The Leader of an Oppressed People
On November 13, Mustafa Dzhemilev, a well-known leader of the Crimean Tatar national movement and a human rights champion in the former USSR, turned sixty. Today, he is Verkhovna Rada deputy, chairman of the Council of Crimean People’s Representatives under the President of Ukraine, and chairman of the Crimean Tatars’ Majlis.
Mustafa Dzhemil-ogly was born in the Crimea in 1943. In May 1944 his family was deported to Uzbekistan. In 1961 Mr. Dzhemilev joined the underground organization Union of Crimean Tatar Youth. A third-year student at Tashkent Hydroelectric Institute, he was expelled and also deprived of his sideline job in 1962 for being a political activist and a security risk. At the same time, he wrote an essay on the history of Crimean Tatars, which was circulated clandestinely.
In 1966, Mr. Dzhemilev was arrested for draft dodging, tried and sentenced to one and a half years in prison. On being released, he went to Moscow as representative of his nation and established contacts with dissidents and human rights militants. In 1969 he was admitted to the Pressure Group for Human Rights Protection in the USSR. He was again arrested in 1970. Incarcerated, Mustafa wrote some notes, letters, articles on the history of his people, and protests against illegal reprisals against the Crimean Tatars, whom he managed to get smuggled out of prison. In 1974 Dzhemilev had his prison term extended by another year “for libeling the Soviet system” and went on a hunger strike in protest. The trial of Dzhemilev in Omsk was attended by Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner. Ukraine has published the book Mustafa Dzhemilev versus the Russian Federation containing a verbatim record of the Omsk trial. In 1979, a little more than a year after being released from prison, Mustafa Dzhemilev was again arrested on a trumped-up charge of “breaking administrative surveillance rules:” he was apprehended at an airport on the last day of his probation period. Dzhemilev was arrested for the sixth time in 1982 and sentenced to serve three years at a Magadan prison camp and four years in internal exile. Even behind bars, he actively corresponded and maintained links with Vyacheslav Chornovil.
Mustafa Dzhemilev was finally absolved of all charges as a political prisoner and released on Mikhail Gorbachev’s orders. He immediately resumed his sociopolitical activities. In 1987 he was elected to the Central Crimean Tatars Pressure Group. In 1991 and 1996 he was elected chairman of the Crimean Tatar People’s Majlis. Mustafa Dzhemilev’s activity brought him a lot of awards and honorary titles, including the annual Nansen Prize of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1998, which he donated for the settlement of Crimean Tatars at their historical homeland. The Day’s correspondent phoned Mr. Dzhemilev on the eve of his jubilee and asked him to answer a few questions.
“What do you think about the Tuzla problem? What should Ukraine do further on?”
“That was sort of a test whether Ukraine has sufficient political willpower to counter the attempted aggressive actions against its sovereignty. This country reacted deservedly but still not as adequately as the situation required. In any case, the neighbor was told in explicit terms not to do so. Yet, the danger has not vanished. Ukraine should not postpone or protract the solution of this problem. It is high time we turned to guarantor countries for preventive protection against the actual environmental damage and the likely violation of territorial integrity. We have always been saying what our neighbor really is, and now Russia has shown a scornful attitude to Ukraine.”
“How would you assess the current stage of the restoration of the rights and repatriation of the Crimean Tatar people?”
“In general, everything is being done to provide a decent living for the people in their homeland. We are grateful for this. Yet, very little has been done to restore the people’s political life. If the state continues to regard the Crimean Tatars as one of more than a hundred ethnic minorities, the problems will not be solved, of course. We differ from minorities in that we are not a diaspora but an integrated nation that has no other land than the Crimea. Our language is on the verge of extinction; in the years of Ukraine’s independence, we have managed, with great pains, to open only thirteen schools attended by less than 10% of our children. Both the Crimean Tatars and Ukraine as a whole are being Russified on an unprecedented scale. Our language is bound to go defunct, unless it really functions along with others. Our political problems can only be solved if a law is passed on the political rehabilitation of our people. The share of our people in the Crimea’s administrative bodies is several times lower than that in the population. Many of Ukraine’s current laws, ostensibly not discriminatory against the Crimean Tatars, still do not take into account the presence of the latter and the necessity of addressing their problems in Ukraine. Take, for example, the land laws. It was so often repeated that, for the sake of equitable distribution of land, a clause is required that the Crimean Tatars who have come back to their homeland should have the same right to acquire land as do the former collective farmers — is it not clear that when we were being deported, we were members of all the existing collective farms, but we could not possibly belong to any Ukrainian collective farms while we were in exile? Now we are in unequal conditions here in the Crimea, and nobody takes this into account. As a result, the Crimean Tatars have, on the average, three times less land than the local population.”
