Over a year after Crimean Tatar Reshat Ametov was abducted and killed for his one-man protest as Russian forces took over Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, his brother is on a solitary quest for the truth -- and journalists could hold the key.
Over the last year, the brother, Refat Ametov, has spent uncountable hours obsessively watching and re-watching the same clips of video footage. Shot in Crimea on March 3, 2014, they show his younger brother, Reshat, standing in front of soldiers in unmarked uniform guarding the Crimean Cabinet of Ministers in Lenin Square in Simferopol.
Passersby, journalists and men in camouflage and with red armbands mill around the square; police sirens sound in the background. For over an hour, Reshat Ametov just stands there. Then some of the men in camouflage take his arms and lead him to a black car that has just driven up, and he is not there anymore.
This video footage is the last time Refat can see his brother alive.
Who abducted and killed Crimean Tatar Reshat Ametov in Simferopol during the Russian takeover of Crimea? A video clip in this report may hold clues to solving the case.
Reshat, 39, a Crimean Tatar father of three who had been making a solitary and silent protest against the Russian occupation, was found murdered almost two weeks later, on the eve of the illegal referendum on Crimea joining the Russian Federation.
Now Refat hopes clues in the footage could help find the killers of his brother, dubbed by international human rights organisations the first victim of the Russian annexation.
Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms had just taken over government buildings throughout the peninsula on Feb. 27, 2014 and installed a new government which called for unification with Russia.
This was opposed by the peninsula’s indigenous Muslim people, the Crimean Tatars, but any organized opposition was threatened by rapidly-formed brigades of locals and Russians, calling themselves Crimean people’s self-defense militias. These are the men in camouflage or with red armbands clearly seen in the March 3 video footage, who take Reshat and drive away with him in the car.
His body was found 60 kilometers away, near the village of Zemlyanichnoe in Belogorsk Oblast, on March 15.
Do you know these journalists? They may have witnessed the abduction of Reshat Ametov outside the Russian-controlled Crimean government headquarters in Simferopol.
Over a year after Russia’s annexation, no one has been charged over Reshat’s kidnapping and death.
Despite the evidence of the video footage, much of which went out live on the Crimean Tatar TV channel ATR, Crimean government head Sergei Aksyonov announced he was confident the self-defense militias were not involved.
Authorities opened a case into murder but not abduction, and suspended the investigation in November 2014, officially because they can’t find a suspect.
The story has completely dropped out of Russian and Crimean media, where independent outlets, including ATR, have been raided and shut down.
“Crimean mass media won’t cover it in principle, and people from civil society organisations or the authorities won’t touch this case, because it’s 100 percent lost,” Refat told the Kyiv Post from his home near Simferopol. “The people who did this serve Russia.”
Yet Refat, who before the annexation worked as an electrician, has not given up.
He has been hunting out more evidence in a one-man investigation he hopes will finally bring his brother’s kidnappers, torturers and killers to justice.
“You have to know what they did to my brother,” he said.
The evidence he has collected includes hard-to-view photographs from the autopsy showing the multiple injuries Reshat suffered.
“He was tortured over 10 days. They stuck a spike through his forehead to kill and get rid of him. Before that he was alive, through all of what they did…When people know that, they feel something different, right?”
When, on March 5, a friend alerted him to the video showing his brother’s abduction, Refat first sent his and Reshat’s family to safe locations.
He found out which division of the self-defense militia had been on guard on Lenin Square that day, and found their headquarters.
“I was there, and Reshat was [taken] there too, I guess,” he said. “I asked them for help, and they actually tried to help me, they were just simple, local guys.”
The militia members he met offered to look for Reshat among the prisoners being held in basements around the city. They claimed to find nothing. Refat tried to track down people visible in the video footage who might be able to offer evidence or clues. The footage shows several journalists at the scene. In particular a cameraman, visible only from the back, follows the group with Reshat to the car, apparently filming his abductors close up.
Finally Refat’s obsessive searching turned up another shot in which this cameraman’s face, and that of another journalist working with him, is visible. The British TV documentary series Unreported World recently produced a short film to try to uncover these journalists’ identities.
It seems likely they are foreign; the Unreported World film resulted in one lead to a Spanish journalist, which however turned out to be false.
Refat and the family’s lawyer Emil Kurbedinov believe new evidence these journalists may possess could help reopen a case.
Because the investigation was into murder, instead of murder with abduction (a category in Russian law) the three individuals seen in the existing footage taking Reshat away are legally considered witnesses and not suspects.
“The investigator couldn’t get anywhere near them… There were some kind of people and that’s all; they were there and then they weren’t; it’s a fairytale of course, like the car was there and then it wasn’t,” Refat said. “It ends up that they didn’t abduct [Reshat], except that’s absurd.”
Olya Skrypnyk, deputy head of the Crimean Human Rights Field Mission, said that a separate investigation into abduction should have been opened.
“We know there are people who are in the video, and we know the investigator says they are members of the self defense who are responsible for keeping public order, and so they decided to temporarily remove [Reshat]. But the case contents show that it’s abduction,” she said.
Skrypnyk said the murder investigation procedure should also have treated the three men from the self defense militia as participants or accessories, leaving the court to decide on their degree of involvement. “But the investigation never even reaches this point,” she said. “The investigation is protecting the suspects. They will never come to court even if a murder suspect is found.”
Possible new evidence from the cameraman shown filming could change that.
“Then we’d really be able to see who did it, and that they are abductors,” said Refat. He and Kurbedinov both called on the journalists to come forward. “Why do they keep silent, where are those video files?” asked Kurbedinov. “They should carry out their professional duty and produce these recordings.”
The Ametov case, according to Skrypnyk, is one of three major cases in post-annexation Crimea showing manipulation of evidence and procedure (the others concern the murder of Ukrainian army officer Stanislav Karachevsky in April 2014, and the trial of Aleksandr Kostenko, a pro-Ukrainian activist charged with injuring a riot police officer in Kyiv in February 2014).
Meanwhile numerous international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Freedom House, have issued damning reports of human rights violations in Crimea since Russian annexation, with Freedom House assessing the peninsula as 6.5 “unfree” on a scale of 7 (Russia scored 6).
Many of the violations, which include house searches, detentions and charges of “extremism,” and disappearances, involve Crimean Tatars, who make up about 12 percent of the Crimean population and who largely boycotted the March 2014 referendum.
This entire ethnic group was deported in 1944 just after the Soviet Red Army had liberated Crimea from German occupation; the deportation and next few years in exile wiped out an estimated 46 percent of the nation.
Refat and Reshat Ametov’s grandfather was a decorated Red Army reconnaissance officer who went into exile with his family, and Refat and Reshat were born in Central Asia.
After a 50-year peaceful protest campaign, the Crimean Tatars were allowed to come back from the late 1980s, but faced many challenges to resettling.
Before March 2014, Reshat had belonged to a working group which promoted Crimean Tatar rights in Crimea. He had been pushing the local village council to implement a Ukrainian decree which granted Muslims a separate plot for burials. “He wasn’t involved in politics, but he really cared about things,” says Refat. “He never wanted to fight; he always wanted to do everything by law.”
Reshat had told his brother about his plan to protest the Russian occupation.
“I understood how dangerous it was; I said no, it’s too late,” his brother recalls.
On Feb. 28, 2014 Reshat put a post on his Facebook page: “Going on Monday to the Cabinet of Ministers to stand in protest. Have you got the guts???”
That was his verdict and his death sentence, says Refat. “He understood that there was no support anywhere. He wrote his last phrase, and went.”
Refat believes his brother’s silent one-man protest, which he carried out as soon as Lenin Square was opened again after several days of complete closure, was motivated by his desire to see justice done.
“I’m sure he stood there just because he was convinced he had a right to. Why didn’t he have a right to be there? He’d always had that right, on any day.”
Refat repeatedly returns to his brother’s love of justice and his solitary action, with the same obsessiveness with which he has watched those hours of footage showing Reshat in front of the soldiers before he is taken away by the self-defense militia.
“Only my brother took action. He was alone, the only one who went out,” he said. “They say Don Quixote fought with windmills. It was something like that. And in reality no one else did it except him.”
While Russian media dubbed the Russian soldiers who took over the peninsula “polite people,” all human rights reports single out the self-defense militias for special censure.
According to the Crimean Human Rights Field Mission, since March 2014 they have been involved in the abduction, harassment and torture of Crimean Tatars, journalists and 20 Ukrainian activists; attacks on non-Moscow Patriarchy Orthodox churches; searches of mosques and madrassas, and raids on commercial buildings and businesses.
The field mission notes evidence of force in the disappearance of at least nine other people in Crimea since March 2014.
In two cases, witnesses saw the men – Crimean Tatars – being forced into vehicles and driven away by people who appeared to be from the self defence militias.
A working group of relatives of the disappeared and relevant authority representatives has been formed, but none of these cases have been solved.
The Russian-backed Crimean authorities have proposed several laws and amendments to legalise the self defence militias and exempt their actions from liability. The militias now have the status of a state public institution, in practice directly subordinate to Aksyonov, the Kremlin-installed head of Crimea, who has distributed medals and certificates for “faithful performance of duty in protecting public order”
For more than a year, “not a single member of the self defense has been called to account for anything, although there are hundreds of cases of seizing private property, harassing journalists, kidnapping, torture,” said Skrypnyk. “Instead, they receive thanks and awards.”
Skrypnyk, from Crimea but now based in Kyiv, says that monitoring human rights on the peninsula, which she calls “a theatre of the absurd,” is increasingly difficult,
“When we’re asked to give any kind of evaluation of the situation as lawyers or human rights activists we can’t, because it’s outside of any recognizable human rights framework,” she said. “It’s outside the framework of any kind of legislation, it’s outside even Russian legislation.”
In this context, Refat Ametov’s dogged pursuit of justice can seem as quixotic as his brother’s one-man protest.
He and Kurbedinov are currently waiting to be granted access to the suspended investigation files, which number thousands of pages.
“I’ve already lost a year. I haven’t been earning anything; I don’t know what I’m living on,” Refat said, when asked how he found time for his investigation. But he has no thoughts of giving up, wherever the investigation leads.
“It’ll be deeper and more difficult information; it’s hard for me to even think about it,” he said. “But whatever I find out can’t be any more terrible. I just don’t know what I’ll do with what I find out. I don’t know what will happen then.”
