Persecution of Crimean Tatars needs sanctions response

Hoardings on the border. Left: On your way to Crimean Tatar Autonomy. Right: On your way from Crimea to Free Ukraine. Via Olga Klymenko

It is way past time for action by the West against the persecutors of the Crimean Tartar people. As human rights activist Halya Cornash puts it:

Two years after invading and annexing Ukrainian territory, Russia has effectively declared war against the Crimean Tatar people.  More words of concern, without real punitive sanctions, would be frighteningly inadequate.

Russia has demonstrated time and again that it does respond to strength, it ignores weakness, it will butt against the limits of any Western 'tolerance' of its actions.

Its latest action, in banning the Tatars' Parliament, demonstrate just how outrageously they will behave.

The Executive Board of the World Congress of Crimean Tatars, in a recent declaration, called for:

1) That the European Union, the European Parliament and all national parliaments of the world respecting human rights, freedoms, peace and democracy recognize that the Crimean Tatars are the indigenous people of the Crimea and the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People is the self-governing body of the Crimean Tatar People, and develop cooperation mechanisms with the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People,

2) That, to convict the crimes committed against the Crimean Tatar People in the conscience of humanity and history, the big deportation of the Crimean Tatar People on 18 May 1944 be recognized as a genocide by the European Parliament, all national parliaments and institutions,

This is the least that must happen. What is most likely to make Russia think twice in its actions is targeted sanctions that make clear to Russia that they must stop the repression of Crimea's indigenous people.


Reblogged with permission.

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By Halya Cornash

A Crimean court has formally completed its criminalization of the Mejlis, or self-governing body of the Crimean Tatar people. There have been no serious threats of sanctions or other measures from European structures and western countries although this is a direct attack on the main indigenous people of Crimea carried out by a country which breached international law through its annexation of Ukrainian Crimea.

The banning of the Mejlis as ‘extremist’ has come in stages, with feelers doubtless out to see how the West responded. Beyond statements of ‘concern’ or condemnation, it did not. Russia therefore moved from vague threats to specific action, with the ‘court application’ first lodged in February. The ban was then made a fait accompli on April 13 when the de facto prosecutor Natalya Poklonskaya announced that she was ‘suspending’ the Mejlis without a court ruling. Russia’s justice ministry then also saw no need to await a court ruling and on April 18 added the Crimean Tatar Mejlis to its list of “civic or religious organizations whose activities have been suspended due to their extremist activities.”

The Council of Europe’s disturbingly weak report on a fact-finding visit to Russian-occupied Crimea did acknowledge that a court ban on the Mejlis “would indicate a new level of repression targeting the Crimean Tatar community as a whole”.

There can be no understating how serious this move is. Oliver Loode, a member of the UN Forum on Indigenous Issues, has stressed that “if a representative body is banned, this is not just a hostile act towards a particular organization, in this case the Mejlis. It’s really an attack against the people, in this case Crimean Tatars.” A recent resolution from the European Parliament recognized the Crimean Tatars as an indigenous people of Crimea whose right to self-government is protected under the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Mejlis as “the legitimate representation of the Crimean Tatar community”.

Russia through its puppet prosecutor and court called the Mejlis a ‘civic organization’ and has now banned it, claiming it to be ‘extremist’.

Nobody is in any doubt of the real reasons for this move, namely the implacable opposition of the Mejlis to Russian occupation. Should any further confirmation be required, this was effectively provided by a chilling suggestion just made by Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee. He proposes that the provisions outlawing what the current regime deems ‘extremism’ should be supplemented with provisions criminalizing ‘denial’ of, for example, the pseudo-referendum which Russia used in an attempt to give legitimacy of its annexation of Crimea. The Mejlis had called on Crimean Tatars and all other Ukrainians to boycott this event.

On Monday the ‘proof’ presented to the court of the Mejlis’ ‘extremism’ was crowned by a document published back in Soviet times (1988) by veteran Crimean Tatar leader and former Soviet political prisoner Mustafa Dzhemiliev. Other material includes an extremely questionable ‘warning’ from Poklonskaya to Refat Chubarov, Head of the Mejlis against supposed ‘extremist activities”; the notification of criminal proceedings lodged against Mustafa Dzhemiliev for having tried to enter his homeland; and against Refat Chubarov, for “encroaching upon Russia’s territory”, that is, opposing Russia’s occupation of his native Crimea; the documents about the legally nihilistic charges against the Deputy Head of the Mejlis, Akhtem Chiygoz regarding a demonstration over which Russia has no jurisdiction; the Mejlis’ founding documents which also far pre-date annexation and whose ‘extremism’ is deemed to lied in their stated aim, namely the reinstatement of the Crimean Tatar people’s national and political rights as part of Ukraine.

During the ‘court debate’ on Tuesday, Nariman Dzhelyal, First Deputy Head of the Mejlis demonstrated that the Mejlis is not a civic organization, but a representative assembly and also an international structure with representatives in many other countries. The Mejlis takes part in OSCE and UN activities and is planning to open official representative offices in Brussels and Washington.

Poklonskaya demanded that the Mejlis be banned claiming, for example, that the call from one Turkish organization for the Mejlis to not be outlawed was proof that the Mejlis was an extremist organization. Zair Smedlyaev, Qurultay [Crimean Tatar National Congress] official points out that by the same ‘logic’, the UN, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, European Parliament and a whole range of other international bodies should be considered ‘extremist’.

As reported, it was quite unclear throughout the so-called court proceedings what exactly the prosecutor was trying to ban since there are a large number of regional mejlis which act as autonomous bodies. While the level of knowledge of the de facto prosecutor is certainly pitiful, it is likely that the lack of clarity is quite deliberate. Why explain who is at risk of arrest if you can leave that unknown and therefore particularly frightening? Mustafa Dzhemiliev recently suggested that around 2, 300 people involved in all structures of Crimean Tatar self-government could be immediately at risk.

This court hearing was a farce with the outcome known from the beginning. The only chance of averting the criminalization of a body representing the Crimean Tatar people was a real threat of punitive measures. Aider Mudzhabayev wrote recently that statements in defence of Crimeans facing persecution, in condemnation of repression, are undoubtedly needed, but are still useless – like trying to cure cancer with words.

Cancer spreads.  How far is Russia to be allowed to go?

Refat Chubarov

Edited to add: Today Refat Chubarov, Chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people, ordered that the Mejlis is to perform its activities in an emergency modus operandi for the duration of Russian occupation of Crimea.

Oliver Loode, a member of the Minority Rights Group and the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, described the Mejlis' banning as "a new low in Russia’s treatment of indigenous peoples worldwide, and merits the strongest condemnation from the international community, including the UN system, states and indigenous peoples’ organizations."

He said:

The key to understanding the severity of the situation is the fact that the Crimean Tatar Mejlis is not just another NGO, but a representative institution of Crimean Tatar people who self-identify as indigenous people of Crimea, and who have been acknowledged as such by their home country Ukraine and a growing number of states and institutions around the world, including the European Parliament. As such, the decision to ban the Mejlis directly violates Article 5 of the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

See also

• BBC's John Simpson incites Brits to break the law
• Crimean referendum second anniversary myths
• 'Very existence' of Crimean Tatars under threat
• Russia painting Crimea's Tatars as 'ISIS supporters'
• Stark warning of bloody provocation planned against Crimean Tatars 
• Kremlin creates agency for national minorities as it axes Crimean Tatar media 
• Crimean Tatar TV silenced, searches and arrests continue 
• Crimean Tatar Leaders ‘”Warned” Not to Protest as Media Silenced

 

The Guardian's 'Avatar' view of Aboriginal people

Simplistic and out of touch could be one recent impression of The Guardian's publishing on Aboriginal people.

Take two current examples from the left presenting angry white, male and Western enviromentalist/socialist perspectives.

On the face of it, if you know nothing of the subject matter, Martin Lukacs 'View from the North' on land rights and mining/drilling in Canada is an odd bit of writing.

He describes a meeting with a Master of The Universe (MOTU) on Wall Street, accompanied by (natch) rape apologist Naomi Klein Wolf. The meeting's aim being to push indigenous land rights as having legal force and hence that they should be counted in consideration of a countries credit rating.

The MOTU, shock, agrees. Legally they may be right but "you and whose army" are going to enforce them.

Lukacs' subsequent argument (it's not really reporting) seems to be predicated on the idea that the battle over land rights in Canada will result in the end of mining/drilling. Literally, he seems to be arguing, Canada's First Nations (as they are known) will 'SAVE THE EARTH' from climate change because, y'know, Aboriginal people, like the inhabitants of Pandora, don't want 'land rape' ...

Not all 'Earth Warriors'

The other day I was watching 'Mabo', the ABC drama about the Murray Islander whose long legal battle ended the concept of 'Terra Nullius' -- empty land -- which meant that he had no legal claim to ancestral land.

Eddie Mabo had all sorts of issues to deal with and one of them was his own people. In one of the first scenes in the drama the elders police his behavior on behalf of the white 'protector'. Later fellows drop out of his legal claim and he is left alone.

The Aboriginal experience in Australia is not one experience and is not solely one of oppression by whites, the communities have their own internal problems, often ones experienced by lots of other communities and which come down to being human. Writers like Lukacs ignore all this grey.

Lukacs' hope for humanity's salvation via Aboriginal land rights is predicated on Aboriginal people not wanting any of that nasty mining/drilling. Now I don't follow First Nations' issues closely but a quick Google brings up negotiated settlements between nations and mining companies, here's one signed a few days ago by a community on Vancouver Island:

Elliott called the potential deal "huge" for his people."

"It's going to create jobs," he said.

Details on exactly how revenue would be shared between the company and the First nation have not been worked out yet, Elliot noted.

"I think any percentage is going to be significant," he said.

"We're going to have a big hand in how the whole project works."

Elliott pointed to an agreement his council signed with Fortis B.C. worth $6 million. The First Nation also has stakes in forestry, aquaculture, petroleum and commercial construction.

"This (new) partnership is going to be 10 times, 20 times larger in the sense of creating opportunities for our members," he said.

Now Canada may be having issues with such deals but clearly they exist and they sound, in terms of what Aboriginal leaders say, just like Aboriginal leaders elsewhere, just like those in Australia. They demand to be part of economic development.

Green/left Kryptonite

An Australia elder, Professor Marcia Langton, has caused consternation on the Green Left through her arguing that mining has been a massive economic plus for Aboriginal people:

When W.E.H. Stanner delivered the Boyer Lectures in 1968, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians - An Anthropologist's View, he gave credence, perhaps inadvertently, to the widely held assumption at that time that Aboriginal life was incompatible with modern economic life. Today, the expectation is quite the reverse.

The policies of federal governments for the past decade have made explicit the expectation that educational achievement and employability will be the key outcomes of spending in indigenous affairs portfolios. This is a view shared by most ordinary Australians.

But on the left, and among those opinion leaders who hang on to the idea of the new ''noble savage'', Aboriginal poverty is invisible, masked by their ''wilderness'' ideology. Their unspoken expectation is that no Aboriginal group should become engaged in any economic development.

In her Boyer lecture Langton goes further, asking whether legendary environmental campaigner Tim Flannery had written something he intended to be "provocative and racist". Langton has caused mass outrage of course as environmentalists and the left struggles to deal with her arguments (or resorts to claims that she must be in the pay of the mining companies). I've embedded Langton speaking at last year's Indigenous Business Enterprise and Corporations Conference after the jump.

It is of a pattern. Another Aboriginal elder, Noel Pearson, has faced similar exasperation from the left as he has worked on alternatives to welfare dependency.

So how does the Guardian, which is trying to expand its reach to Australia, deal with this issue of mining and Aboriginal people? It publishes an 'woe-is-us' essay by John Pilger which is entirely about mining and Aboriginal people and which ignores Langton, even though the area he focuses in on -- the Pilbara in Western Australia -- is her focus too.

Pilger silences the major Aboriginal voice contradicting him and ignores the huge debate in his supposed country that her Aboriginal elder's voice has caused. What would you call that if it was not Pilger, the great white exposer of Australia's historic sins, who was doing it? Dare I say racist?

Writes Russell Skelton in The Age:

The attacks on Langton could be filed away as nothing more than a monumental storm in a tiny teacup. But I believe there is something far more profound going on - given the level of vitriol, she has touched some exposed nerves.

What Langton is saying sits uncomfortably with the way the Aboriginal industry - activists, NGOs, Amnesty and anti-intervention groups - have stereotyped Aboriginal Australians as a powerless, downtrodden, oppressed minority living in a world of disadvantage fuelled by government neglect.

It's a view that has its roots in our shocking colonial history and in the landmark battles fought in the 1970s when Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser led the charge on land rights, native title, equal pay, access to welfare and unemployment benefits against a coalition of belligerent miners, ruthless pastoralists and recalcitrant state and territory governments. An essential part of Langton's thesis is that times have changed, old ways of seeing are no longer useful.

Skelton says something which is like Green Left Kryptonite:

[The mining corporation] Rio Tinto has a far superior track record when it comes to creating skills and jobs than any government or NGO.

Australia 'Closing the Gap'

What Pilger fails to tell the Guardian's left/liberal British audience is that there has been an incredible development in Australia over the past decade. As I reported when comparing it to Australia's sickening treatment of asylum seekers arriving by boat, there is now near universal and definitely bipartisan commitment to both Aboriginal development and facing up to history.

Pilger is flat out wrong when he claims that Australia is still trying to bury the past.

All political parties are committed to changing the constitution. Australian TV, as I have also reported, now features Aboriginal stories written, produced and directed by Aboriginal people in prime time and getting hit ratings and awards.

When Kevin Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generations in 2007 he also launched the bipartisan 'Closing The Gap' strategy of systematically meeting targets in education, housing and health. Five years on and one has been met, by the end of 2013 all Indigenous four-year-olds in remote communities will have access to early childhood education.

Australians are well aware of the problems -- the 'gap' -- which Pilger writes exclusively about. He is not telling any of them, that's any Australians, urban/rural, right or left wing, anything they are not both knowledgeable about or concerned about.

Pilger comes with no solutions, none. That is something Australians are sick of and if The Guardian is going to get any traction in Australia it had better start publishing some thinkers coming with solutions, ideas to end the horrors Pilger describes, and not just old white lefties that Brits still think are relevant whilst Australia has moved on.

Edited to add: Just noticed that for the Guardian's audio edition which features the Pilger article that they've picked a traditional, apparently stock, touristy image (pictured right) to illustrate rather than looked a bit harder for one of your average Aboriginal person.

Edited to add: I missed this excellent video report (not embeddable) via The Age about the Aboriginal run multimillion dollar businesses proving themselves in the Pilbara. It interviews some of the owners and I'm left wondering if a photo of one of them could best illustrate a 'typical Aboriginal person' rather than a stock traditional one, eh Guardian? Also wondering if any of these businesses will make it into Pilger's film, supposedly about their area, for ITV?

Listen to Marcia Langton at the 2012 Indigenous Business Enterprise and Corporations Conference after the jump:

'White Australia' lives on

Image via Senthorun Raj

Four hundred years ago boats began arriving in Northern Australia looking for sea cucumber, an animal still prized in Chinese cooking and medicine.

Fishermen from what is now Indonesia would trade with the local Yolngu people. When the British arrived in the area a hundred years later they encouraged the lucrative trade.

Four hundred years on and similar fishing boats coming to Australia's northern shores are being presented in an entirely different light.

Cynical politics has led both major parties to pretend that the country's borders are 'under siege' and 'at risk of invasion'. That is the sort of language deployed against the arrival on those fishing boats of refugees from the world's major trouble spots. Year after year, politicians vie with unworkable plan after unworkable plan to 'stop the boats', the latest being to spend over A$2b on drones to someone find boats in millions of square kilometers of ocean, when it is illegal to 'turn boats back' on the high seas.

The demonisation of desperate and frightened people was already awful -- a grub fight -- but has now reached a new low. The conservative opposition, very likely to be the next government, has taken one case of alleged rape by an asylum seeker in order to propose that all asylum seekers living outside camps (where they all used to be kept until the outcry got too loud over the conditions, particularly the impact on children):

.. are not to be housed near ''vulnerable communities'' - presumably children and, in the context of the alleged assault which sparked the debate, female college students.

They will be subject to ''behaviour protocols'', breach of which will carry ''negative sanction'', which might mean a return to detention, or perhaps criminal charges - it is unclear. The police must be notified and consulted at every instance. And, of course, the neighbourhood must be ''alerted'' to their presence.

Matthew Zagor writes:

Apart from the unavoidable equating of refugees with child sex offenders, there is a clear assumption that they are not to be trusted close to our Australian women, a classic racist trope with its undertones of the sexually threatening foreigner.

There is also a remarkable inversion and appropriation of the rhetoric of vulnerability: it turns out ''we'' are the vulnerable ones, the ones under threat and in need of protection.

Bianca Hall writes in The Age that, asylum seekers on bridging visas, released from detention, are 45 times less likely to be charged with a crime than members of the general public. Almost all these people are genuine refugees, meaning that they will be accepted as asylum seekers, though, as with the UK, there is controversy over increased removals of Tamils.

Since a third wave of 'boat people' began arriving in 1999 Australian politics has been like this, Labour and Liberal alike have played footsie with 'dog whistles' that hark back to Australia's explicitly racist policy history of stoked-up fear of Asians from the North, 'yellow peril', the 'White Australia' immigration policy written into the constitution and finally ditched by Gough Whitlam in the 1970s, with the last racist provision gone in 1978. Bahá'ís and Jews were amongst those also impacted by racist immigration policy.

When the first 'boat people' arrived from South-East Asia in the late seventies the reaction was "symptomatic of an insecure nation threatened by Asian penetration", writes Dr. Rachel Stevens. The numbers then, and in a second wave from the late eighties, were small but they remain small today.

In 2010 134 boats arrived unauthorised in Australia with a total of about 6,879 people on board (including crew). Most asylum seekers arrive by air. There are ten times as many people overstaying their visa, with the largest number of those being British.

Since the first boat with five Vietnamese men arrived in Darwin in 1976 Australia has spent countless billions and huge amounts of political focus on what, to outsiders, certainly to Europeans, is a non-issue. The numbers are tiny. In forty years there's been no 'terrorist threat'. There is no 'solution' to 'secure the border'.

Given how both elements of the media and some politicians have played up and played loose with the issue it's easy to think that Australians are merely reacting, like mushrooms in a cupboard being fed the proverbial. But this forgets the history, what is already out there.

'Atone for the hardness of heart'

It could change. A decade ago Indigenous issues divided the country with many accusing the then Prime Minister, conservative John Howard, of using division on issues like land rights and apologies for past treatment in much the same way that 'boat people' are being used now.

Now? Who said this?

One of the reasons why Aboriginal policy has been so unsuccessful, despite an abundance of official goodwill, is that few policy-makers have ever spent a night in an Aboriginal community or mixed with Aboriginal people except those who have made it into the middle class.

A hippie, liberal big city type? No, that was the extremely conservative likely next Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.

Indigenous issues now unite all the major parties, including the representatives of white and rural Australia, the Nationals. In February:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott put aside politics .. as the lower house passed legislation to create an Act of Recognition of indigenous people.

In a bipartisan process just like that which led up to the 1967 referendum which first recognised Aborigines in the national census the plan is to further recognise the first inhabitants in the constitution. This is difficult as most constitutional change proposed in Australia has failed.

Mr Abbott said he and Ms Gillard were partners on this matter.

He honoured her work and that of other leaders who paved the way over the years.

'Most of all I honour the millions of indigenous people, living and dead, who have loved this country yet maintained their identity, and who now ask only that their existence be recognised and their contributions be acknowledged,' he said.

Australia now had an opportunity to do what should have been done 200 or 100 years ago.

'We need to atone for the omissions and for the hardness of heart of our forebears to enable us all to embrace the future as a united people,' he said.

'We shouldn't feel guilty about our past, but we should be determined to rise above that which now makes us embarrassed,' he said.

Mr Abbott said Australia was a blessed country.

'Except for one thing - we have never fully made peace with the first Australians.'

Maybe, one day, Australia will come together to apply the same logic to their treatment of another marginalised, maligned and dehumanised minority?

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