Divide and digest
Eastern approaches 2014-09-17
Summary:
THE MEJLIS is the governing body of Crimea’s Tatars, the Muslim indigenous group who make up 12% of the region’s population. On September 16, its headquarters was surrounded and searched by dozens of Russian police. The raid came just a day after Crimea’s elections, which the Tatars, most of whom opposed Russia’s takeover of the peninsula this spring, largely boycotted. For the Tatars, who have a long history of oppression at Russian hands, it is the latest in a series of incidents that seem to signal a new effort to suppress their political autonomy.
Western sanctions notwithstanding, Vladimir Putin is having it his way in eastern Ukraine at the moment. In Crimea, most of the population has welcomed Russian rule. Nevertheless, the Tatars seem to have Moscow worried. Their suspicion of Moscow has deep roots: in 1944, the entire Tatar population of 180,000 was deported to central Asia in a single night on the orders of Josef Stalin. Almost half died of hunger; the group was not allowed back to Crimea until the late days of the Soviet perestroika reforms in the 1990s.
If the Tatars...Continue reading