers at the statue of Lenin which the Mejlis had demanded should be pulled down and replaced by a park reflecting peace and unity among the different nationalities of Crimea.

A “march for peace” was held at Bakhchisarai by the League of Crimean Tatar Women. It walked past Russian nationalist vigilantes who had formed a cordon in front of a Ukrainian base surrounded by Moscow’s forces. “I do not like foreign soldiers occupying our country,” said 25-year-old Aliya. “I also do not agree with the policies of Hizb ut-Tahrir. If the Russians start pressuring the Tatars then it is natural that people will close in and, who knows, people like Hizb ut-Tahrir may start picking up support.”

Sitting on his balcony, watching the march and the Russian soldiers, 75-year-old Rifat Ibrahimov’s one wish was that the past not return: “I was so very young when we were moved from here that time. I have learnt to forget most of the terrible things that happened, especially after we came back home. No, I do not want to see days like those again.”

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Crimean Khanate

Crimean Tatars  (Qırım, Qırımlı) are a Turkic ethnic group, and formerly during the Crimean Khanate a Turco-Mongol ethnic group, native to the Crimea (a peninsula on the northern part of the Black Sea) in modern-day Ukraine. They are a subgroup of the Tatars. Crimean Tatars speak Crimean Tatar,Russian or Turkish, depending on locale, and increasingly Ukrainian, as it is mostly the language of education. For example, in Crimea, they use Russian in public and/or with non-Tatars, while Turkey's population of Crimean Tatar ancestry primarily uses Turkish.

In modern times, in addition to living in Ukraine, there is a large diaspora of Crimean Tatars in Turkey,Uzbekistan, Romania, Bulgaria, Western Europe, the Middle East and North America, as well as small communities in Finland, Lithuania, Russia, Belarus and Poland.

Juma-Jami Mosque

The Crimean Tatars emerged as a nation at the time of the Crimean Khanate. The Crimean Khanate was a Turkic-speaking Muslim state which was among the strongest powers in Eastern Europe until the beginning of the 18th century. The nobles and rulers of the Crimean Tatars were the progeny of Hacı I Girai a Jochid descendant of Genghis Khan who was Great Mongol ruler, and thus of Batu Khan of the Mongol Golden Horde. The Crimean Tatars mostly adopted Islam in the 14th century and thereafter Crimea became one of the centers of Islamic civilization. This was signified by Ozbeg Khan erecting the first mosque and medrese in Eski Qırım in 1314.

According to Baron Iosif Igelström, in 1783 there were close to 1600 mosques and religious schools in Crimea. In Bakhchisaray, the khan Meñli I Giray built Zıncırlı Medrese (literally "Chain Madrassah"), an Islamic seminary where one has to bow while entering from its door because of the chain hanging over. This symbolized the Crimean society's respect for learning. Meñli I Giray also constructed a large mosque on the model of Hagia Sophia (which was ruined in 1850s). Later, the khans built a greater palace, Hansaray in Bakhchisaray, which survives to this day. Sahib I Giray patronized many scholars and artists in this palace. During the reign of Devlet I Giray the architect Mimar Sinan built a mosque, Juma-Jami, in Yevpatoria. The Crimean Khanate became aprotectorate of the Ottoman Empire in 1475, when the Ottoman general Gedik Ahmed Pasha conquered the southern coast of Crimea. The alliance with the Ottomans became an important factor in the survival of the khanate until the 18th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Tatars

1. Кримські татари - Crimean Tatars of Ukraine - Qırımtatarlar - YouTube

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Cremia The Muslim land occupied:

Crimean coup is Putin’s payback

Spare a thought, meanwhile, for Crimea’s Tartars. They are the peninsula’s original Turkic-speaking Muslim inhabitants. Well-educated and politically organised, they now number 300,000, 15 per cent of Crimea’s population. They want to remain part of Ukraine. They support Kiev’s new pro-EU leadership.

They also have their own awful folk memories of Russian colonisation and exile: in 1944, Stalin deported the Tartars and other smaller groups to central Asia. They mostly came home after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Understandably, they may now fear being cast once again in the role of fifth columnists. So far the Kremlin has said nothing about their rights.

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Days after the end of Vladimir Putin’s Sochi Olympics, the borders of Europe are shifting. Or, more accurately, military forces suspected of acting on Moscow’s orders are creating a new cartographic reality on the ground.

Overnight, alleged undercover Russian special forces seized control of Simferopol airport, in the administrative capital of Crimea.

The move comes less than 24 hours after a similar squad of shadowy, well-armed, Russian-speaking gunmen seized Simferopol’s parliament building and administrative complex. If anyone was in doubt as to what this meant, the gunmen left a clue. They raised a Russian flag above the parliament building.

Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, described the operations in Crimea in apocalyptic terms. What was unfolding in the south was “an armed invasion and occupation in violation of all international agreements and norms”, he posted on Facebook. That’s certainly how it seems.

Moscow’s military moves so far resemble a classically executed coup: seize control of strategic infrastructure, seal the borders between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, invoke the need to protect the peninsula’s ethnic Russian majority.

The Kremlin has denied any involvement in this very Crimean coup. But Putin’s playbook in the coming days and months is easy to predict.

On Thursday, the Crimean parliament announced it would hold a referendum on the peninsula’s future status on May 25. That is the same day Ukraine goes to the polls in fresh presidential elections.

The referendum can have only one outcome: a vote to secede from Ukraine. After that, Crimea can go one of two ways. It could formally join the Russian Federation. Or, more probably, it might become a sort of giant version of South Ossetia or Abkhazia, Georgia’s two Russian-occupied breakaway republics.

Either way, this amounts to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, de facto or de jure.From Putin’s perspective, a coup would be payback for what he regards as the western-backed takeover of Kiev by opposition forces.

The Kremlin argument runs something like this: if armed gangs can seize power in the Ukrainian capital, storming government buildings, why can’t pro-Russian forces do the same thing in Crimea?

There are, of course, signal differences. Despite the presence of radical Ukrainian nationalists, the vast majority of opposition demonstrators in Kiev were ordinary citizens. They were fed up with the corruption and misrule of President Viktor Yanukovych and his clique. It was a bottom-up revolution. The protesters were armed with little more than homemade shields, rubbish helmets and molotov cocktails.

In Crimea, by contrast, the shadowy Russian troops are equipped with the latest gear. Ukrainian officials point to the GRU, Russian military intelligence. And the warp-speed tempo of events in Crimea is being dictated from the top, not the bottom — from Moscow, rather than the street.

The choreography has been impressive. Within hours of the airport seizure, Russian MPs proposed a bill in the state Duma simplifying procedures for getting Russian passports to Ukrainians.

The goal, the MPs said, was to protect a “brotherly nation”. Russia’s most important opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, meanwhile, has been placed under house arrest for two months and denied access to the internet. The Kremlin, that most risk-averse of entities, has everything covered.

It only remains to be seen what role Yanukovych will play in this fast-moving drama. Despite having fled the country, he insists that he is still Ukraine’s legitimate president.

Russia refuses to recognise Kiev’s new pro-western interim government as a legitimate partner. It is likely to continue to treat Yanukovych — whose regime is accused of plundering $70bn from Ukraine’s treasury — as the head of a government-in-exile.

It may even seek to return him to Crimea to continue his “executive” functions. Given Yanukovych’s love of bling, Crimea’s sumptuous Livadia Palace — where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met to discuss Europe’s 1945 post-war carve-up — might serve as his new headquarters.

Spare a thought, meanwhile, for Crimea’s Tartars. They are the peninsula’s original Turkic-speaking Muslim inhabitants. Well-educated and politically organised, they now number 300,000, 15 per cent of Crimea’s population. They want to remain part of Ukraine. They support Kiev’s new pro-EU leadership.

They also have their own awful folk memories of Russian colonisation and exile: in 1944, Stalin deported the Tartars and other smaller groups to central Asia. They mostly came home after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Understandably, they may now fear being cast once again in the role of fifth columnists. So far the Kremlin has said nothing about their rights.

All of this presents the west with one of its biggest crises since the cold war. Russia has mounted a major land grab of a neighbouring sovereign state. How will the west react?

—By arrangement with the Guardian

by Luke Harding, dawn.com

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The Crimean Muslim Tatars have their own unofficial parliament, the Mejlis, which states its purpose as being to promote the rights and interests of the Crimean Tatars.
For centuries under Greek and Roman influence, Crimea in 1443 became the centre of a Tatar Khanate, which later became an Ottoman vassal state.

Rival imperial ambitions in the mid 19th century led to the Crimean War when Britain and France, suspicious of Russian ambitions in the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire declined, sent troops.

Port city of Yalta
Yalta: The port city is a heaven for tourists
Given autonomous republic status within Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, Crimea was occupied by the Nazis in the early 1940s.

Tatar deportation

The Tatars were accused of collaboration by Stalin and deported en masse to Central Asia and Siberia in 1944. Many did not survive.

Only as the Soviet Union collapsed were they allowed to return. By the time over a quarter of a million did so in the early 1990s, it was to an independent Ukraine where they faced very high unemployment and extremely poor housing conditions.

There have been persistent tensions and protests over land rights, and allocation of land to Crimean Tatars remains a highly contentious issue.
However, another significant minority, the Muslim Crimean Tatars, point out that they were once the majority in Ukraine, and were deported in large numbers by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1944 for alleged collaboration with Nazi invaders in World War Two.
Ethnic Ukrainians made up 24% of the population in Crimea according to the 2001 census, compared with 58% Russians and 12% Tatars.

Tatars have been returning since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 - causing persistent tensions with Russians over land rights.

http://m.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18287223