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
Milli Firka spokesman.
The Russian occupation authorities
have been tightening the noose around the Mejlis since the Anschluss, banning
Mustafa Cemilev Refat Chubarov from
returning to their homeland, threatening its members and most recently
increasing the punishments on any who meet with Cemilev or Refat.
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 Russia’s occupation.
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But in an article yesterday, Rinat
Shaymardanov, a spokesman for the Milli Firka 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 “Cemilev 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 Moscow’s 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
Milli Firka 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 people’s 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 Cemilev 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
Milli Firka commentator’s 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 group’s 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 Russia’s own ethnic situation is, given
Shaymardanov’s 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 Putin’s
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 Milli Firka spokesman points to could be the
most serious of all – a direct threat to the existence of the Russian
Federation as an integral state.
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