On a crooked lane in the Crimean capital the afternoon prayer in the Kebir mosque has just let out and a group of believers gathers beneath its lone minaret to say their presidential vote in Ukraine's weekend ballot will be a vote against Russia.
It is a heartfelt sentiment among Crimea's quarter of a million Tartars who make up 12 percent of the peninsula's population.
PHOTO: AP
More than 60 years have passed since the Soviet Red Army drove the entire Tartar population from Crimea at gunpoint on suspicion of collaborating with the Nazis during World War II and it has been more than a decade since Ukraine parted ways with Russia.
But the Tartars still regard Moscow's policies with deep distrust.
"Better dirty American democracy than Russian totalitarianism," said Muhamad Vilor Osmanov, a Tatar student in a local university who like many of his kin opposes the Russian-speaking, Moscow-backed presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich.
Yanukovich, who has pledged closer ties to Russia and official status for the Russian language in Ukraine if he is elected, had Russian President Vladimir Putin's backing from the beginning of the campaign.
He has proved massively popular with the Russian-speaking populations elsewhere in eastern and southern Ukraine, but Crimea's Islamic residents do not share that enthusiasm for Moscow's man.
"If Yanukovich comes to power he will emulate Putin's regime. Look at the mess he made in Chechnya," Osmanov said of the Russian president.
The Tartars' relationship with the much larger Russian population of the Crimean peninsula has never been easy.
In 1944, more than 200,000 Crimean Tartars, descendants of the Mongol Golden Horde, were deported to Siberia and Central Asia.
And for centuries the Russian Empire fought bloody wars with the Tartars' ethnic cousins from Ottoman Turkey to retain control of this strategic Black Sea territory, which was only signed over to Ukraine in 1956 by the late Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
But the elections have pitted the two communities against each other anew ahead of a rerun presidential vote scheduled for Sunday.
The Tartars' modest tent camp in support of the Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko -- modeled on the massive opposition tent city which sprang up in Kiev after a contested November ballot -- is overshadowed by masses of Yanukovich supporters who wave Russian flags and brandish banners reading "Forever with Russia."
Data from the last vote, which was declared invalid by Ukraine's top court due to massive fraud and ballot-rigging, point to a vote along ethnic lines with some 16 percent of the population voting for Yushchenko and 82 percent for Yanukovich.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS