Milliy Firqa: Russia must destroy Crimean Tatar Mejlis or face national disaster

The Milliy Firqa. , long opposed to the mainstream Crimean Tatars led by





Paul Goble



Staunton, September 6 Moscow has no choice but to disband the Crimean Tatar
Mejlis lest its existence become a model for the formation of similar organizations by other
non-Russian minorities in the Russian Federation, a development that would put a
delayed action mine under the continued existence of that country, according to a Milliy
Firqa spokesman.



The Russian occupation authorities have been tightening the noose around the
Mejlis since the Anschluss, banning Mustafa Dzhemilev Refat Chubarov from returning to
their homeland, threatening its members and most recently increasing the punishments on
any who meet with Dzhemilev or Chubarov.



Most analysts and commentators have suggested that Moscow has been
proceeding in this direction because the Mejlis remains committed to Crimea being part of
Ukraine and thus calls attention to people on the peninsula and around the world to the
illegitimate nature of Russias occupation.



But in an article yesterday, Rinat Shaymardanov, a spokesman for the Milliy Firqa
Party which is cooperating with the Russian occupation authorities, suggests that the real
reason Moscow may be moving against the Mejlis has little to do with Crimea itself and far
more with what could happen in Russia itself
(islamio.ru/news/policy/mina_zamedlennogo_deystviya/).

For 23 years, Shamardanov says, the Mejlis of Dzhemilev and Chubarov has
existed as an inalienable part of the Crimean-Ukrainian nomenklatura; and because the
status of its leaders, it has served as untouchable as a key link of Crimean and
international corrupt schemas.

Since Crimea has been reunited with Russia, he continues, the Mejlis has done
everything it can to sabotage Moscows policies there, opposing the reunification
referendum, refusing to accept Russian passports, and speaking out against all the policy
initiatives of Simferopol and Moscow.

But despite that, at present, some are lobbying Russian officials in both Simferopol
and Moscow to allow the Mejlis to continue to exist out of concerns that unless that
happens, the Crimean Tatars will revolt or otherwise cause trouble, the Milliy Firqa
spokesman says. Any move in that direction would be a terrible mistake both in Crimea
and for Russia as a whole.

In Crimea, he argues, the Mejlis is not the representative organ of a people as its
supporters claim but an artificial pseudo-state formation created by Ukraine for the harsh
administration of a people by a stratum of a national elite bought off with the final goal of
that peoples assimilation and inclusion into a single Ukrainian nation.

Therefore, there is no reason to restore it or to fear that in the absence of its
restoration the Crimean Tatars will revolt. Many of them, the Filli Firka spokesman says,
support what Vladimir Putin and Simferopol are trying to do. They deserve support, not
traitors to the Russian cause like Dzhemilev and Chubarov.

But there is a more compelling reason, he suggests, not to reanimate and
legitimize the Mejlis in any form the impact that would have as a delayed action mine
under the fundamental principles of the state organization of the Russian Federation.

Russia is a multi-national country, with some 200 peoples who are now
developing within the framework of existing Russian laws and who are represented in the
organs of power through the political and government institutions of that country. None
of them has a status like the one the Mejlis claims representative of a people rather
than a territory.

If the Russian authorities legitimated the Mejlis, does anyone think that other
peoples of Russia would not want to have their own analogous representative organ? And
can one imagine the impact of the existence of a multitude of such institutions on the
Russian Federation?

By creating two hierarchies of recognized structures, territorial and ethnic, on one
and the same territory, the authorities would be creating the most terrible danger for
Russia, putting under its territorial integrity a bomb of extraordinary destructive force
capable in the shortest time to split up the Federation into petty national pieces.

Do they understand this threat in the federal center? Shaymardanov asks. Do
they recognize what a gigantic Trojan horse the backers of the Crimean Mejlis would be
introducing into Russia? And that question leads to another: What forces are standing
behind the project of the rebirth of the Crimean Mejlis?

Beneath the Milliy Firqa commentators somewhat hyperbolic tone, his article is
noteworthy for three reasons: First, it suggests that there is enormous pressure within
Moscow and Simferopol to come to terms with the Mejlis at least for public relations
purposes and that the groups opponents feel they must go all out to block such a move.

Second, it highlights just how much influence the Mejlis has that anyone among
the Russian occupiers would be thinking about any kind of olive branch to an organization
which has been consistently pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian.

And third, it shows just how fragile Russias own ethnic situation is, given
Shaymardanovs suggestion that many non-Russian groups would like to follow the Mejlis
lead and have representation for themselves on the basis of ethnicity rather than territory,
an argument he would have been unlikely to have advanced were there not some basis for
it.

That Putins Anschluss of Crimea has brought Russia many problems is beyond
question even if it has boosted for a time at least the poll numbers of the incumbent of the
Kremlin. But the problem the Milliy Firqa spokesman points to could be the most serious of
all a direct threat to the existence of the Russian Federation as an integral state.