The Kurultai: Between Communists and National Radicals

Late in the evening of November 11, the first session of the new, fourth, Kurultai of the Crimean Tatar people completed its work in Simferopol. Messages of welcome to those elected were sent by President Leonid Kuchma, US Ambassador Carlos Pascual, Chairman of the Crimean Council of Ministers Valery Horbatov, and many compatriots of Crimean Tatars living in Turkey, Romania, and other countries. The newly elected deputies formed a new Majlis again naming former Soviet dissident Mustafa Dzhemiliov to head it and passing a number of decisions, resolutions, and appeals. All the debates for the last three days focused on one central topic, the past and future of Crimean Tatars in Ukraine. As Mustafa Dzhemiliov told The Day’s correspondent, had during the past decade the Crimean Tatars been duly integrated in the life of Ukraine, there might have been no need for the Kurultai and Majlis. Unfortunately, the Tatars have to live under the status quo. What are the results of the decade that passed since the creation of the first Kurultai?

Ten years ago, the author of this article was sitting in the same chair in the Trade Union Palace of Culture in Simferopol, with over 100 journalists accredited to the first Kurultai (to be precise, it was the second Kurultai; the first took place in 1917). It was June 1991 and the Communist system was rapidly disintegrating, loosing its strength, image, and power. Unable to block the desire of the Crimean Tatars to return to their homeland, the system was still able to offer some feeble opposition, cowing peninsular residents with alleged gangsterish behavior of the Tatars, saying that the Tatars would burn down their homes and cut up their children. The Tatar answer was short: you deported us in one night and now want to take tens of years to move us back. We reject this. Caught by a spontaneous desire, the Tatars began to flock back to the Crimea in rapidly increasing numbers. Their return was followed by unauthorized land squatting, for, in the absence of ready housing, the moribund Soviet power refused to allocate land sites for Tatars to build their homes. In protest against the still existing Communist ways, the Tatars adopted their own Declaration of National Sovereignty of the Crimean Tatar People. When it was all over, Mustafa Dzhemiliov, already known from his role in the Crimean Tatar movement and watched by a hundred world press journalists, assembled a group of newly elected Majlis members around himself near the rostrum. As I was sitting nearby I was able to overhear how he said at the beginning, “Let’s try to figure out what we have done.”

It seemed at the time that the Kurultai of the Crimean Tatars was a democratic creation within a totalitarian state, the materialized will of a people who defeated the state’s opposition and its ideological system, a body to lead the fight to remove the dreadful consequences of one of Stalin regime’s worst crimes, the deportation of Crimean Tatars. Several months later the USSR collapsed, the Communist Party was banned, and, following the national referendum, Ukraine declared its independence. What was in store for the Kurultai? Many hoped that Crimean Tatars would sit in Verkhovna Rada and the government, with the Kurultai becoming an anachronism and disbanded or become an ethnic cultural organization. Such views were widespread, and both Mustafa Dzhemiliov and Vyacheslav Chornovil imagined the future of Crimean Tatars in independent Ukraine in much the same vein.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that there were two options for the Crimean Tatars, either to steadily enforce the implementation of the Declaration of National Sovereignty, something that might risk a military conflict, or gradually integrate into Ukrainian society. True to their refusal to use violent means to fight for their national liberation, the Tatars chose the latter option. However, it was a far from smooth road, for the Communists were in no hurry to treat them as equals.

Contrary to their expectations, the Crimean Tatars were caught in the crossfire from two opposition camps, first, from the Soviet Communist apparatchiks who wanted to reactivate Russian territorial autonomy for the peninsula, not one for the Crimean Tatars, and, second, from the Russian national radical organizations who combated with determination the creation of Crimean Tatar schools, participation of their representatives in government, and resuscitation by the Tatars of their culture and religion.

To date, thousands of the Crimean Tatars have returned to the peninsula, and over 300 villages built by the returnees are a reality, with the locals laughing off their past fears when they, believing the Communist propaganda, went stayed up nights to protect their children. True, much has been done for the repatriation program by allocating funds and creating a base of support. However, in his welcoming letter to the Kurultai, titled as an address to the Crimean Tatar people, Pres. Kuchma refrained from ever mentioning such words as the Kurultai and the Majlis.

On the one hand, brought up in the best traditions of Communist ideology and cowing peninsular residents with possible cessation of the Crimea to Turkey, the Crimean authorities’ greatest fear is that the elected bodies of the Crimean Tatars should be transformed into their nation-state system. On the other hand, due to their passive position on the integration of the Crimean Tatars, the authorities are themselves consistently changing the system of their civil organizations into what is becoming an increasingly more and more independent nation-state within Ukraine. At the present Kurultai, deputies proposed a provision whereby the people’s representative bodies (the Kurultai and numerous majlises) are to be funded not by charity, but by the people. This proposal, already a tacit reality, is nothing but an attempt to levy a tax to subsidize the representative bodies of the Crimean Tatars, an attribute of a full-fledged state. Taking into account that thousands of Crimean Tatars have received training in national (that is, state) government via the Kurultai and majlises and that, in its degree of organization, democracy, and efficiency, the Kurultai is head and shoulders above the Crimean parliament, one can only replace the word delegate with deputy and bring all the 246 democratically elected people’s representatives into the Crimean legislature session hall to see that they will do better than many current lawmakers.

In a word, the Kurultai in a free and non-totalitarian Ukraine, instead of completing its historical mission and becoming part of history, is engaged in forming, despite all the opposition from the authorities, nothing less than the system of a nation-state. The reason for this is that the hopes of the Crimean Tatars, as those by many Ukrainians, of a better life following the ten years of independence did not come true. As a result, Mustafa Dzhemiliov and other Crimean Tatar moderates have to balance between two camps. On the one hand, they are under fire from national radicals like Eldar Shabanov and Enver Kurtiyev who made a motion for the Kurultai to regard the Declaration of National Sovereignty as a major document for the Crimean Tatars and accusing the Majlis of collaboration with the unitary Ukrainian state. On the other hand, Mustafa Dzhemiliov and his group of Majlis moderates are taking a beating from a tiny pro-Communist group of the so-called aksakals who accuse them of extremism, calling them national radicals. In fact, this is the case when the truth lies somewhere in the middle. According to Mustafa Dzhemiliov, the support and understanding of their position from Ukrainian democrats and the state is of utmost importance for the Crimean Tatars now, especially on such issues as land, participation in elected offices, and the creation of a national territorial autonomy based not on scare tactics but quite ordinary principles: 1) equal status for the Crimean Tatar language with the state language on the peninsula, 2) state funding for nationally oriented education and culture, 3) adequate representation in the power structure, and 4) restoration of former geographical names on the peninsula “arbitrarily changed by the colonial Soviet regime.” Unlike the radicals who urged Kurultai deputies to step up the fight and join the staunch and ineffectual opposition to all things Ukrainian, the Majlis leaders engaged in a wide-ranging dialogue with the authorities, consistently pushing for the enactment of needed laws, and nurtured productive contacts with the president of Ukraine, other branches of power, and international organizations. “For the past two centuries since we lost our statehood, there has never been such a high degree of understanding between our people and the head of state,” Mustafa Dzhemiliov maintains.

What will the next ten years be like? The answer lies in the official sources.