Threatened, Raided, And Exiled: Opposing Putin In Crimea

Deported once under Stalin, Crimea’s Tatars face a similar fate under Vladimir Putin. Leonid Ragozin reports from Crimea, and News’ Max Seddon reports from Kiev.













Mustafa Dzhemilev, Crimean Tatars' spiritual leader, in exile in Kiev.


Max Seddon /











SIMFEROPOL, Crimea — When Russian troops seized Crimea from Ukraine in March, Vladimir Putin assured the peninsula's indigenous minority group, the Crimean Tatars, that Moscow would grant them better rights than Kiev had ever provided them. Six months later, Russia has exiled their leaders, outlawed their elected parliament, raided the homes of several Crimean Tatars, and threatened to deport or prosecute anyone who refuses to accept Russian rule.

The brutal crackdown on the vocal Crimean Tatars, which began earlier this month after their elected parliament, the Mejlis, called on its supporters to boycott local elections, has evoked dark memories from 1944, when Stalin forcibly deported the entire population to Central Asia. Most of the 300,000 Crimean Tatars, who vehemently opposed the Russian annexation, are now faced with a stark choice: continue their dissent in a Russia that brokers none; quietly adapt to life under the new regime; or leave the homeland they spent decades fighting to reclaim.

"The atmosphere's completely lawless, it's more dire than under Soviet power," Mustafa Dzhemilev, the wry, diminutive, chain-smoking Ukrainian lawmaker who led the Mejlis from 1991 until last year and is still the Crimean Tatars' unofficial leader, told News in a Georgian restaurant in Kiev on Thursday. "Soviet power was predictable, in a way, because you knew there'd be the investigation, the court, the arrest, and then they sent you to the camp. Now that's all vanishing."

After boycotting the obviously flawed referendum in mid-March that returned overwhelming results for a return to Russia and maintaining their opposition since, many Crimean Tatars have begun to see worrying parallels. In an interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant conducted in August and published on Monday, Sergei Aksyonov, the Putin-appointed head of Crimea's government, said that the Mejlis "does not exist" and vowed to "expel from Crimea anyone who incites ethnic hatred," a charge leveled at several exiled Mejlis leaders.

The local elections that the Mejlis had boycotted were held on Sep. 16 and two days later, balaclava-clad special troops raided the Mejlis' office — which was still flying the Ukrainian flag — in the Crimean capital, Simferopol. They were followed by investigators from the FSB security services, who spent 12 hours in the building. They shuffled through papers and Mejlis leaders' personal belongings, and left with all the computers and stacks of documents. Two elderly Crimean Tatar women who remained inside opened a window to face waiting TV cameras. "Glory to Ukraine!" one of them said, sotto voce.





















FSB officers raided the Mejlis' office in Simferopol, Crimea on Sep. 16. The group was evicted a day later.


Anadolu Agency / Getty Images











A legendary Soviet dissident who spent 15 years in Soviet prison camps and once went on a record 303-day hunger strike, Dzhemilev, 71, had resisted Putin's considerable overtures to win him over only weeks earlier. Not long before the first Russian troops appeared on the Crimean peninsula in February, Dzhemilev was approached by a Russian businessman in the city of Sevastopol who said that Putin wanted to meet him. Unable to discern what Putin could want from him, Dzhemilev refused.

When Russia's lighting-quick annexation of the peninsula shortly afterward made it clear what Putin wanted, Dzhemilev received another invitation to meet him, this time from Mintimer Shaimiev, the former longtime head of the Tatar minority in Russia. (The Tatars in Russia are related to the Crimean Tatars, but are far less independent-minded politically.) This was the first request for contact made by Russia at any level to a Ukrainian official since the invasion. Dzhemilev agreed, only to back out again after his wife asked him, "Why are you going to meet that bastard?"

Eventually, Shaimiev found a compromise and convinced Dzhemilev to talk on a special telephone in his Moscow office that, Putin said, had the power to reach him anywhere in the world at any time of day without fail. "He said, 'We will solve anything the Ukrainians didn't solve as soon as is humanly possible,' like it would be heaven," Dzhemilev said. "I was polite with him. I said, 'We are not opposed to help, and Russia certainly owes us for [the Soviet deportations], but first you have to remove your troops.'

"Putin said, 'That's just what I expected you to say. Any patriot would say that. But let's find out what the people want in the referendum,'" Dzhemilev continued. "I said, 'The Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people has already made the decision to boycott this referendum. It's illegal and pointless — you can't hold referendums under occupation,'" he said.

"I told him, "Nobody's going to recognize this referendum, and neither are we. And you talk about the Crimean people — there's no such people. There's the indigenous Crimean Tatar people, and there are settlers, who, of course, have the same rights as us, but not the right of self-determination you're talking about,'" Dzhemilev said. "And he just kept saying, 'referendum, referendum.'"

Then, Putin said that he was worried the Crimean Tatars would wind up entangled in "bloody misadventures," and warned that Ukraine had been taken over by "fascists," Dzhemilev said. "I told him, 'Listen. We are very proud that we fought for our homeland all those years without spilling a drop of blood, ours or anyone else's. But when a foreign soldier shows up on your land and starts imposing the order of a foreign country, then there's no telling what's going to happen." The conversation ended there.

"I can't go to Moscow now, so there's no way I can reach him on that phone," Dzhemilev said.







View Entire List ›

Click here to view full content