Crimean Tatar council banned from all activity. (
AN).
Crimean Prosecutor Natalya Poklonskaya on Wednesday suspended the activity of the
Mejlis (Council) of the Crimean Tatar People
because of its destabilising “extremist activity”.
The Tatars are a Muslim minority in the Crimean Peninsula. They were
deported from their homeland under Stalin, and allowed to come home only
in the 1990s.
Russian authorities have been putting pressures on them since 2014
after they voted in a referendum against Russia’s internationally
unrecognised annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula.
The Mejlis is now "banned the use of state and municipal media, the
organisation of mass demonstrations, the use of bank accounts and any
activity,” Prosecutor Poklonskaya said.
The European Union and human rights activists have slammed her
decision, which will be valid until Crimea’s Supreme Court rules on
Poklonskaya’s ban. Earlier, she had called for the Mejlis to be declared
an extremist organization.
According to the prosecutor, the Crimean Tatar organisation ought to
be added to Russia’s list of suspended public and religious
associations. For some Tatars analysts, the move is part of a broader
trend.
"The Mejlis’s political activities have been blocked for some time.
Many of its leaders have been expelled from the region, and those who
are left are involved in providing social and moral support to the
community,” writes Ayder Muzhdabaev, deputy general director of
ATR,
a Tatar language TV channel that used to broadcast out of Simferopol,
but was forced to move to Kiev to continue its activities.
For Muzhdabaev, what is really worrisome about the ban is that it is
part of a plan by Russian authorities to create a "hybrid ghetto" for
Crimean Tatars.
This is being done by, “On the one hand, turning them into a kind of
untouchable caste, reducing the contacts with the rest of the
population; and on the other, frightening the Crimean Tatar community to
such an extent that people are afraid to communicate, and thus resist.”
"There is no doubt” that the Mejlis will eventually be declared as an
extremist organisation. "The laws against extremism in Russia were
adopted precisely to suppress all dissent," Muzhdabaev writes.
What is worse in this case, notes the journalist, is the fact that
for the first time the laws “
will be applied to a representative body
elected by an entire people, and so consequently the whole Tatar people
will be deemed as extremist."
In a statement, a spokesperson for the European Union slammed
“Yesterday's decision by the so-called prosecutor of Crimea to suspend
the activities of Mejlis.”
This development “is extremely worrying”, and
“must be reversed immediately.”
Likewise, Amnesty International noted that the ban “is aimed at
snuffing out the few remaining voices of dissent in Crimea”, and
“signals a new wave of repression against Crimean Tatar people” after
“Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine two years ago.”
Since then, “
Amnesty International has documented the suspected
enforced disappearance of at least six Crimean Tatars”. In March 2014,
one missing Tatar was found dead.
For Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland, “banning
the Mejlis would discriminate against the whole Crimean Tatars community
and is therefore unacceptable”.
Hmmm.......Russia treating Tatars like Turkey treats Kurds.
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