Over 300 Crimean Tatars held a public rally in Simferopol on Human Rights Day the Sunday before last. The demonstrators wielded slogans: “There will be no stability in the Crimea unless the Crimean Tatar problem is solved,” “Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, pass a law on the status of the Crimean Tatar people,” “We demand equal rights in employment, privatization, and land allotment,” etc.
The rally coincided with the end of a Dzhankoi trial of a case about a group of the Crimean Tatars who resorted to blocking a railroad track, which disrupted the schedule of a number of trains. The court found guilty four Crimean Tatars, including local Mejlis leader Ruslan Kurseitov, and gave them two year suspended sentences and a UAH-2000 fine as compensation for the losses incurred by the railroad. A Crimean Tatar leader and Mejlis member, Nadir Bekyrov, who took part in the trial as the defendants’ lay advocate, thinks that the defendants were innocent because they had to resort to such a protest action to call attention to their problems, including lawbreaking and unjust land allotment. To draw the attention of the authorities to this trial, a group of Crimean Tatars picketed a few days ago in front of the Dzhankoi city administration, demanding that the district administration chief be dismissed. This did not, however, influence the court ruling.
The group of Crimean Tatar defendants has become the first non-governmental organization prosecuted for protest actions and blocking transport in the Crimea. However, as the Crimean head of government Serhiy Kunitsyn said earlier, leaders of the Union of Soviet Officers of the Crimea and of the youth organizations, whose pickets also disrupted traffic in Simferopol, were not taken to court. The rally orators called this trial “a symptom of the Ukrainian leadership’s departure from the policy of creeping assimilation and tacit ethnocide to overt reprisals in the spirit of Stalinist-Breznevite oprichniki (special cavalry used by Ivan the Terrible to terrorize his opponents — Ed.).”
This trial also became the main theme of the rally on Human Rights Day. The trial was denounced as political, and the resolution adopted says among other things, “The Ukrainian state, which proclaimed human rights as its top priority in the 1996 Constitution, in fact continues the practice of suppression, repression, and forced assimilation of the Crimea’s indigenous peoples begun by the imperial governments of Tsarist and Soviet Russia.”
The demonstrators pointed to instances where historical cemeteries and mosques have been ruined, and the indigenous peoples denied their cultural and historic treasures such as the Crimean Tatar Bakhchisarai Palace and the Karaite Kenasa in Simferopol and Juft Kale. Moreover, these facts “are followed by a new wave of the expropriation of land property.”
According to Nadir Bekyrov, the Dzhankoi court ignored the defense evidence as well as direct mandates of the Constitution of Ukraine. He thinks this shows that “the Crimean Tatars are not protected by the Constitution of Ukraine” and “what they face is inquisition, not justice.”
The human rights demonstrators added, “The international community should not close its eyes to this... If the President of Ukraine still entertains any feeling of responsibility and is aware of the inevitable consequences of what is happening, he must intervene and use his power to cut short the unconstitutional activities of provocateurs who hold high governmental posts, wear military uniforms and judicial robes, and are by concerted effort pushing Ukraine back to the Middle Ages.”
