Crimean Tatars a Beleaguered Minority

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

A peninsula that juts out into the Black Sea from Ukraine, the Crimea, which covers an area of more than 26,000 square kilometres, is virtually an island, and has been a bone of contention and an arena for war for centuries.

The Crimean Tatars, a Muslim Turkic-speaking people, had founded an independent state there in the Middle Ages, allied with the Ottoman Empire. The Crimean Khanate was among the strongest powers in Eastern Europe until the beginning of the 18th century.

However, their state weakened as the Ottomans lost ground to an expansionist Russian Empire. When Catherine the Great annexed the Crimea in 1783, the Tatars comprised 98 per cent of the population, but many Crimean Tatars were massacred or exiled. Their numbers continued to dwindle, due to Russian settlement.

They fared little better in the new Soviet Union in the 20th century. The Crimea was captured by the Nazis in 1941 during the Second World War and retaken by the Soviets three years later. The Tatars were all expelled in 1944, having been accused by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin of collaborating with the Nazis. Given the geopolitical position of the Crimea, the Tatars were perceived as a threat. Some 200,000 were deported to central Asia, and many more thousands died en route.

After Stalin’s death, the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1954 transferred the Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, today’s Russian Federation, to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, now the independent Ukraine.

Although a 1967 Soviet decree removed the charges against Crimean Tatars, the Soviet government did nothing to facilitate their resettlement in the Crimea or to make reparations for lost lives and confiscated property.

But after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, nearly 300,000 Tatars were able to return to the Crimea, despite strong opposition from its mostly Russian and Ukrainian inhabitants. The Crimea had now become an autonomous republic within an independent Ukraine. The Tatars now comprise 12 per cent of the peninsula’s population of two million, with the remainder made up of Russians, at 60 per cent, and Ukrainians, 25 per cent.

When the USSR dissolved, the Tatars collaborated with the newly independent Ukrainian government in Kyiv to secure their rights. They founded a representative body, the Qurultay, with the 33-member Mejlis as its executive; the current chair, Refat Chubarov, was selected this year. It is able to address grievances to the Ukrainian central government, the Crimean republic’s government, and international organizations.

But the Crimea continues to be dominated by its Russian majority, and there were violent clashes between them and the Tatar minority in 2006-2007. Many Russians (and Ukrainians) fear the spread of radical Islam among the Tatars. Amid the ethnic tensions, small-scale Wahhabist groups sponsored by Arab Gulf states emerged, including the banned Hizb-i-Tehrir, which castigated the Mejlis for its “soft” policies, but the radicals have little support.

In 2010, several pro-Russian Crimean political leaders demanded the disbanding and banning of the Mejlis and all other forms of political representation for the Crimean Tatars. The current Crimean republic’s prime minister, Anatoliy Mohyliov, has in the past praised Stalin’s expulsion of the Tatars.
Two mosques were attacked recently, and ethnic tensions threaten to throw the Crimea into a downward spiral of civil violence.