Shutting down the station was only the latest affront. A year after Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, much has changed—and not for the better—for the peninsula’s three million people, particularly its 300,000 Muslim Crimean Tatars who are among its original inhabitants. Reports of human rights abuses in Crimea, including violations of freedom of religion or belief, abound. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), on which we serve, is observing in Crimea what it has long seen in Russia: The abuse of religious communities, including those the Kremlin views as threatening the pre-eminence of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Moscow Patriarchate.
Once Russia took military control, it ordered all of Crimea’s 1,500 religious groups to register with Moscow in order to gain Russian legal operating status. Russian officials are permitted to make lengthy requests for comprehensive information, so the registration process can be onerous and costly. And the stakes for registration are high: Unregistered groups lack the status to open bank accounts, own property, issue invitations to foreign guests, and publish literature.
Moscow is applying all of its restrictive laws in Crimea, including its anti-extremism law, which defines extremism as merely asserting the superiority of one’s religious beliefs and does not require the threat or use of violence for prosecution. This law, which USCIRF, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, and other organizations have repeatedly called on Moscow to reform, remains a major threat to religious freedom in Russia. And now it has come to Crimea, and Kremlin-installed local authorities are using it to persecute religious minorities.
For example, there have been numerous raids on Muslim homes, mosques, and schools, and on Kingdom Halls of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which Moscow views as a “nontraditional” religious group outside of Russian culture. Crimean authorities have imposed fines for possessing Islamic and Jehovah’s Witness texts. Authorities have also accused the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar representative body, of extremism, and have harassed its members and sealed its office.
In addition, they have ordered nearly all Turkish Muslim imams and religious teachers to leave Crimea and have barred two Crimean Tatar Muslim leaders from entry. And after they shut down ATR, Ravil Gainutdin, the head of the Council of Muftis of Russia, wrote an open letter of protest to Russia’s communications minister and to the head of the Russian occupation in Crimea.
Crimea’s Jewish community is also feeling the heat. In March of last year, Reform Rabbi Mikhail Kapustin of Simferopol was forced to leave Crimea after denouncing Russian actions. His synagogue had been defaced by a swastika and, a month later, vandals defaced Sevastopol’s monument to 4,200 Jews killed by the Nazis in July 1942.
Categories: Behaviour, Civil Rights, Civil War, Double Standard, Europe and Australia, Religions