Dealing with Muslim minorities is one of the major human rights concerns of the 21st century. Beijing has launched a crackdown on the Muslim Uighur minority in China, which has a population of about 11 million, most of whom live in the northwest. About one million of them were forced to enroll in so-called rehabilitation camps. In Myanmar, the Muslim Rohingya minority was forced to leave their homes and migrate to Bangladesh in 2017 after fleeing burnt villages, rape and massacres. Some 750,000 have been forced to leave their homes.

But while both groups have attracted the attention of the international media and have received media coverage, there is another Muslim minority facing ethnic cleansing, and its plight has not received the attention it deserves. It is related to the minority Crimean Tatars. In the five years following Russia's annexation of the Crimea and the isolation of lucrative ports away from Ukraine, the lives of 250,000 Tatar Muslims in the Crimea were shattered. The Tatars were banned from working, their language was banned, their newspapers and way of life banned in an attempt to keep them away from the peninsula.

This is not the first time that the Tatars have suffered persecution. Crimean Tatars are a Muslim people whose language, culture and history have been forcibly obliterated for centuries. The inhabitants of the Crimea "precious" since the thirteenth century have been attacked again, because of their race and religion, and more because of the water. Crimea is completely surrounded by water, located on the Black Sea and the Sea of ​​Azov. It is no wonder that the northern, landlocked (Russian) region has been looking at the region for centuries.

Problems began in the early seventies of the seventeenth century, when Catherine the Great took control of the Crimean peninsula, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. It was known as Khania the Crimea. Catherine attacked the area, seized the main ports, and began the process of political reorganization, which included replacing the Tatar governor with a Russian governor, and distributed the land to Russian officials and nobles. Catherine encouraged the transfer of Russians from the interior to the peninsula, which was home to more than a quarter of a million Tataris. Muslims accounted for 85% of the population. In 1783, Russia annexed the Crimea. This was the cause of the first wave of tatar migration. Initially, between 8 and 10 thousand Tatars, mostly nobles, left for other places in the Ottoman Empire.

Charge of incitement

In 1853, when Russia set out to expand its empire outside the Crimea, to the Danube, the Ottomans deployed a military force to prevent them. Over the next two years, Britain, France and Sardinia joined what became known as the Crimean War (the same war that made Florence Nightingale legend). Russia lost and then sought revenge against the Tatar people, who were accused by the Tsarist regime of inciting the Turks and cooperating with them. And imposed the use of the Russian language on the population, and replaced the names of Tatars, and names of places with Russian names.

As Alan W. Fisher points out in his book, Crimean Tatars, "During this period, the population of the Crimea declined from about 275,000 in 1850 to 194,000 in 1860." These Tartars, who remained under Russian rule, did not trust their Russian rulers or compatriots, who did not conceal their ambition to strengthen and extend their control.

Almost a century later, another Russian ruler turned his attention to the Crimea. As the supreme leader of the Soviet Communist Party, Joseph Stalin began to eliminate Tatar intellectuals. These intellectuals were working to revive the Tatar language and culture and advocate for self-determination. In 1927, Stalin called them "bourgeois nationalists" and collected up to 40,000 Tatars and sent them to labor camps in Siberia.

This was only the beginning, 75 years ago. "On May 18, 1944, Stalin, eager to control the Crimean ports and to seek revenge against the Tatars who stood with Germany, ordered the brutal cleansing of about a quarter of a million Tataris. Convinced that the Germans could help liberate the Tatars, they cooperated with the Nazis to fight the Red Army on the Eastern Front. Stalin then launched a more comprehensive ethnic cleansing of the Tartars and deported them to Central Asia - Uzbekistan. Half died on the way because of disease and hunger, according to some estimates. Thousands of Tartars fled to Turkey and Europe. Some ended up in the United States.

The people of Mazloum

None of them was allowed to return until 1989, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev recognized the Crimean Tatars as an oppressed people who had been deported illegally. By that time the Crimea had spent half a century as part of Ukraine. In 1954, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was preparing to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's integration with the Russian Empire.

The Tartars began to return to the Crimea after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Thousands found that their homeland had been completely resettled by the Russians. However, they committed themselves to the reconstruction and revival of the Crimean Tatars' heritage, and created their own political body, the Council. This body played the role of the embassy of the Tatars, and as a body that worked to restore the rights of Tatars and determine their fate.

In February 2014, Russia invaded the Crimea, and seized it from Ukraine. The Russians began harassing the Tatars, especially after Moscow held a referendum in March 2014, a vote aimed at determining the future of the peninsula (either as part of the Russian Federation or a subsidiary of Ukraine). The vote, as the US State Department noted, was forged as a pretext for an illegal and violent invasion. The Tartars strongly opposed this; many Tatar activists and journalists were arrested. Many of them disappeared; political activist Rashad Amitov, who was campaigning against the referendum and the invasion of Russia, was kidnapped in front of the Cabinet building in Simferopol, the Crimean capital. The body of the 39-year-old activist was found two weeks later and his assassination remains unclear.

Later, the Tatar newspapers and radio and television stations were closed. Crimean education was banned. In April 2014, the Crimean Tatars leader and the head of the "Council", Mustafa Zemeliev, were prevented from entering the Crimea after he was abroad during the referendum. He has been in exile ever since. In 2016, the Russians banned the Council, calling it a dangerous and extremist organization; many Tatar people have since been arrested, accused of sympathizing with terrorists or belonging to extremist groups.

Clear violation

The Tatars, living in the United States, say they fear their families and friends in the Crimea, who face daily discrimination. Many have lost their jobs and are unable to find new jobs. Business owners who fear the Russian reaction, do not employ the Tatars. Titans and businesses have been raided and, in some cases, seized.

"The human rights situation in the Crimea continues to deteriorate as a direct result of the Russian authorities' enforcement of their laws against the Crimean population in clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and other violations of international humanitarian law," a report released in February by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights .

Today, there are 250,000 Tatars in the Crimea; but while the Tartars in the 18th century were 80% of the population, today they make up about 12%.

The United States, the European Union, NATO and Turkey condemned Russia's annexation of the Crimea and refused to recognize it. NATO said that "the Crimea, is Ukrainian territory." Last year, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling on Moscow to withdraw from the territory. America and the European Union have imposed sanctions on Russia for its aggression. However, all these measures have not changed reality. While Russia has violated international law, no one has taken serious action in reaction.

Moreover, no one moved to stop the slow ethnic and cultural cleansing of the Crimean Tartars. The West and its institutions that have been created to defend human and peoples' rights continue to be indifferent. They have abandoned justice, and with it the Crimean Tatars.

An annoying situation

Last December, Tartar Crimean leader Mustafa Zemilev visited the Crimean Tatars Association in Brooklyn, New York, and told the assembled Tatar crowd, many of whom were forced to leave their homeland in 1944, that the situation in the Crimea was disturbing. He said he feared for the next generation, which the Russians wash their brains and keep them away from the culture of Tartars and their language and religion. In fact, Russia began restoration of the so-called Grand Mosque of Khan, last year, a building of the 16th century.

Board banned

Russian authorities arrested at least 23 Crimean Tatars on suspicion of being members of a banned group in March. The FSB raided the homes of 25 Crimean Tatars in Simferopol, the defendants. Nine of the detainees are activists of the Crimean Solidarity movement, who were placed in pre-trial detention on charges of belonging to a "terrorist organization", according to the police police website. And linked members of the banned "Council", between the raids by Russia finally, and the Ukrainian presidential elections. Most of the Crimean Tatars have not renounced their Ukrainian citizenship, and many have voted in the last presidential elections.

Amnesty International has also criticized the arrests as a continuation of the "relentless" persecution of the Crimean Tatar community for five years. "The recent crackdown is one of the biggest acts of brazen intimidation of an entire society in recent months," said Oksana Pokalchuk, director of the organization in Ukraine. The State Department called on Russia to "release these detainees, and more than 70 Ukrainians, were unjustly imprisoned."

85%

The proportion of Tatars was

Of the total population.

40

A Tatar sent them

Stalin to camps

Work in Siberia.