Crimean Tatars and the Kremlin’s Oppression of Muslims

On October 24, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Hissein Brahim Taha, the secretary-general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Russia’s solidarity with Muslim nations:

Russia may well have some “reliable partners” in Islamic nations – like-minded autocracies in Syria and Iran come to mind – but the impression that the Kremlin gets along well with all Muslims is misleading at best.

Just ask , the Muslims who suffered persecution and exile under , and who are now the target of atrocities under Vladimir Putin’s illegal occupation.

Russia illegally annexed Ukraine in 2014, sending in troops with unmarked uniforms, staging a fake referendum and as extremists. The main reason for the persecution? 's annexation.

Russian authorities the representative body of the Crimean Tatars, called the Mejlis, and the Crimean Tatar TV channel . Within a year, the U.K.’s Amnesty International had human right abuses against Tatars and opposition figures.

In a March 2015 report, Amnesty cited seven reports of abduction, and another abductee found dead, apparently after being tortured. Amnesty documented the abduction of three Tatars and the head of the rights group Ukrainian House, Andriy Schekun, also tortured while being held.

That was just the start. The Russian occupiers went after leaders of the Mejlis, forcing some to leave and arresting others, Amnesty reported in December 2016. John Dalhuisen, then the group’s Europe and Central Asia director, :

Dozens of Crimean Tatars have been imprisoned after being of belonging to the Hizb ut-Tahrir Islamic group, banned in Russia and some other countries . Hizb ut-Tahir says it nonviolent efforts to bring Muslims together under a sole caliphate, but some members have been linked to attacks and plots in Russia, Europe and the Mideast.

In its 2016 report, Amnesty called the accusations of membership in Hizb ut-Tahir “highly questionable.” Meanwhile, “No progress has been made in the investigations into the spate of enforced disappearances that followed shortly after the peninsula’s annexation,” Amnesty said.

In a November 2017 report, Human Rights Watch echoed many of Amnesty’s findings and said persecution of Crimean Tatars by Russians had

Between 2014 and 2022, an estimated 10% of the Tatars left in Crimea fled to mainland Ukraine, while Russians poured into the peninsula, overhauling its ethnic makeup. By spring of 2018, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (a sister U.S. news agency to VOA and Polygraph.info) :

Fast forward to today, after the Kremlin’s all-out war on Ukraine, and Putin’s “partial mobilization” to round up troops to replace the thousands of Russian soldiers who’ve been killed trying to take over first the entire country and now, at least some eastern and southern provinces.

Occupying authorities in Crimea began to distribute draft papers, and . At least in the first days, they were mobilized to war .

One 27-year-old man from Simferopol fled on September 23 to avoid mobilization: “I didn’t serve in the army, but it was clear that Crimean Tatars were taken first of all, that raids had begun, to our places of compact residence," he told the Russian-language Belarusian opposition .

Refat Chubarov is leader of the Mejlis, now exiled in Kyiv. "About three thousand Crimean Tatars, avoiding mobilization, were forced to leave Crimea after September 23. But there are those who foresaw this and left earlier," .

According to an October 4 report by Politico, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the round-up “a deliberate attempt by Russia to destroy the Crimean Tatar people,” while Chubarov said the mobilization amounted to an international war crime. :

On November 1, the European Union (EU) the lopsided mobilization of Muslims on the peninsula. “Crimean Tatars are being deliberately and disproportionately targeted in the implementation of Russia’s order and reportedly forcibly involved in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, their traditional homeland,” said an EU statement.

The Ukrainian nongovernmental group said that of the Geneva Conventions says an occupier has to conscript people from occupied territories.

“According to preliminary estimates, about 90% of the [mobilization] subpoenas in Crimea were received by Crimean Tatars. At the same time, Crimean Tatars make up 13%–15% of the population of the peninsula. Such a scale of mobilization can lead to a covert genocide of the Crimean Tatar people,” Yevhen Yaroshenko, an analyst at CrimeaSOS.