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10-03-2016, 04:00 AM
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Russia demands loyalty or silence: Tatars
BAKHCHYSARAY: Crimean Tartar activist Ilmi Umerov walks slowly and has difficulty controlling his left arm but his voice is strong and his eyes are piercing as he reiterates his rejection of Moscow´s rule in the peninsula, an opinion for which he faces trial.
The deputy head of the Mejlis -- the Crimean Tatars´ elected assembly -- was on September 7 released from three weeks´ involuntary detention in a psychiatric hospital in Simferopol, on the Black Sea. His incarceration for tests of his "mental capacity" followed his televised insistence that Crimea should be returned to Ukraine, prompting Russia to charge him with calling for Russia´s borders to be changed. His detention led to widespread condemnation from international rights groups, **t least because Umerov, 59, suffers from Parkinson´s disease and high blood pressure and is diabetic. "Russia is striving for loyalty," Umerov told AFP in the garden of his house in Bakhchysaray, the main town in the district of the same name of which he was the longtime leader until he resigned when Crimea fell under Moscow´s control in 2014. Failing that, "it would be entirely e**ugh for them if the Crimean Tatars fell silent," he added. Ruled entirely sane by doctors in the psychiatric hospital, Umerov will **w go on trial and faces up to five years in jail. "The time has come when, for a thought, for an opinion, they will put people on trial and hand them real sentences," Umerov said. Crimea´s Muslim Tatars number some 300,000 -- around 14 percent of the peninsula´s population -- although Umerov estimates some 30,000 to 40,000 have left since Russia´s annexation. Activists say several hundred others have had their homes searched or been detained. The Tartar ATR television channel has been shut down, while the Mejlis was banned as "extremist" and is **w largely a symbolic entity. Umerov believes the worldwide outcry over his detention, which included statements from Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and the US State Department, prompted his clean bill of mental health. In the Soviet era, dissidents were frequently incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in order to discredit them, and comparisons have been drawn between that practice and Umerov´s case. "The special services, the FSB that is, did **t dare to carry out some kind of order," he said, referring to Russia´s feared security service. "So the psychiatric testing turned out to be objective. They declared me mentally healthy." Umerov believes that although his ill-health might spare him a prison term, "all the same I will be considered a convict." The Tatars have lived through a long history of repression dating back to Catherine the Great in the 18th century. In 1944 Stalin deemed the entire population "traitors" and deported them from Crimea, mostly to Central Asia. They were only able to return in the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev´s reforms. أكثر... ??????? ??????: Russia demands loyalty or silence: Tatars || ??????: ahlam1399 || ??????: اسم منتداك
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