Mumine Saliyeva cannot forget how masked, gun-toting pro-Russian security officers pounded on her door last October. They arrived to search her apartment and arrest her husband, Seiran Saliyev.
“Every day, I check a hundred times whether the door is locked, I get up at night to check, check again before my morning prayer,” the fine-featured 32-year-old woman in a white headscarf told Al Jazeera.
“The echo of that knock is still in my ears; I can’t do anything about it.”
This was not Saliyev’s first search and arrest.
In January 2017, the tour guide and amateur wrestler was sentenced to 12 days of detention for “dissemination of extremist materials” – for posting songs of a Chechen folk singer and former separatist fighter that are banned in Russia.
In May 2016, Saliyev used a mosque sound system to announce searches in the apartments of Tatar activists.
Dozens gathered to witness the searches, and a court later fined Saliyev 20,000 rubles ($350) for “organising an illegal rally.”
Now he faces up to 20 years in jail for “membership in a terrorist organisation”.
Pro-Russian police allege he is an activist of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation that strives to peacefully restore a Muslim caliphate and operates freely in Ukraine and many Western nations. But Russia outlawed it as “extremist.”
In late January, pro-Russian authorities forcibly placed Saliyev in a psychiatric institution in a move that echoes totalitarian Soviet practices of “punitive psychiatry.”
A slow genocide?
The Turkic-speaking, Muslim ethnic group of 250,000, or about 12 percent of Crimea’s population, largely resisted the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
They held protests, blocked highways and prevented Russian troops, armoured personnel carriers and tanks from entering their villages.
While Crimea’s ethnic Russian majority mostly welcomed the annexation, the response of Tatars was based on bitter memories drummed into their collective psyche.
Imperial Russia conquered their state, the Khanate of Crimea, in 1783, and over the next century, tens of thousands of Tatars fled to Ottoman Turkey.
In 1944, their entire community was deported, mostly to Central Asia, for alleged “collaboration” with German Nazis. Almost half of them died of diseases and starvation.
“During stops, soldiers yelled, ‘Got any dead? Bring them out!'” Nuri Emirvaliyev, a frail, 83-year-old historian who was 10 during the deportation, told Al Jazeera while recalling his family’s two-month-long journey in cattle cars to Soviet Uzbekistan.
After decades of protests, arrests and activists that united the community, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, allowed Tatars to return to Crimea. They never got their property back, and in post-Soviet Ukraine, they faced discrimination and were virtually barred from government and police jobs.
And then, the annexation came.
“In 1944, we were a nation of ‘traitors,’ now we are a nation of ‘terrorists’,” Server Mustafayev, an activist of Crimean Solidarity, a group that helps political prisoners and their families, told Al Jazeera.
‘They groped our women’
Tatars are not the only group targeted for their anti-Kremlin stance.
Pro-Ukrainian, anti-corruption activists and Jehovah’s Witnesses have been detained, deported, tortured, sentenced to fines and up to 20 years in jail, rights groups say.
But Tatars are by far the largest stratum of Crimea’s population to face persecution, and their peaceful resistance is seen almost daily. Dozens flock to each search, arrest or court session. They post videos and comments online, triggering squalls of reposts and media reports.
Mere witnessing proves harder than it seems.
“They provoked us, groped our women, shot in the air,” a white-bearded Hizb ut-Tahrir activist in an auburn astrakhan hat told Al Jazeera, describing recent searches and arrests.
Hundreds held single-person pickets throughout Crimea holding banners that read “Tatars are not terrorists” and “Return fathers to their children.” At least 72 were arrested and fined, although Russian law does not prohibit such pickets.
They collect money to pay the fines – and mockingly hand over buckets and plastic containers full of coins. They hire lawyers, send food parcels and postcards to jailed activists and pitch in to help their families and children.
Once a month, they bring the children together for drawing and horse-riding lessons, visits to historic sites – and a chance to share their pain.
The children “make drawings of their fathers in handcuffs, tell each other, ‘Don’t worry, your dad is coming back soon,'” Dilyara Ibragimova, a 30-year-old mother of four, told Al Jazeera. Her husband Timur Ibragimov was arrested together with Saliyev and also faces up to 20 years in jail.
David vs Goliath
The Kremlin praises Crimea’s “comeback to Russia” as bloodless and voluntary.
But a day before the March 18, 2014 “referendum”, Tatar activist Reshat Ametov was found dead – covered in cuts and bruises, with eyes poked out, next to a pair of handcuffs.
Three days earlier, the 39-year-old father of three was forced into a car by three camouflage-wearing pro-Russian “self-defence fighters” during his one-man protest.
Since then, more than a dozen Tatars have disappeared without a trace; some were seen kidnapped by burly men, US-based Human Rights Watch said in November.
Two were found dead.
Hundreds of Tatars, most of them observant Muslims, have been arrested and interrogated, had their houses searched and religious books confiscated.
At least 26 were sentenced to up to 15 years in jail on charges ranging from “separatism” to “terrorism” to “organisation of mass riots.”
Moscow banned annual marches to mark the 1944 deportation, outlawed the Mejlis, their informal parliament, and forced community leaders out. Pro-Russian authorities appoint loyal imams to Crimea’s mosques – forcing them to compile lists of possible “extremists” and deliver pro-Moscow sermons.
But Crimea’s pro-Moscow leader denies any pressure on Tatars. Sergey Aksyonov said in televised remarks last June that “Crimean Tatars are not persecuted.”
His press service declined to comment for this story.
Backed by Turkey
Secular and apolitical Tatars also face a crackdown.
Security services conduct “anti-terrorism” drills next to Tatar villages, frightening residents with gunfire and explosions. A Tatar boy had his fingers blown off by an explosive planted during one such drill; his relative told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.
Corrupt officials use violence and pressure to expropriate Tatar businesses and assets. Dozens have been fired from state-run clinics and schools because of their ethnicity, and many refuse to work for pro-Russian authorities.
Thousands fled for Ukraine and Turkey. Ankara is the most vocal backer of their cause – it finances Tatar groups, lambasts rights abuses and helps release jailed activists, says Timur Akhmetov, an Ankara-based expert on Russia-Turkey ties.
“On the other hand, [Turkey’s] backing does not harm its ties with Russia in general, and should not create problems for Turkish investments, in Crimea in particular,” Akhmetov told Al Jazeera.
Community leaders are also worried that pressure and biased coverage in Kremlin-controlled media herald new, bigger purges.
“Something similar was happening in Chechnya before the start of the second Chechen campaign, when media actively created an image of a ‘terrorist people’,” Zair Smedlyaev, a Mejlis leader, told Al Jazeera.
“It is very likely that tomorrow, Crimean Tatars will be declared the most terrible criminals, and this will be a pretext for a new genocide.”
Source: Al Jazeera
Chants blared through speakers as a crane lifted a massive Greek flag above Syntagma Square, where Greeks converged from across the country to rally against negotiations over a name dispute between Athens and Skopje.
Hundreds of buses transported demonstrators from across the country for the “Macedonia is Greek” demonstration. Tens of thousands assembled in the city centre, with organisers claiming more than one million people would take to the streets.
“Hands off Macedonia,” they chanted.
“Macedonia belongs to Greece,” others yelled.
The demonstration comes two weeks after an estimated 300,000 people gathered in the northern coastal city of Thessaloniki to voice their opposition to the negotiations.
White-and-blue flags fluttered above, and throngs of demonstrators wearing traditional Macedonian garb marched in anger.
As that rally came to a close, anarchist counter-demonstrators clashed with police, and far-right protesters lit an anarchist squat on fire.
Assailants later vandalised a Holocaust monument.
Before Sunday’s rally in Athens, activists carried out security patrols to protect dozens of squats in the city centre from potential attacks.
Nasim Lomani, an activist at the City Plaza squat, which provides residence to upwards of 350 refugees and migrants, said extra security precautions were taken.
“All the squats are ready to protect themselves in case of any fascist attack,” he told Al Jazeera. “There are fascists coming from all over Greece so we have to be careful.”
Decades-old dispute
The demonstrations in Athens and Thessaloniki have drawn the participation of members of the Golden Dawn, the neo-fascist party that holds 16 seats in the Hellenic Parliament.
Last month, negotiations over the decades-old name dispute between Greece, which has a northern region called Macedonia, and the Republic of Macedonia, were relaunched.
In 1991, when Greece’s northern neighbour declared independence after breaking away from the war-gripped remains of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Athens and Skopje were at odds over the name.
Greece accuses Skopje of territorial designs and falsifying its historical heritage by co-opting figures such as Alexander the Great, who ruled over the ancient kingdom of Macedon.
Meanwhile, the Republic of Macedonia, which was admitted into the United Nations in 1993 as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), rejects its neighbours’ claim to hold an exclusive right to the name.
The dispute has prevented Skopje from completing its accession into the European Unionand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) since the 1990s.
In Skopje, former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski oversaw a programme to erect statues of Alexander the Great, and to name highways, buildings, sports venues and the country’s international airport after Greece’s historical heroes.
Current Prime Minister Zoran Zaev has expressed his willingness to rename the sites and bring down the monuments that have sparked outrage in Greece.
‘Undeniably far right’
At a press conference on Thursday, the rally’s organisers alleged a conspiracy against Greece’s claim to the name “Macedonia”, blaming Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist George Soros for spreading “propaganda”.
Nina Gatzoulis, one of the organisers and coordinator of the World Committee of Pan-Macedonian Associations, insisted the rally was “above political parties” and not affiliated with any factions.
Gatzoulis accused UN negotiator Matthew Nimetz of harbouring anti-Greek biases, alleging a spurious history of employment at NGOs funded by Soros.
“We should love our fatherland and do everything to get it,” she proclaimed. “Let us be all as one and fight bravely.”
Seraphim Seferiades, a politics professor at the Athens-based Panteion University, dismissed the organisers’ claims to be apolitical.
“It’s undeniable that this is the far right – no matter how much they are trying to conceal it,” he told Al Jazeera, alluding to the organisers’ long history of far-right political activity.
Seferiades argued that the size of the Thessaloniki rally indicates a “real advent of nationalism, this is the first stage of a real Golden Dawn-like resurgence”.
For its part, Golden Dawn leaders have accused the Syriza-led government of national betrayal. On Saturday night, party leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos urged a crowd of 600 supporters to topple “the anti-Greek government”.
“Blood, honour, Golden Dawn”, the far-right demonstrators chanted, waving burning torches in the air and burning Macedonian flags.
‘The real enemy is in the banks and ministries’
While Greece’s far right sees an opportunity in the heightened tensions, other parties, such as the right-wing New Democracy party, have adopted an unclear stance on the demonstrations.
New Democracy leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis urged followers to steer clear of last month’s Thessaloniki rally, but other party officials have expressed public support for the protests.
In the lead-up to Sunday, Mitsotakis said he respects everyone’s personal decision to attend the rally, and many New Democracy officials were expected to be present.
Elsewhere on Sunday, hundreds of anti-fascists – among them anarchists, socialists and others – held a counter-demonstration in the city centre.
Thousands of police officers were deployed throughout the city, and blocked streets leading to the Syntagma Square protest in order to prevent clashes between the two sides.
“In Greece, Turkey and Macedonia, the real enemy is in the banks and the ministries,” the anti-fascists chanted in unison.
Others burned the Golden Dawn flag, taunting nationalist demonstrators who were cordoned off by heavily-armed riot police.
Skirmishes between anti-fascists and police broke out on Sunday.
Over the weekend, flyers were posted on the doors of homes on several streets in Exarchia, a neighbourhood that serves as a stronghold for anarchists and leftists, warning of potential far-right attacks.
Petros Constantinou, national director of the anti-fascist group Keerfa, said the Greek far right has failed so far, in an apparent effort to use anger over name negotiations, to rebuild its support base.
“Politically, what the right wing is trying to do in its relation to the far right is to stop the ongoing shift of the population to the left,” he told Al Jazeera.
“When we say this demonstration is a greenhouse for neo-Nazis, it’s because of nationalism and the attempt to deny the right of the people to exist [in Macedonia] and enjoy self-determination,” Constantinou added.
“I don’t believe we are in the position to see people go back to the right wing. They still believe in their struggles, their strikes and resistance.”
Source: Al Jazeera
