Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 1 – Russian occupation
officials in Crimea have provided a remarkable confirmation of how free Ukraine
was and how unfree Russia has become. According to them, Ukraine allowed so
many publications to appear there that Russia has banned that they lack the
ability to seize them all at once.
Officials of the occupation regime’s
State Committee for the Inter-Ethnic Relations and Deported Citizens said
yesterday that there are “hundreds of thousands” of publications in Crimea that
are banned in Russia, so many that they cannot be confiscated immediately as
Russian law requires (ansar.ru/rfsng/2014/10/31/54826).
Zaur Smirnov, the head of the State
Committee, said that these “extremist” materials had flooded into Crimea before
the Russian occupation in order to support “non-traditional forms of Islam” and
thus to undermine the government-backed and traditionalist Muslim Spiritual
Directorate of Crimea.
Such materials, he said, “thank God
are banned in the Russian Federation” and must be confiscated and destroyed.
But because there are “hundreds of thousands” of copies in Crimea, it is “impossible”
for officials “to seize them all at once.”
Consequently, the Russian authorities now there are asking religious
groups to turn them in voluntarily.
Smirnov noted that Sergey Aksenov,
the head of the Republic of Crimea, had met with the heads of religious
organizations and taken a decision to offer them “the opportunity themselves to
carry out a so-called cleansing” of such materials by destroying them or
handing them in.
Only after they have had the chance
to do so, Smirnov said, “will the laws of the Russian Federation be applied
with full force.”
Some in Russia
and the West will applaud what the occupation is doing, viewing it as a move
against Islamist extremism, but those familiar will the sweep of Moscow’s bans
on religious literature will recognize it for what it is: an indication of how
the freedoms Crimeans enjoyed as citizens of Ukraine are being taken away now
that they are de facto subjects of Russia
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