Crimea: Dark Week Consequences

Several weeks ago, people living on Schmidt St. in Simferopol watched a scene reminiscent of a rally. Eyewitness accounts point to a group of teenagers aged 15-16, most wearing biker-like decorated dark uniform clothes and shades, marching down the street with the Majlis office, shouting threats against Crimean Tatars. On the bridge spanning the Salhyr River, the agitated youths spotted several teenagers, among them 14-year-old Zayir Zidliaev and Serhiy Kuzmychiov. Zayir and his friends were approaching the Salhyr and the skinheads gave chase. Serhiy recalls, “We split and ran. I headed for the maternity hospital. We heard them yell after us, “Hold it!” Zayir says he was chased by a dozen of them. He raced down the steps to the river. “They chased me and shouted, ‘Drop him in the river!’ They caught me and threw me in the Salhyr, then they clubbed me, hitting me on the head... They marched away, shouting ‘You filthy bastards! May you rot in hell!’” Salhyr is a river racing from the Crimean Mountains. When the snow stars melting it becomes quite deep and is very cold. The boy was caught in the current. He swallowed quite some water and started to yell for help. He was saved by passersby, a middle-aged man and a girl. But for them, he would have drowned...

Another incident took place a week ago. At about six p.m., Diliaver Maksudov and his girlfriend (a Russian, incidentally) were taking a stroll on Pushkin Street, Simferopol’s Broadway, when a large group of Slavic youth approached. Eyewitnesses said later that practically all were skinheads. Some say they attacked Diliaver right away, others insist that they first asked him if he was a Crimean Tatar. When he said he was, they pounced on him. Emergency hospital physicians later testified that the young man had received a nonpenetrating knife wound in the small of his back.

The bad news quickly reached Dilyaver’s numerous relatives. They visited him at the hospital and heard his story. After that a large group of Crimean Tatars marched to the Cotton Club Bar on Pushkin Street, the local punk hangout. One of the Crimean Tatars recognized one of Diliaver’s attackers. A big brawl followed, with most visitors in the far dimly lit corner suffering blows and stabs. Oleksandr Dombrovsky, head of public relations, Chief Interior Directorate of the Crimea, told journalists that there were nine victims, six hospitalized with knife wounds and internal injuries, including two in a bad condition, one with a penetrating wound in the vicinity of the lungs, and the other with both lungs punctured. These two and Diliaver sustained surgeries that same night; all three were stable, but the victims with punctured lungs were in a bad condition.

The Kyiv District Court of Simferopol warranted the arrest of Kurtseit Adbullayev on charges of organizing physical assaults against journalists in Simeyiz and the Cotton Club brawl. Public attention is focused on three victims sustaining especially grave wounds at the bar, especially Pavlo Perederiy with a grave cardiac wound. Doctors say they are worried. His fellow students and Cotton Club patrons set up a concerned citizens’ group preparing mass actions of protest. The Crimean Tatar Majlis issued a statement expressing “sincere sympathy with all the victims” and stressing that such “incidents ... should serve as a lesson to all the Crimean politicians and society...” The document strongly demands that the authorities establish the identities of “the true organizers” and the “actual objectives” of “this new attempt to destabilize the sociopolitical situation on the peninsula by antagonizing people on ethnic grounds...” There is an intensive search for skinheads and Crimean Tatar antisocial elements. The Crimean Parliament is to hold this month’s second emergency session to discuss the situation. At the same time, last week saw an unprecedented outburst of anti-Tatar sentiments. The Crimean community has actually been thrown back to the turn of the 1990s when the ethnic Tatars had just begun returning and intolerance was high, owing to Communist propaganda portraying Crimean Tatars as Nazi collaborators.

The Majlis itself has suffered a split and the fact has been reported by news agencies. The long absence and nonparticipation in the current affairs of the most experienced national leaders Mustafa Dzhemiliov and Refat Chubarov have allowed radical forces take a stronger hold in the Crimean Tatar Parliament and at local majlis.

These politicians promptly urge people to launch mass actions and are unable to assess the consequences. Mustafa Dzhemiliov said that from now on popular actions would be organized only as decided by the Majlis, with all deputies in attendance. This, however, cannot conceal the fact that the Crimean Tatar ethnic movement is experiencing a cadre and organizational crisis. At present, the methods it used against the Soviet system have exhausted themselves, while new methods often prove unadjusted and even unformulated.

Another obvious fact is that practically all political forces are trying to use the sad Crimean events for their own ends. Pro-Russian forces have declared that they will organize rallies in response. The Crimean newspapers and television make no secret of whose side they are on; local journalists appear to have never heard about notions such as unbiased and tolerant information. The Communist Party headquarters announced their secret scenarios in conjunction with the Crimean situation. Its press service first issued a statement signed by Leonid Hrach, proposing the president suspend the Crimean constitution and enforce presidential rule on the peninsula; several hours later, a revised version of the statement appeared, with the this clause deleted.

All this prompts local observers to suggest the existence of a third force, something that seems on everybody’s tongue. Serhiy Kunitsyn spoke on local television, saying the events were “carefully planned and organized “ by forces being “outside the Crimea and Ukraine.” Secretaries of primary United Social Democratic primary party organizations held a conference last Saturday and passed a declaration reading that there is a connection between what happened in the Crimea and in Kosovo, that there is evidence of a “single guiding hand.”

A number of analysts agree that the current situation in the Crimea is objectively something that could not have been avoided, caused by the logic of the whole process of repatriating the deportees. Without doubt, this ethnic confrontation is rooted in, and is a time bomb planted by, the Stalin regime on May 18, 1944. Another reason, however, is the nature of repatriation since the early 1990s; the chaotic, unorganized arrival of Tatars in their historic homeland, with Crimean authorities refusing to allocate plots and Tatars seizing them to build homes (and being subsequently allowed to stay there by those same authorities). That period formed the kind of relationship between authorities and repatriates, such that the latter would demand things and the former would go through the motions of refusing, then recognize their demands as legitimate, after the fact. Fuel is added to the fire by the discriminatory approach of the authorities and law enforcement agencies, as in cases of appropriation of parcels of land. It is an established fact that less than one-fifth of such captures has been perpetrated by Crimean Tatars, yet no one officially mentions this and the militia publicly combat only repatriates. An important role has also been played by the community being psychologically unprepared to accept a great many people with a different way of life. Could all these problems not have been timely decided without planting time bombs under the Crimea’s future?