“Are you afraid of what could happen if the authorities find out you spoke to a journalist?” I asked the grieving father as we sat in his kitchen in the Crimean city of Bakhchysarai.
“No, I’m not afraid of anything anymore. They took my son, they may as well have taken my life,” said Umer Ibragimov, a Crimean Tatar in his 60s.
On 24 May 2016, Ibgragimov’s 32 year-old son, a prominent Crimean Tatar activist named Enver Ibragimov, was abducted– allegedly by Russia’s federal security FSB officers.
Ibragimov has written over one hundred letters to the Russian and Ukrainian authorities but has seen no progress in the investigation into his son’s disappearance. His folder of carefully filed letters contains a disc of the CCTV footage showing his son being violently abducted, which according to Ibragimov, the police have refused to look at. Officials have reportedly ignored all evidence collected by families and friends.
Since Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014, Crimean Tatars have become a special target of repression by the occupying authorities. The Crimean Tatars are a Muslim ethnic minority, indigenous to this region, and are among the most virulent opponents to Russian rule. According Crimea SOS, a Ukrainian charity, over 27 Tatar activists have been imprisoned on false charges of ‘extremism.’ 43 activists, including Enver Ibragimov, have been abducted – allegedly by occupying authorities. Of those, 18 are still missing and 6 have been found dead. Ibragimov says that many incidents unreported as families of missing people are afraid of reprisals from the authorities.
As a result, more than 100 Tatar children are now fatherless and many families of the political prisoners are in dire financial straits. At least 30,000 Crimean Tatars have fled the intensifying pressure to other areas of Ukraine, according to Crimea SOS.
According to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, one of the oldest Ukrainian human rights organizations, there is no evidence to suggest that the arrested activists were involved in extremist activities and Memorial, an award-winning Russian human rights organization, has described all the activists in custody as political prisoners.
A sense of threat constantly hangs over the Crimean Tatars. Families of political prisoners say they look out of their window often to see officers sitting in their cars, just watching people enter and leave their apartment building. Russia’s Federal Security Service regularly carries out illegal searches in Tatar homes and have taken up to £2,000 (USD $2,770) in money, and also phones and laptops. The political prisoners’ wives have themselves been detained and illegally held.
What’s more, Russia’s crackdown on independent media threatens to stop coverage of these ominous forms of political repression. After annexation by Russia in 2014, independent outlets were forcibly shut down, transmissions of Ukrainian stations were replaced with broadcasts from Russia. Many journalists and activists have resorted to censoring their own work to avoid arbitrary detainment, harassment and violence. Many journalists have left Crimea for other parts of Ukraine. Sergei Mokrushin, an investigative journalist, fled Crimea and resettled in Kyiv after his friends’ homes were raided by the FSB in 2015.
I caught a glimpse of this during a research trip to Crimea’s capital, Simferopol in February, when I interviewed the families of Crimean Tatar political prisoners. Police detained and questioned me about my political interests and work. ‘We have witnesses who say you met with unhappy locals and used the word “annexation”. This word is incorrect. We don’t like it,’ they said.
Russian screen writer, Michael Idov, whose work has been restricted in Russia, writes: “In the absence of hard guidelines (which is the way the Putin government generally likes it, the better to keep the citizenry on its toes), people are left to explore the boundaries of their own bravery.”
As for Ibragimov, he continues to write to the authorities and talk to journalists in the hope that he’ll find out what happened to his son. Like many Crimean Tatars, he refuses to be scared into silence.
Photos: Madeline Roache