Turkish Supported Hizb ut-Tahrir 'militants' detained in Crimea.

Hizb ut-Tahrir 'militants' detained in Crimea — prosecutor-general. (Tass). 

Four followers of the Hizb ut-Tahrir terrorist organization have been detained in the city of Bakhchisarai in Crimea, the republic’s Prosecutor-General Natalya Poklonskaya told TASS on Thursday.

"Officers of the Crimea and Sevastopol department of the Russian Federal Security Service detained members of a terrorist organization and the organizer of this cell in the city of Bakhchisarai. Searches are underway," she said, adding that a criminal case was opened against three Bakhchisarai residents on charges of participating in a terrorist organization and one more person was charged with organizing terrorist activities.

"It has been established that one of those detained, being the leader of a local cell of the terrorist organization, has been engaged in secret anti-constitutional activities by means of conducting propaganda campaigns among local residents to recruit them to his terrorist organization and holding secret meetings," Poklonskaya said.

As many as six followers of Hiz ut-Tahrir have been detained in Crimea since the beginning of the year. The terrorist group was active in Crimea’s resort cities of Yalta and Alushta and maintained friendly relations with the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatars, a public movement outlawed in Russia.

Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Party of Liberation) is an international religious and political organization founded in 1953 in Jerusalem. Its goal is to remove all the non-Islamic governments and bring back the Muslims to the "truly Islamic life."

Russia’s Supreme Court banned Hizb ut-Tahrir in 2003 as a terrorist organization.

Hmmm......Hizb ut-Tahrir is very welcome in Islamist Erdoganistan.

Six day ago: 

Hizb ut Tahrir / Wilayah Turkey: Istanbul Became One Heart with Aleppo (PDF).

Hizb ut-Tahrir calling for a caliphate in Turkey

Crimean Tatar council Mejlis banned from all activity.

#Turkey PM #Davutoglu met #Crimea Tatar leader Mustafa Abdülcemil Kırımoglu & #Tatar Majlis Chairman Refat Chubarov pic.twitter.com/4TKJ8BgM30

— Abdullah Bozkurt (@abdbozkurt) April 16, 2016

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.