Since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, armed men have shown up frequently to search the cinder-block houses, mosque and school in Sary-Su, a settlement of the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim ethnic minority that has long suffered from discrimination in the peninsula that is its historic homeland.
The worst shock came in September, when two men in the town of 3,000 were abducted.
Now the community “is trembling with fear,” said Rebiya Setarova, an 80-year-old Tatar, as she tottered anxiously across a dirt road to check on her son and grandchildren ahead of Friday prayers. “Now I worry for the fate of my son. Everybody worries about the children.”
Police have made no arrests, and the kidnappers’ identities remain a mystery. However, Setarova has no doubts about who is responsible.
“This is what we get when Russia comes to Crimea,” she said.
The fears and uncertainties of people in Sary-Su sum up how life has been upended for the 300,000-strong Crimean Tatar community. Deported en masse to Central Asia by the Soviets 70 years ago, they began returning to Crimea in the 1980s to rebuild their lives in an independent Ukraine.
Russia’s annexation in March, which many Tatars vocally opposed, overturned their world. Since then, the Tatars’ self-ruling body, the Mejlis, has been disbanded by Russian authorities, its highest-ranking leaders barred from re-entering Crimea and dozens of impromptu searches for narcotics, weapons and banned literature conducted in Tatar neighborhoods across the region.
Human rights experts say Russia is punishing them for speaking out against annexation.
“For their openly critical position, the authorities have been cracking down on dissent,” Human Rights Watch researcher Yulia Gorbunova said.
It was a warm September evening in Sary-Su when Abdureshit Dzhepparov’s 18-year-old son, Islyam, served him Turkish coffee and left the house. Thirty minutes later, neighbors were on the telephone: They had seen Islyam, along with his 23-year-old cousin, frisked and forced into a dark blue Volkswagen van by men dressed in black.
The van sped away. Neither of the kidnapped men has been seen since.
“When these things happen, you can’t even make plans — every night, if your children are out ... as a parent you can’t sleep until they get home,” said Dzhepparov, who also has a daughter in high school.
Elsewhere in Crimea, at least seven other Tatars have vanished since March, including three who had been active in demonstrations calling for the region to remain part of Ukraine. Two of the abducted were later found dead. The others are missing.
Police have opened investigations into the disappearances, and Crimean leader Sergei Aksyonov has attempted to reassure the Tatars that their community is being treated fairly.
“We have respect for people of any faith or confession, and I can guarantee that there will be no infringements based on nationality on Crimean territory,” Aksyonov told reporters.
Residents of Sary-Su are worried that the new lives they built from scratch in Crimea could quickly unravel. This settlement by a creek — the name means “Yellow Water” in the Tatar language — sprang up in the 1990s, when families returning from exile occupied empty fields and built their homes.
The pro-Moscow authorities say the searches were intended to look for drugs, guns and literature banned by Russian law.
Human Rights Watch said that many searches, sometimes conducted in the middle of the night, involved dozens of masked men with guns.
In October, when Aksyonov met with Dzhepparov in the nearby city of Belogorsk, hundreds of angry Sary-Su residents massed to vent their outrage over the kidnappings and official actions toward the Crimean Tatars.
“There were snipers on the roofs, the entire city was surrounded by troops,” said Dzhepparov, who said he was nervous the enraged crowd might get out of hand. “If something had suddenly gone wrong, it would have been a catastrophe.”
Such fears seem well-founded: Tatar protests occurred frequently and peacefully under Ukrainian rule, but since Russian annexation, they have sometimes ended in confrontations with ethnic Russians or police.
“Ukrainian authorities were diplomatic and allowed the steam to be let out of the valve,” attorney Dzhemil Kemishev said. “People came out and protested, talked about the things that were worrying them, and things ended there, but when you’re being told not to do that, it’s like when you don’t lift the lid off a pot of boiling water: Sooner or later it will explode.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion