Ukraine in Arabic | Six months of Russian occupation of Crimea
KYIV/Ukraine in Arabic/ Anxiety among the Tatars contrasts sharply with the happiness expressed by Crimea’s dominant Russophone population, still riding the euphoria of joining Russia, despite a tricky transition.
Mr Umerov is one of 240,000 indigenous Crimean Tatars who live on the Crimean peninsula, which dangles from Ukraine into the Black Sea but which was annexed by the Kremlin in March. His father, Rustem, survived Joseph Stalin’s brutal deportation of the Tartars to Central Asia in 1944 and a ten-year stint in the gulag to return home from exile to his native Crimea as the Soviet Union collapsed.
This spring, two tragedies hit Ilmi Umerov in one week. First his father died suddenly after a short illness. Then his homeland of Crimea was wrenched from Ukraine and absorbed by Russia.
Mr Umerov, 57, lives in Bakhchysaray, not far from the 16th century Khan’s Palace of his ancestors, whose graceful towers puncture the sky over the town.
In the weeks before he died, Mr Umerov’s father peered out of the window and saw the “little green men” - the Russian soldiers who took over Crimea by stealth and later oversaw the flawed referendum that found 97 per cent of voters in favour of the region leaving Ukraine for its neighbour. “My father and the other old people warned us to beware of a new deportation,” said Mr Umerov in an interview. “He thought it was the beginning of the Third World War.”
The Tatars, historically fearful of Moscow after their persecution by the Russian-dominated Soviets, boycotted the referendum and spoke out against the Kremlin's seizure of Crimea.
Since then, Mr Putin’s authorities have responded in character, restricting Tatar gatherings, calling critical journalists from the community’s lively media to meetings with the FSB (Federal Security Service), and launching raids on Tatar businesses.
On October 6 there were fears the campaign was turning violent after the body of a young Tatar man abducted last month was found dumped at an abandoned holiday camp in the coastal city of Yevpatoriya. Another 17 Tatars are said to have gone missing since the Russian takeover.
In April and July, Russian prosecutors dealt the heaviest blows; slapping five-year bans on the Tatars’ two most important leaders, Mustafa Dzhemilev and Refat Chubarov, preventing them from re-entering Crimea after they visited Ukraine - a banishment with painful echoes of the 1944 exile, in which tens of thousands perished or lost contact with their relatives.
Then, in May, Crimean authorities announced a temporary ban on demonstrations and fenced off central Simferopol in an attempt to prevent the Tatars marking the anniversary of the deportation. The community defied the ban and met on the edge of the city.
In September, the campaign peaked with a raid on the Mejlis, the Tatars’ self-governing council in the Crimean capital, Simferopol. Men in masks with automatic weapons guarded the building as it was searched, officially in connection with protests at the border when Mr Dzhemilev was refused entry. Russia’s foreign ministry said extremist literature, computer hard discs and a firearm had been confiscated, and the council was ejected from the building. Mr Dzhemilev called it a “robbery”.
The raid came two days after the Mejlis had urged Crimeans not to vote in September 14 local elections that were dominated by the slavishly pro-Kremlin United Russia party.
Mr Umerov, a former deputy speaker of Crimea’s parliament who resigned as head of the Bakhchysaray regional administration after Russian grabbed the peninsula, is convinced such measures are designed to bend the Tatars to Moscow’s will.
“First they prevent us from freely marking our genocide, our Holocaust,” he told the Telegraph. “Second, they exlude our leaders. Third, they attack us with these gun-toting search teams and shut down the Mejlis. This is nothing less than a campaign of terror.”
Sergei Aksenov, the de facto acting head of Crimea, appeared to admit the measures were designed to stifle free speech when asked about the Tatars’ plight in a recent magazine interview.
“All activities aimed at non-recognition of Crimea’s joining to Russia and non-recognition of the leadership of the country will face prosecution under the law and we will take a very tough stance on this,” he said.
Mr Aksenov added that the Mejlis – which has 33 elected members and was established in 1991 – had “little authority” and “does not exist, legally speaking”.
“The Russian authorities want to instill fear in us Tatars and force us to stop supporting Kiev,” said Sevket Qaybulla, a member of the Mejlis and editor of Avdet, a Tartar newspaper that has received two official warnings for allegedly “extremist material” in articles that explained the elections boycott.
“It’s not that life was ideal under the Ukrainians but we had a degree of freedom,” he added. “Now we see a new Russian reality: anyone who disagrees with the Kremlin must be crushed. If you want to criticise, you have to whisper at home."
Other signs of Moscow’s takeover in Crimea are more suble but perhaps just as telling. Harmonising with bureaucratic Russian rules and practices can test the patience.
“My sister works in a firm that got bought up by the Russian state insurance company and now they spend most of their day sewing documents together with a needle and thread,” said one resident of Simferopol who asked not to be named. “It’s total ‘sovok’,” he added, using the word for dated Soviet-style behaviour.
Switching to Kremlin rule brings bigger headaches that are beginning to throb. Ukraine provides most of Crimea’s water and electricity, and there are already power cuts in Simferopol in order to conserve supply.
Moscow has said it could spend up to $7bn (£4.4bn) this year alone to integrate Crimea’s economy and shore up its good standing after the takeover. A 12-mile long bridge linking the Russian mainland with Crimea across the Kerch Strait should be completed by 2018.
“Russia is providing a big boost in funding compared to the tiny amounts we received from Ukraine, which always preferred to ignore or humiliate us,” said Igor Shapovalov, who heads a new government agency tasked with developing Sevastopol, the military port at the tip of the Crimean peninsula.
If the Tatars are the vanguard of dissent, then Sevastopol is a pole of pro-Russian fervour.
Russia first took Crimea in 1783, wresting it from the Crimean Khanate. The territory passed to the Bolsheviks in the early 20th century but in 1954 it was transferred from Russian to Ukrainian jurisdiction inside the USSR, and it stayed with Ukraine after the Soviet breakup, in what Russian nationalists have long viewed as a deep injustice.
The peninsula’s population of 2.3 million is around 60 per cent ethnic Russian, 24 per cent Ukrainian and 11 per cent Tatar, but in Sevastopol Mr Shapovalov says the Russian population is in the high 90s.
The city is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and a cradle of Russian heroism. Once it was known for its “two sieges” but locals now say a third has been added.
“In the first we defended the empire against your British and Turkish forces [during the Crimean War] in the 1850s,” explained Lyudmila Ponomareva, 70, a retired officer’s wife who was walking the city’s Lenin Street. “In the second we defended the Soviet Union against the Nazis in 1942. And in the third, this year, our men defended the city against the fascist plague from Kiev.”
Nearby, groups of schoolchildren flocked to an exhibition supported by Russia’s ministry of culture about the national anthem.
In an upstairs room, phalanxes of Russian soldiers, a space rocket being prepared for launch and a waving Mr Putin played across a screen. At the end of the video, the students gathered excitedly in front of a camera that projected them on to a background of Red Square as they sang the anthem.
Downstairs, Olga Tkacheno, 77, an attendant who survived the second siege as a child, said: “I thank God every day that Putin is now our president. The children come here and sing the anthem and they cheer when they see Vladimir Vladimirovich on the screen. The elderly visitors sometimes cry. Putin raised Russia up and now our Crimea will flourish.”
Yet even here there were signs of dissent. In the exhibiton guestbook, one visitor had drawn a Ukrainian trident and written “Glory to Ukraine!” Another scrawled over the top, “Shame on the fascists! Glory to Russia!’
Thirty miles to the north of Sevastopol, Mr Umerov sat in a restaurant opposite the Khan’s Palace. The night before he had used his political clout to invite two FSB officers to the same place, to express his disgust afer a court suddenly evicted the local Bakhchysaray Tatar council from its building.
“They don’t hide the fact they are pressing on us,” he said. “But if no-one resists Russian power the world will think that all Crimea supported this illegal annexation.”