Radicalization of Russias MuslimsAre Crimean Tatars Next?

(Part 2)
geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/religion/radicalization-russias-muslims-crimean-tatars-next-2

Asya Pereltsvaig
[Part 1 can be read here . Thanks to Iryna Novosyolova for a helpful discussion of some of the issues discussed
in this post.]

In 2014, the Russian Federation acquired another Muslim group that may prove troublesome both within Russia
and globally: the Crimean Tatars. According to the 2002 Russian census, there were only 4,131 Crimean Tatars
living in the country, concentrated in Krasnodar Krai in southern Russia; the March 2014 annexation of Crimea,
however, brought with it some 245,000 Crimean Tatars. The referendum, which allegedly showed an
overwhelming desire of the people of Crimea to join Russia, was boycotted by Crimean Tatars (various Ukrainian
and international media sources reported at the time that 95-99% of Crimean Tatars did not take part in the
referendum; see here, here, and here; while Russian media stated that the proposed boycott did not take place).
Also, reports surfaced in the social media and Ukrainian news outlets that Russian (para)military personnel were
conscating and tearing up passports of potential voters of Crimean Tatar background (see here, here, here, and
here).
Crimean Tatars have good reasons for viewing the Russian
annexation of their homeland with suspicion and worse:
since the Crimean Peninsula was rst made part of the
Russian Empire in 1783, Crimean Tatars have been
subjected to massacres, exiles, discrimination, and
deportations. By 1897, they constituted only 34% of the
peninsulas population. After the Bolshevik Revolution,
persecutions of Crimean Tatars continued throughout the
1920s and 1930s, marked by widespread imprisonment and
execution. The conscation of food to supply central Russia
resulted in widespread starvation. According to some
sources, half of the Crimean Tatar population was killed or
deported between 1917 and 1933. Persecution reached its
culmination on May 18, 1944, when the Soviet government deported the entire remaining Crimean Tatar
population to Central Asia as a form of collective punishment for alleged collaboration with the Nazis during their
occupation of Crimea in 1941-1944 (the reality of this purported collaboration is discussed in my earlier post).
The deportation process, as described by the victims in their memoirs, was horric. More than 32,000 NKVD
troops participated in this action. The deportees were given only 30 minutes to gather personal belongings, after
which they were loaded onto cattle trains and moved out of Crimea. The expulsion was poorly planned and
executed; the lack of accommodation and food, the harsh climatic conditions of the destination areas, and the
rapid spread of diseases generated a high mortality rate during the rst years of exile. It is estimated than nearly
half of the deportees died of diseases and malnutrition, causing Crimean activists to call it an instance of
genocide. Even after Crimean Tatars were ocially rehabilitated in 1967, they were not allowed to return to
their homeland until after the fall of the USSR because, as some scholars explain, Crimea was seen by Soviet
leaders as too geopolitically and economically crucial. Although many Crimean Tatars have returned to the
peninsula since 1991, few managed to move into the areas of their historical settlement. Prior to the
deportations, the majority of Crimean Tatarsmembers of the Tat and Yalboyu subgroupslived in the
mountainous central and southern parts of Crimea and on the southern coast. These areas, and particularly the
coastal region, are climatically favorable, protected by the east-west running mountains from frigid northern
winds. But upon their return, most Crimean Tatars had to settle in the less desirable central and eastern parts of

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the peninsula.
The resentment is further fueled by a new wave of repressions since the 2014 annexation. Many Crimean Tatar
activists have been prosecuted by Russian authorities: some face criminal charges in Russia and hence cannot
go back to Crimea, others have been subjected to unjustied searches and seizures of their property. As noted
in Lily Hides article in Foreign Policy,
The new regime has banned leading Crimean Tatars from the peninsula, and instigated politically
motivated court cases against others. It promised to make Crimean Tatar one of three state
languages, then reduced hours of Crimean Tatar instruction in schools, closed down ATR, the
Crimean Tatar television network owned by Islyamov, and has regularly raided Tatar households
and religious institutions in search of extremist material. Until a January 2016 visit by a Council
of Europe envoy, the new authorities refused to grant access to Crimea to international monitoring
organizations and the U.N., though human rights violations have been extensively documented.
The initial reaction from Crimean Tatars has been to resist through peaceful means, says Hide. For example, a
long-term media campaign led by Serhii Kostynskyi of Ukraines National TV and Radio Committee aimed to
expose human rights abuses and win back Crimea with soft power. However, such attempts to draw the
attention of international and domestic media to Crimea have been a limited success. The continuing ghting in
the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has deected the attention of both politicians and the media, locally and
internationally. Moreover, the majority of Crimeas Russian-speaking population are happy to be part of Russia,
even if it brought the peninsula little economic or social development. Thus, Crimean Tatars, who constitute a
minority in their historical homeland, have little support within Crimea and have to look for an alliance elsewhere.
As noted in Hides article, Crimean Tatar activists and Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary groups have joined
forces in leading a low-level insurgency against the Russian annexation. In the fall of 2015, the two groups
together imposed a unilateral trade blockade of the peninsula, stopping trac, demanding to see travelers
documents and conscating goods; in November 2015, unknown saboteurs cut four nearby power lines
providing electricity to Crimea, leaving the entire peninsula in the dark. Many Crimean Tatar activists realize that
joining forces with the paramilitaries and adopting their tactics meant giving up the moral high ground. But Hide
cites Evelina Arifova, one of Crimean Tatar activists pushing for a trade and electricity embargo on the
peninsula, as saying: Without their radicalism, we wouldnt have achieved anything.
This conclusion in favor of radicalism can be based not only on Kostynskyis less-than-successful media
campaign in Ukraine on behalf of Crimean Tatars, but also on the contrasting experiences of Muslim groups in
the North Caucasus, particularly the Chechens and the Circassians. When I mention the two groups in my
classes, I typically get many nods of recognition for the rst group and mostly blank stares for the second. As
mentioned above, the Circassians, like the Chechens, were subjected to a prolonged war with the Russian
Empire and ultimately the majority of them were expelled from their ancestral homeland. The exiled Circassians
those who survived the brutal expulsionfound new homes throughout the Ottoman Empire, especially in
present-day Turkey, Jordan, Syria, and Israel. Yet unlike the Chechens, todays Circassian activists chose to
follow a peaceful, non-violent path for maintaining their ethnic identity and culture, seeking recognition of the
genocide committed against them, and campaigning for Russia to allow some of them to return to their homeland
in the Northwest Caucasus (the latter issue is particularly relevant for the Circassians in war-torn Syria). The
2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, where the Circassians ancestors were boarding the Ottoman ships, oered
them an excellent opportunity to draw international medias attention to their cause. And yet, most mainstream
media organizations downplayed or ignored the Circassian issue, as discussed in detail in Martin Lewis earlier
GeoCurrents post. The Chechens, in contrast, have gained much more media attention. They got their PR
campaign together, a student in one of my adult education classes once joked. By blowing stu up, I replied.
Here, I agree with Martin Lewis that the media is to some extent complicit in driving nationalist movements to
become more radicalized and more violent. As Lewis puts it, if news source chose to highlight violent responses
while ignoring non-violent ones, a perverse message is seemingly sent: If you want our attention, kill
someone!. While Crimean Tatars have not yet been involved in violence against persons, they are evidently

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prepared to blow up power lines and destroy goods. It is, however, a step in the radical direction.
Several other factors suggest that we might see a rise in violence perpetrated by Crimean Tatars and an
internationalization of their more militant activists. Unlike the Chechens and the Volga Tatars, the Crimean Tatars
do not constitute the majority or even a plurality in their region. It is therefore hardly likely that they will be able to
gain much cultural or economic autonomy, regardless of whether Crimea remains under Russian control or is
transferred back to Ukraineand independence is entirely out of the question. In fact, the vector of Russian
policy with respect to Crimean Tatars is clear from the recent persecutions of the Crimean Tatar activists,
including the exile of their leader, 72-year old Mustafa Jemilev, a veteran of the dissident movement. Jemilev is
now banned from Crimea by Russian authorities, while his wife remains in Crimea and his son is in prison in
Russia. While for now Crimean Tatars align themselves with Ukrainian paramilitaries, it would not be surprising if
the more militant wing of their movement begins to look for alliances in the larger Muslim world.
The comparison between Tatarstan and Chechnya above also suggests that
stunted economic and social development facilitates radicalization of Muslim
groups. While the authors of a recent article in Foreign Aairs William
McCants and Christopher Meserole focus on political culture, they too
admit that economic factors play a role, particularly the high degree of
unemployment. As many other authors have suggested, high unemployment
among young males creates a demographic base for jihadi recruiters to
draw upon. By all accounts, Crimea was economically underdeveloped
already on the eve of the Russian annexation in March 2014, even according
to Russian sources such as Russia Today, a media outlet that peddles proPutin state-sanctioned propaganda in English. According to their article
Crimeas economy in numbers and pictures, published on March 15, 2014,
Crimeas budget decit at the time constituted $1 billion, while the republics
annual GDP was only $4.3 billion (see image on the left, reproduced from
the Russia Today article). By 2018, Crimea expected Russian investment of
about $5 billion. Yet Crimea also had a lot to lose by severing its ties with
Ukraine: on the eve of the annexation, 90% of water, 80% of electricity, 60%
of primary goods, and 70% of tourism came from Ukraine. The Russia
Today article hypothesized that if Crimea becomes a part of Russia itll become a more attractive holiday
destination for Russias population of 142 million, whose per capita income is more than three times that of
Ukrainians. However, in reality, the hostilities turned o tourists and the logistical diculties in getting to and
from the peninsula with a ferry caused a further drop in Russian tourism. As reported by Segodnya.ua, almost
60% of tourists from Russia do not consider the resorts of the annexed Crimea to be a decent replacement for
Turkey and Egypt. Thus, although Sergey Aksyonov, Crimeas prime minister and an advocate of joining Russia,
had hoped that breaking away from Ukraine would transform the economy for the better and would turn the
peninsula into another Singapore, this has not happened. The economic sanctions imposed by the European
Union, the United States, Canada, Australia, and several other countries directly against Crimea and Crimean
individuals have further inhibited tourism and infrastructure development.
The political and economic problems, as well as direct
persecutions, have caused many Crimean Tatars to leave
the peninsula; according to BBC.com, 10,000 Crimean
Tatars have been forced out of Crimea and moved to
Kherson, Lviv, Zaporizhye, and Kiyiv districts of Ukraine (see
map on the left from travel-tour.com.ua). This mass
displacement parallels what had happened in Chechnya in
the wake of the two Chechen wars. Thus, the destruction of
family and community ties as a result of this relocation may
bring Crimean Tatars to the point where religious identity
would matter more than ethno-linguistic identity. As is, only a
small minority of Crimean Tatars speak their indigenous

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language, which is considered to be endangered: although it is taught in several schools, it is mostly spoken by
older people, according to the Ethnologue. Islam, on the other hand, has always been an important part of
Crimean Tatar identity. Historically, Crimean Tatars were described as diligent Muslims, but while some
important Muslim traditionscharity, fasts (including that of Ramadan), and pilgrimage to Meccawere strictly
observed, others were downplayed or ignored. For example, the German geographer Gustav Radde, who visited
Crimea in the mid-1850s and wrote an ethnographic treatise about Crimean Tatars , informed his readers that
Crimean Tatars drank vodka and a low-alcohol homebrew, though not wine. Another Islamic proscription that
was generally ignored by Crimean Tatars is the ban on gambling, playing cards and dice, which were considered
acceptable and indulged in widely, Radde wrote. Yet the treatment of women and the family law in traditional
Crimean Tatar society, as described by Radde, is reminiscent of what is practiced in the most strictly Islamic
countries. Thus, although Crimean Tatars today have certainly not seen the de facto implementation of Sharia
law that has been experienced in Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov, including polygamy and enforced veiling,
they could move in the more radical Islamist direction, especially as dislocation, persecutions by Russian
authorities, and the continuing loss of their indigenous language make Islam the linchpin of their identity.
All in all, Chechnya has experienced signicant radicalization and internationalization of its rebels, Tatarstan
seems to be experiencing the same phenomena in a milder form, and the Crimean Tatars may be beginning to
move in the same direction. Such developments may be driven as much by Russias repressive policies and the
international medias silence on non-violent protests as by internal causes such as economic and social
underdevelopment. I think the conclusion of the authors of the Chatham House summary about the North
Caucasus applies as well to Crimea:
The causes of radicalization in the North Caucasus mean the situation is unlikely to change until
Russia itself changes and Moscow is able to oer an alternative vision to the people in the region.
If religious repression continues, so will the insurgency.
Russian political culture may yet prove to be as deadly as the French one, albeit not by banning the veil but by
allowing itand by leaving little room for moderate Muslim identity based on history, culture, traditions, and
language rather than jihad.

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