Russian persecution of Crimean Tatars

[ArsalanKhan21]

Crimea's independent Tatar TV news channel silenced by 'red tape' | World news | The Guardian

Crimea's independent Tatar TV news channel silenced by 'red tape'
Russian authorities’ refusal to renew licence over alleged paperwork ‘errors’ forces ATR to shut down after annexation from Ukraine



Tatars in annexed Crimea rally in support of the ATR TV station in Simferopol, after the Russian authorities refused to let it continue broadcasting. Photograph: Alexander Polegenko/AP
Alec Luhn in Moscow

Wednesday 1 April 2015 17.59 BST Last modified on Wednesday 8 April 2015 09.15 BST
Crimea’s only independent TV news channel, ATR, has been forced to stop broadcasting after the new authorities rejected its attempts to register for a licence.

ATR is also the only channel that broadcasts in the language of the Crimean Tatars, an ethnic minority that opposed Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in March 2014. Sixty per cent of the channel’s content was in Russian, 35% in Crimean Tatar and 5% in Ukrainian.

Although the official reason the channel wasn’t registered was mistakes in its paperwork, ATR’s director, Shevket Memetov, tied the forced closure to the channel’s occasionally critical coverage of life under Russian rule. Crimean Tatars have faced disappearances and police searches under the new government.

“We showed and talked about everything like it is. We talked about problems as they are,” Memetov told the Guardian. He said freedom of speech had been stifled by the new authorities.

After the annexation of Crimea, local media outlets were required to register with the federal communications agency before 1 April 2015. ATR submitted registration documents three times, but the agency rejected them because of supposed mistakes in the paperwork, Memetov said. Its fourth attempt has not received a response, and the channel had to stop broadcasting at a minute after midnight on Wednesday. The state-owned channel Pervy Krymsky is now the only local television broadcaster covering news.

The children’s channel Lale and the radio stations Meidan FM and Leader, which are part of the ATR media holding, also ceased activities. The news site 15minut.org is still online, as the holding’s leadership tries to determine whether regulations will allow it to keep working.

The prime minister of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, claimed at a press conference in March that the alleged mistakes in ATR’s documents were likely to have been “made deliberately to inflame the political situation”. But his comments also seemed to suggest that the channel may have been denied registration due to its critical stance.

“At the same time, defending Ukraine’s interests on the territory of Crimea today is pointless and unnecessary,” Aksyonov said. “There’s no need to stir up the population with the thought that Crimea will become part of Ukraine again someday.”

Although ATR is not a 24-hour news channel, it has unflinchingly covered many of the problems that have arisen since Crimea joined Russia, including interruptions of utilities and food supplies, huge lines at the ferry crossing to Russia and the second-highest inflation rate in the world. In December, the United States and the European Union placed an economic embargo on Crimea.

According to Memetov, Crimea’s internal politics, information and communications ministry has been monitoring the channel’s coverage, instructing it to ignore negative issues and to show more of the republic’s new Moscow-backed leadership. The owner of the ATR holding, Lenur Ilsyamov, told journalists that the authorities had tried to buy the channel, threatening to “take it by force” otherwise.

Russian law places a variety of restrictions on the channel’s coverage, he added, essentially forbidding it from showing the Crimean Tatars’ two most important political leaders. Refat Chubarov, the head of the Tatar parliament, was banned from Crimea in July while on a trip to mainland Ukraine to meet his predecessor, Mustafa Dzhemilev, who had been banned in April. Russia’s government newspaper said Chubarov was forbidden from entering Crimea due to “signs of extremism” in a speech he gave on the Tatars’ right to self-determination.

Law enforcement officials have searched the homes of Crimean Tatars, who make up 13% of the population, for “extremist” literature in recent months. Several Tatar activists have also been arrested on charges that the Crimean Field Mission on Human Rights has called unsubstantiated.

According to the mission’s report in February, nine people have gone missing since the annexation, including Crimean Tatar activists and ethnic Ukrainians. Several of them were reported to have been abducted.

Memetov said the channel was not planning to move to Ukraine and was looking into ways to continue its activities.

 

[Gazprom]

So? What's the big deal. Muslims always claim persecution everywhere ,whether existant or non-existent. The crimean muslims better be smart and not arouse the anger of cossacks .The cossacks have long memories and very powerful guns also and have not forgotten the crimes of islamic khanates of ottoman and crimea on christian people.

 

[ArsalanKhan21]

UNPO: Crimean Tatars: Restriction of Freedom of Religion since Illegal Annexation

April 29, 2015

Crimean Tatars: Restriction of Freedom of Religion since Illegal Annexation

Since the illegal annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in March 2014, religious minorities in the peninsula, including Muslim Crimean Tatars, have suffered from human rights violations, particularly violations of their freedom of religion and belief, as a result of Moscow’s restrictive laws. The anti-extremism law, in particular, constitutes a major threat to religious freedom in Crimea, as it allow the authorities to conduct raids in Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslim houses, mosques, and schools. They have also ordered Crimean Tatar leaders, Turkish imams, a local Rabbi, Greek and Roman Catholics and those belonging to the Kiev Patriarchate, to leave Crimea.



Below is an article published by Foreign Affairs


“Our people survived [deportation by] Stalin,” commented a manager of ATR, which, until April 1, was the only Crimean Tatar television station left. “Will they not survive these current problems?” Russian authorities had just shut it down—along with other media outlets—by refusing to register it under Moscow’s complex religion laws.

Shutting down the station was only the latest affront. A year after Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, much has changed—and not for the better—for the peninsula’s three million people, particularly its 300,000 Muslim Crimean Tatars who are among its original inhabitants. Reports of human rights abuses in Crimea, including violations of freedom of religion or belief, abound. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), on which we serve, is observing in Crimea what it has long seen in Russia: The abuse of religious communities, including those the Kremlin views as threatening the pre-eminence of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Moscow Patriarchate.

Once Russia took military control, it ordered all of Crimea’s 1,500 religious groups to register with Moscow in order to gain Russian legal operating status. Russian officials are permitted to make lengthy requests for comprehensive information, so the registration process can be onerous and costly. And the stakes for registration are high: Unregistered groups lack the status to open bank accounts, own property, issue invitations to foreign guests, and publish literature.

Moscow is applying all of its restrictive laws in Crimea, including its anti-extremism law, which defines extremism as merely asserting the superiority of one’s religious beliefs and does not require the threat or use of violence for prosecution. This law, which USCIRF, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, and other organizations have repeatedly called on Moscow to reform, remains a major threat to religious freedom in Russia. And now it has come to Crimea, and Kremlin-installed local authorities are using it to persecute religious minorities.

For example, there have been numerous raids on Muslim homes, mosques, and schools, and on Kingdom Halls of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which Moscow views as a “nontraditional” religious group outside of Russian culture. Crimean authorities have imposed fines for possessing Islamic and Jehovah’s Witness texts. Authorities have also accused the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar representative body, of extremism, and have harassed its members and sealed its office.

In addition, they have ordered nearly all Turkish Muslim imams and religious teachers to leave Crimea and have barred two Crimean Tatar Muslim leaders from entry. And after they shut down ATR, Ravil Gainutdin, the head of the Council of Muftis of Russia, wrote an open letter of protest to Russia’s communications minister and to the head of the Russian occupation in Crimea.

Crimea’s Jewish community is also feeling the heat. In March of last year, Reform Rabbi Mikhail Kapustin of Simferopol was forced to leave Crimea after denouncing Russian actions. His synagogue had been defaced by a swastika and, a month later, vandals defaced Sevastopol’s monument to 4,200 Jews killed by the Nazis in July 1942.

And even Christian churches and leaders who are not affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate have come under increasing pressure, facing abuse and violence. Last June, the leader of the Salvation Army in Crimea, left the peninsula after reporting repeated harassment by security agents. By late 2014, clergy without Russian citizenship, particularly Greek and Roman Catholics and those belonging to the Kiev Patriarchate, were compelled to leave Crimea, and the home of the Kiev Patriarchate’s Bishop of Simferopol and Crimea, Klyment Kushch, was burned down.

What is happening in Crimea today bodes ill for eastern Ukraine. In the Donbas region, which Russian-backed separatists already control, a 4,000-man group known as the Russian Orthodox Army, which was headed by a former Russian military intelligence officer, reportedly has been attacking Protestant and Kiev Patriarchate communities and confiscating their property.

There is no question that Russia bears the responsibility. It instituted discriminatory laws at home, and those spread to Crimea. The question is what can be done about the problem. Certainly the international community should continue to demand that Russia withdraw from Ukraine. It also must renew its calls on Moscow to reform its anti-extremism law, and to stop using it to harass religious minorities and the Moscow Patriarchate’s Orthodox rivals. And supporters of the Moscow Patriarchate must ask themselves whether their church ultimately benefits when it is seen as a tool of Russian repression. And with the shutdown of most media outlets in Crimea, including nearly all Crimean Tatar media, the United States and other nations should step up broadcasting into Crimea and especially to Crimean Tatars.

The world must remember Crimea’s religious communities and defend the religious freedom of their members.

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