International | The Crimean Tatars

Back into exile

The life of Mustafa Dzhemilev is a parable of the Crimean Tatars’ struggles

|KIEV

CRIMEA had not yet been seized by Russia when Mustafa Dzhemilev, leader of the Crimean Tatars, smelled a rat. On February 13th 2014 a Russian representative passed on a message: Vladimir Putin would like to talk to the 70-year-old former Soviet dissident. “What about?” he asked. “The future of Crimea,” said the emissary.

Mr Dzhemilev tensed. Why might Mr Putin want to discuss this part of Ukraine with him? It was a bad omen for his people, a Turkic group that moved to Crimea in the 13th century and see it as their native land.

From the mid-15th century the Crimean Tatars had their own state, a khanate, patronised by the Ottoman empire. Despite Mr Putin’s rhetoric, the peninsula became part of the Russian empire only in the late 18th century under Catherine the Great. Many Crimean Tatars moved to modern-day Turkey, but those who stayed were a welcome ornament of her realm.

The Soviet empire under Stalin was less accommodating. In 1944 the entire Crimean Tatar population was accused of collaborating with Hitler and deported to Central Asia. Most were women, children or elderly. The young men, including Mr Dzhemilev’s father, were at the front, unaware that their relatives had been expelled, herded in cattle carriages and moved to Uzbekistan where nearly half perished. He and his family lived in a village, banned from venturing farther than 4km. When Stalin died, they rejoiced. But even as other deported communities, including Chechens, returned, they were not allowed to. Crimea and the Black Sea coast were a zone of state dachas and sanatoria where the Communist nomenclature holidayed. They did not wish to be disturbed by the Crimean Tatars’ territorial claims.

Mr Dzhemilev joined a movement of Crimean Tatars, was kicked out of university, and, in 1966, arrested for refusing to serve in the army. “They deprived me of my home but wanted me to fight for them,” he says. “I told them that I did not have enemies outside the Soviet Union.” Freed a year and a half later, he became part of a broader dissident movement that gave his people fresh prominence.

Dzhemilev shut out

He protested against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and signed letters in defence of prisoners of conscience. In total, he spent 15 years behind bars. He gained the support of people such as Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet physicist and dissident who in 1976 tried to attend his trial for anti-Soviet activity in Omsk, Siberia.

He went on a hunger strike for 303 days (he was force-fed). Rumours of his death sparked protests among Crimean Tatars in Turkey and an outcry around the world. Then a note from Sakharov was shown to Mr Dzhemilev by his brother through a visiting-room screen: “Your death will only benefit our enemies. I ask you to stop.” Nearly 40 years later Mr Dzhemilev repeated those words to Nadezhda Savchenko, a Ukrainian pilot captured last year by Russia, who also went on hunger strike.

The last time he was sent to jail was in 1983 for trying to execute the will of his father and bury his body in Crimea. He was finally released at Sakharov’s demand in 1986. A year later some thousand Crimean Tatars demonstrated on Red Square, demanding to return home. Permission came a few years later in the form of the Soviet Union’s collapse; they began to move back, mostly unaided by the government of newly independent Ukraine. All the same, they were the loudest opponents of last year’s sly Russian invasion.

Four days before the bogus referendum on Crimea’s future, and wishing to avoid bloodshed, Mr Putin enticed Mr Dzhemilev to Moscow; he was put up in the Stalin-era Hotel Ukraine. They did not meet in person but, on the phone, Mr Putin promised to grant Mr Dzhemilev’s wishes if his people backed the Kremlin. This exchange between a former KGB officer and a former dissident did not get very far. Mr Dzhemilev wished only for Russian troops to leave Crimea. Mr Putin could just have read his closing statement at his trial in 1983: “Fourteen years ago I vowed that nobody ever under any circumstances would make me renounce my duty…Today I can repeat these vows and hope that I would have enough spiritual strength not to change this principle to the end of my days.”

As Russia formally annexed Crimea, Mr Dzhemilev, with other leaders of the Crimean mejlis, or ruling council, was barred from entering the peninsula. Since then Crimean Tatar activists have been hounded; the community’s only television channel has been closed. And, 70 years after the deportation, Mr Dzhemilev has again been deprived of his homeland.

This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "Back into exile"

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