When Zarina Dzhepparova, the wife of a Crimean Tatar political prisoner, got a call from her sister on Dec. 2, she knew the drill already – stay calm and reach out to a trusted lawyer.
Police had come to Dzhepparova’s legal registration address in Crimea seeking to interrogate her. Failing to find her there, the police forced her neighbors to give them the phone number of Dzhepparova’s sister and answer many peculiar questions.
What religion does Dzhepparova follow? How long ago did she convert to Islam? Does she adhere to the main canons of Islam? Does she wear a headscarf? And how would the neighbors characterize her?
“We have to identify the neophytes,” the police told them, referring to supposedly fervent, new followers of Islam.
Dzhepparova says that she is the victim of the Russian authorities’ profiling of Muslims, a practice that has led Russia to throw hundreds of Ukrainian citizens in prison on accusations of terrorism and extremism.
Since Russia illegally occupied the Crimean peninsula in 2014, accusations of extremism have become one of the Kremlin-backed authorities’ strongest tools to pressure the Muslim Crimean Tatar minority, which has stubbornly resisted Russia’s illegal presence in their homeland.
Now, attending a mosque in Crimea is more than enough to be identified as a potential religious extremist and become a victim of constant police harassment.
Crimean Tatars during funerals of Reshat Ametov, a 38-year-old Crimean Tatar, whose beaten body was found on March 17, 2016. (Anastasia Vlasova)
‘Operation Neofit’
Activists believe that the police interrogated several women — and attempted to interrogate Dzhepparova — as part of Operation Neofit (“neophyte” in Russian). It aims to compile a list of Muslims in Crimea to allow the police to monitor their activity. Special attention is paid to those who were not born into a Muslim family, but converted to Islam.
Dzhepparova converted to Islam over 10 years ago, after marrying her husband Arsen Dzhepparov.
“The neighbours told my sister that they had given her number to the police. She was terrified, thinking I’d be taken away like my husband,” Dzhepparova recalled in a conversation with the Kyiv Post.
Arsen Dzhepparov was arrested in April 2016 after local authorities raided their family home early in the morning. Three years later, he and five other Crimean Muslims were sentenced to a combined 76 years in prison for their alleged affiliation with Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international Islamist political organization, which seeks to unite Muslims around the world in one Islamic state.
It has been recognized as a terrorist organization in Russia since 2003, but remains legal in Ukraine and most Western countries.
Dzhepparov was imprisoned for 8 years. Global human rights NGO Amnesty International deemed the case fabricated and labeled him and others prisoners of conscience.
Several days before they tried to interrogate his wife, the police paid a visit to another wife of a Crimean Tatar persecuted by the Kremlin, Anna Bogacheva.
She converted to Islam 9 years ago, a year before getting married.
Men in civilian clothes arrived in an unmarked car and introduced themselves as policemen, Bogacheva told the Crimean Solidarity human rights initiative.
Right away, they asked Bogacheva whether she was a member of any religious organization. What followed was similar to Dzhepparova’s incident: a series of questions about her religious beliefs and lifestyle. After reaching out to a lawyer, she demanded to see the documents providing legal grounds for her to be questioned.
What she saw were lists of “neophytes” in different areas of the city and biographical details of Crimean Muslims, including Bogacheva and her husband Vadym Siruk. He was arrested with Dzhepparov in 2016 and eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison. Siruk is now serving his term in Bashkortostan, a region in central Russia.
On Dec. 3, police visited Natalia Bekirova, the wife of Crimean Tatar Inver Bekirov, another prisoner of conscience who was arrested with Dzhepparov and Bogachev in 2016.
Bekirova married her husband back in 1989 and also eventually converted to Islam.
She was asked which mosque she goes to and whether she attends any religious groups. Other questions involved her children and her sources of income, Crimean Solidarity reported.
“All these visits, checks and interrogations remind me of a state that seeks out the ‘wrong believers’ to punish them… this is nothing but discrimination on the basis of religion,” Dzhepparova says.
Crimean Tatars who on Sept. 16, 2020, were convicted on terrorism charges by a Russian court, pose for a picture in the courtroom in this archive photo. (Crimean Solidarity/Facebook)
Familiar practice
Religious profiling of Muslims is not a new practice in Russia.
In the North Caucasus region and the republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan — all majority Muslim — law enforcement has actively monitored Muslim believers, earning them criticism from local lawyers and activists who say it amounts to discrimination on religious grounds.
In 2019, a scandal erupted in Tatarstan when a police officer asked the directors of a local school to compile a list of all students whose families adhere to strict religious beliefs. Specifically, the police were interested in “those who wear hijab,” the headcovering for Muslim women. They also wanted to know when exactly the students started following Islamic values.
“Those are ready-made lists for Islamophobes,” lawyer Ruslan Nagiyev told Business Online, a local newspaper in Tatarstan’s capital, Kazan. He believes such profiling infringes upon the constitutional right to freedom of conscience and faith, as well as the individual’s right to privacy.
Lilia Gemedzhy, a well-known Crimean lawyer, thinks that experience in Russian republics such as Tatarstan shows that Crimean Tatar families in the occupied peninsula are at risk of persecution for their religious beliefs.
“We’ve been following similar cases in Russia and often people who get out of jail are soon thrown back in prison, sometimes without even making it home,” she told the Kyiv Post. “It is enough to exit the premises of the prison and the police will charge you with a different crime. Sometimes they are charged again while they are at the prison, supposedly for some recruiting activities and more.”
She believes that the main goal of the Russian government is to crush dissent and ostracize Muslims from society.
“These people who have enough courage to be different, to reject the official point of view… they have to be outcasts,” Gemedzhy said.
People attend a ceremony commemorating the victims of the 1944 deportation of the indigenous people of Crimea, the Crimean Tatars, at Sofiivska Square in Kyiv on May 18, 2018. (Mykhailo Markiv)
Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatars are an ethnic group of Turkic origin that is native to Crimea.
Their history includes three deportations from their homeland – first, when the Russian Empire annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783; then when the Soviet regime deported them to Central Asia during World War II; and, finally, when the Russian government annexed the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014. After Russia seized Crimea, many Tatars were forced to flee their homeland again for security reasons.
According to some estimates, the deportation of Crimean Tatars by the USSR in 1944 – an act recognized as genocide in Ukraine – killed nearly half of the Crimean Tatar population at the time.
Since the illegal occupation in 2014, Crimean Tatars have been subject to hundreds of arbitrary detentions, illegal searches, interrogations and absurd charges of terrorism. The minority actively opposed Russian aggression in the peninsula and protested for religious freedom, for which they have been persecuted ever since.
Crimean Tatar activists, journalists and lawyers who chose to stay in Crimea after annexation have faced wiretapping, surveillance and threats from the Russian authorities. Many have received warnings from the police or have been sentenced to long terms in Russian prisons.
According to the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, over 100 Crimean Tatars are currently political prisoners of the Kremlin. Most were imprisoned for their alleged connection to Hizb ut-Tahrir.
In a statement issued on Sept. 16, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine called criminal cases against Crimean Muslims “blatantly fabricated.”
But the Kremlin-imposed de facto authorities in Crimea continue to illegally raid homes of Crimean Tatars, looking for anything related to Islam so they can link them to Hizb ut-Tahrir.
“Any public events, protests and pickets at which people criticize the repressive practices in Crimea annoy the authorities and security officials,” Lutfiye Zudiyeva, a human rights defender and activist with Crimean Solidarity, told the Kyiv Post.
She was also arrested by Russia because someone tagged her in a Facebook post that supposedly contained prohibited Hizb ut-Tahrir symbols. Along with her, the police detained Mumine Saliyeva, an activist and coordinator of the Crimean Childhood program within the Crimean Solidarity network. Both women were fined and released.
The Russian government is hoping that activists will be afraid of the country’s repressive policies and will censor themselves, Zudiyeva told Kyiv Post.
“But this won’t work with Crimean Tatars,” she says.
“Their life has been like this for centuries. Their struggle for rights has always been merged with great challenges. They had to sacrifice time, property and sometimes years of freedom. And they defeated fear back then.”
