The Muslim News - Muslim cemeteries in Crimea attacked

Issue 229, Friday 30 May 2008 - 26 Jumad al-Awwal 1429

Muslim cemeteries in Crimea attacked

By Arzy Emirova in Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine and Ahmed J Versi in London

A Muslim graveyard was desecrated in the village of Chistenko, Crimea, Ukraine, last month.The attack took place at night outside the village where dozens of gravestones were defaced and broken.
Muslim Tatars found more than 40 gravestones damaged as well as graffiti on the walls of the cemetery written in Russian that read, ‘Tartars, leave Crimea now!’ when they visited the cemetery at night. Other drawings showed gibbets, and the Tartar national symbol with the letter X marked through it.
Head of the Crimean Muslims, Ablayev Haji Emirali, told The Muslim News, “Undoubtedly the acts of vandalism both in Nizhnegorskiy region and Chistenkoye are provocations which aim to cause a clash between Crimean Tatars and the Slavic population of Crimea. The ones who are responsible for these inhuman actions are expecting that Crimean Tatars will take retaliatory measures and destroy the gravestones in Christian cemeteries. But nothing like this happened. We have been continuously calling not to yield to these provocations.”
He alleged that either the Russians - “who are interested in destabilizing the situation on the peninsula which would allow them to bring their troops into Crimea” - or the Ukranians, “who have shown indifference to the attacks in the past and now,” were behind the attacks. In addition, he held that, “a conflict in Crimea can be the way of shifting the blame for the existing problems in the country on Crimean Tatars.” Tensions between the Tartars, Russians and Ukrainians have been running high recently because the police are forcing Tartar squatters off land wanted by developers
Since the beginning of this year two Muslim cemeteries have been viciously vandalised in Crimea. More than 270 gravestones were destroyed in the Muslim cemetery of the Nizhnegorsky region in February. Police blamed the attacks on local school children. Crimea’s police force is overwhelmingly Christian and Slavic and Tartar activists have accused police officers of anti-Islamic bias.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin exiled all Tartar Muslims from Crimea in 1944 because of alleged collaboration with German invaders during the Second World War. Tartars had settled in Crimea some 700 years previously, a half-millennium before Slavic colonisation.
Islam first appeared in Crimea in the ninth and eleventh centuries, during the times when the peninsula was populated by Hasar, proto Bulgarian, Pecheneg, Polovets and other tribes. Flourishing of the Islamic culture on the peninsula is connected with the existence of the Crimean khanate (1443-1783), where Islam had a status of a state religion.
When Ukraine became independent in 1991, the former Soviet republic’s new government allowed the return of Crimean Tartars to their homeland. However, when they went to their homes, they found the Ukranians and Russians had occupied them. Having nowhere to live, they squatted on empty land.

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