A sort ofAt around 7 am on Saturday morning, when a dozen masked men banged on the doors and windows of his house, Nariman Jeljal must have known that he would also be taken away. Jelyal is the last leader of the Crimean Tatar minority. After Russia annexed Crimea, he still lives on the peninsula. Shortly before the raid, he reported on Facebook that his neighbor had been kidnapped in a village near the capital Simferopol. On Saturday, these men locked Jeljal’s wife and four children in a room and took Jeljal away by minibus.The program points to the Russian domestic secret service FSB There.
This behavior is called “mask performance”. FSB has long set its sights on Jeljal. The fact that he is now attacking is likely to retaliate against the summit with international participation held in Kiev at the end of August to establish a “Crimean platform” that should overcome annexation. Except for a few representatives of cooperation with Russia, the fact that the Crimean Tatars refused to annex their homeland is also due to their history, in which the deportation of the locked freight train to Central Asia in 1944 was formative. Tens of thousands of people lost their lives in the process.
Jeljal’s fate reflects the fate of his people: he was born in Uzbekistan in 1980 and was not able to return to Crimea with his family until the end of the 1980s. Since the annexation, journalists and political scientists on the peninsula have become conversation partners for those who want to understand what is happening. The propaganda in Moscow imitated the harmony of a multi-ethnic country; but those who opposed annexation were brutally persecuted. Dozens of Crimean Tatars were taken to Russian prisons. In August, the memorial hall of human rights organization counted a total of 89 Crimean residents who were persecuted only for joining a “terrorist organization” and in some cases sentenced to long-term imprisonment.
The meaning here is Hizb ut Tahrir, an Islamic organization allowed in Ukraine but banned in other countries. Jeljal told FAZ in Simferopol in the spring of 2018 that Russia’s rulers used “all means” to punish disobedience. This was not his first raid; Jeljal was also arrested. As early as 2016, the Russian rulers listed the Crimean Tatar’s executive branch council as an “extremist”; in the lawsuit, Jeljal represented Mejlis as the last member to remain in Crimea. Dscheljal reported to FAZ that the FSB required him to publicly state that he was no longer a member of the committee. So far, those in power have avoided initiating the “parliamentary process” and have tried to discredit the institution.
Moscow has not succeeded in this regard. For example, Dscheljal traveled to Prague, Washington, and Kiev, and recently participated in the “Crimean Platform” summit there. He advocated the establishment of a representative office of the Crimean Tatars in the countries participating in the platform, so that it would not stay in noble rhetoric. Dscheljal hopes to have an international solution, for example, under the patronage of Kiev, Moscow, the European Union and Turkey, in the form of a special territory of Ukraine, Turkey is a champion of the Crimean Tatars. “We are still subject to the political situation,” he said of his people.
Crimean Tatars demonstrate against Jeljal’s kidnapping
Dscheljal’s fate was the same as the other four Crimean Tatars at the weekend, and they were also kidnapped. Two of them were accused of destroying important infrastructure. They will face imprisonment of 10 to 15 years. For a long time, it was not clear what Dscheljal was accused of. It was only on Sunday night, quoting his lawyer, that Dscheljal was listed as an accomplice in the same case. On Saturday, he was in handcuffs and a sack on his head until late at night. On Saturday, many Crimean Tatars gathered in front of the FSB building in Simferopol. According to the “Crimean Unity” movement, about 40 of them were arrested; the picture shows how they squeezed into a blue bus.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Serensky and other Ukrainian politicians described the new round of persecution as Russia’s response to the fact that the “Crimean platform” has already started operating. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba called on partners to increase pressure on Moscow.
