Guardian: The gravest ethnic and political conflict in Russia today is not to be found inChechnya nor in the xenophobic capitals of Moscow and St Petersburg.
Rather, it stalks the newly acquired peninsula of Crimea and is bound up with the fate of the Crimean Tatars. It became clear soon after the sudden annexation of Crimea in March that modern Russia does not possess either the institutions or the tools to integrate an ethnic group with a strong sense of its own identity and a traumatic history. The usual methods employed by the Kremlin – bribery, intimidation and displacement – will only aggravate the conflict.
The Crimean Tatars are the ancient, native inhabitants of Crimea. They absorbed a great many of the peninsula’s different peoples and had their own state, the Crimean Khanate, for more than 300 years from the middle of the 15th to the end of the 18th centuries. Catherine the Great then annexed Crimea to the Russian….