Conflict between Crimean Tatars and “Cossacks” continues

Interethnic strife has erupted again in the Crimea. Agitation began in several places simultaneously. To thwart violent clashes between the Surozh (Sudak) Cossacks and the Crimean Tatars, the authorities had to introduce round-the-clock patrols by riot police in the village of Vesele near Sudak. A conflict arose in the village of Soniachna Dolyna between local residents and repatriates over a plot of land on Cape Meganom. The Crimean Tatars are staging more and more active protest actions — rallies, demands, unauthorized seizures of land — against the local authorities whom they think hamper the allotment of land to the repatriates. The impression is that these events were caused by the desire of both the Crimean Tatars and local authorities to show the National Security and Defense Council commission with Volodymyr Radchenko at its head, which is now looking, on the President’s instructions, into the Crimean land problem, that there is a deep contradiction in the region between the requirements of city dwellers and the performance of village, city, and district administrations. It is often the unwillingness or meffectiveness of the latter that provokes tension.

For example, there was a mass-scale fight on January 9 in Vesele between members of the local Cossack community and the Crimean Tatars. The Crimean media quote the Surozh Cossack Otaman Volodymyr Yevenko, recently elected to the city council, as saying that about fifty Sudak Cossacks arrived at Vesele because they were told that several Crimean Tatars had beaten up a villager in the local bar.

Mr. Yevenko says that, while approaching the village, the Cossacks ran into an ambush of approximately the same number of repatriates and this touched off a fight in which both sides used steel bars, pipes, and blackjacks. According to the Sudak otaman, as the fighting continued, about a hundred more Crimean Tatars came from nearby villages. The brawl stopped at night, when a riot police unit intervened and began to patrol the village. Mr. Yevenko claims one of the local residents received medium-degree injuries and was hospitalized and a dozen of Cossacks were badly bruised and had soft tissue lacerations. Sudak City Council Secretary Vasyl Tsaruk told journalists that policemen had seized many blackjacks, steel bars, and “other improvised weapons.” The police are now investigating who these belong to. Mr. Tsaruk says none of the fighters were hospitalized. The local resident, the attack on whom made the Cossacks come to the village, was taken to a hospital. Police are investigating what happened. “Although it is difficult now to find out who started the fight, law enforcement is looking into this,” Mr. Tsaruk noted. “The place was visited by high Security Service and Ministry of Internal Affairs officers.”

On the other hand, the Crimean police PR department denies that any large-scale clashes, ambushes, or fights ever took place. It claims that an unidentified person informed the Sudak city police department at 9 p.m. January 9, that a fight was imminent in the center of the village of Vesele. To check the information, a mobile squad was sent to Vesele. “It was learned on the spot that some unknown hooligans had beaten up a forty-year-old local resident at about 9 p.m. near a central cafe.” The victim was rushed to a Sudak hospital, where he was tentatively diagnosed as having an “open cranio-cerebral injury and brain concussion.” Vesele was visited by top Sudak city policemen, the city prosecutor, and a group of Crimean General Police Directorate executives led by deputy department chiefs Mykola Pykhtin and Viktor Seredenko. In addition, a riot police unit, several traffic police cars and mobile squads were deployed in Vesele. The PR department’s version says this was done because “two — Crimean Tatar and Slavic — conflicting groups of local residents with fifty men on each side gathered near Vesele’s village community center... The police managed to explain to the people that confrontation was undesirable, and conflict was averted. The people went home at about one a.m.,” the PR department says. The situation in Sudak and the neighboring districts is now calm. In Vesele and Morske, law and order is being maintained by small police units. Vesele’s central street is being constantly patrolled by eight policemen...

Meanwhile, Context-Media quotes Mehmet Usmanov, head of the Sudak regional majlis, as saying that, in his opinion, the Vesele incident, including a large-scale fight between the Crimean Tatars and Cossacks, was deliberately timed to coincide with the visit of the commission to inspect land protection and management in the Crimea, led by National Security and Defense Council Secretary Volodymyr Radchenko. “The so-called Cossacks aimed to distract the commission’s attention from the true situation in the land sphere. They want to establish a Cossack community in Vesele. But there have never been Cossacks in the Crimea, and we have already decided not to recognize Cossacks on the territory of Sudak district and the whole Crimea,” Mr. Usmanov said. The regional majlis head also denied reports that the incident was provoked by the beating-up of a Vesele villager by local Crimean Tatars: “Nothing of the sort! Small-time fights occur everywhere, but there were no conflicts precisely on that day before the so- called Cossacks came to the village.” According to Mr. Usmanov, about fifty Sudak Cossacks arrived at Vesele at about 8 p.m. on January 9 in two minibuses and five cars. “The half-drunken crowd of so-called Cossacks held clubs in their hands, and they came to settle scores with the Crimean Tatars who live in the village,” the regional majlis leader said. “Here they ran into a group of 25 Crimean Tatars.” As far as Mr. Usmanov knows, this resulted in a fight that left five Tatars and about twenty Cossacks injured to various degrees. He also said the situation in Vesele is today under control of the law enforcement with whom the regional majlis maintains close contact. “The situation is stable now, but these so-called Cossacks really are unpredictable,” the Sudak regional majlis head states.

Yet, the Surozh (Sudak) Cossack community plans to hold a large protest rally in Sudak district in the immediate future, said Otaman Vasyl Yevenko. The otaman noted the rally would be organized in protest against the continued unsanctioned seizures of land by the Crimean Tatars in Sudak district. As Mr. Yevenko pointed out, the Slavic population is increasingly incensed over the existing interethnic and land-ownership situation in Sudak district. “I see more and more Slavic guys signing up for the Cossacks: they can’t take any more of this.”

Meanwhile, residents of the village of Soniacha Dolyna, situated on the opposite side of Sudak, demanded several days ago in a letter to the president, prime minister, Verkhovna Rada speaker, prosecutor general of Ukraine, as well as the Crimean and Sudak leaders, that they take measures to stop unauthorized land seizures on Cape Meganom, Sudak City Council Secretary Vasyl Tsaruk told journalists. The authors of the letter say they reserve the right to organize “popular resistance” if the unsanctioned seizures are not ended. They did not explain how people might interpret the term “popular resistance,” but more than 300 Soniachna Dolyna residents have signed the text. According to the Sudak official, unsanctioned seizures in Meganom took place later last year. “A pressure group parked two vans and organized a round-the-clock sentry duty on the territory about fifty meters away from Sudak district’s best beaches,” Mr. Tsaruk said. In his words, the squatters — Crimean Tatars, most of whom live in the Crimean steppe — demand that the seized territory be allotted to them for the construction of individual houses. “They are drawing up the lists of those who claim these lands,” Mr. Tsaruk said. “Local majlis leaders say there are 200 to 300 people on the lists, but our information is there are about 360, and an additional list is being made, which includes another fifty men as of last Friday night. Quite often, whole families sign up: so many adults in the family, so many applications for land ownership...” The Soniachna Dolyna and Sudak administrators add that the situation is further aggravated by the fact that the territory being claimed is out of the village council’s jurisdiction. “Cape Meganom is a state-run nature preserve, so the problem of its privatization should be referred to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine,” Mr. Tsaruk explained to journalists.

About 100 Crimean Tatars held a rally in front of the Crimean Council of Ministers building in Simferopol recently. The speakers demanded that land plots on the Crimea’s southern coast be made available to those whose ancestors were deported from precisely these places. They passed a resolution that demands the dismissal of Crimean Vice Premier Anatoly Korneichuk and states that allotting land to former deportees “will not only make it possible to realize the Crimean Tatars’ dream of returning to their native places, reviving viniculture and fruit farming, but will also give an impetus to the further development of ethnotourism.” The Crimean Tatars’ pressure group insists that the resolution be referred to NSDC Secretary Volodymyr Radchenko, head of the mentioned commission. Moreover, in response to the restoration in Simferopol of the Aleksander Nevsky Cathedral ruined by the Communists in the 1930s, the Crimean Tatars demand that the Simferopol authorities allot land to build a grand mosque comparable to the Orthodox structure. The majlis and the city council have been bickering for several months, as the latter refuses to allot land for the mosque on the grounds that there is allegedly no suitable place. The Bakhchisarai majlis has also increased its demands: it wants the city council to remove the market from the territory of Azizler, the ancient Muslim cemetery.

Here too the problem is still to be solved. This only plays in the hands of the extremists on both sides, who derive pleasure from every, even minor, conflict and try to use it to serve their own aims. The question remains open in both Bakhchisarai and Sudak: will speculation or the people’s wisdom prevail? The more so that in the coming May the public will observe the sixtieth anniversary of the deportation of Crimean peoples, and the peninsula’s population needs harmony, not conflict, on these mournful days.