So I’m sure that any politically aware person has been following events in Ukraine.
As a brief summary…
- Ukraine is split between an EU-leaning west bordering Europe and a Russian-leaning East bordering Russie
- After the 2010 election Ukraine had a very pro-Russian, very corrupt government
- Big protests against the government have just brought down the old government and a new pro-EU govt is in power.
- The old leader has fled to Russian protection, Russian military is being activated.
All simple right? Not much for Muslims to be concerned about?
Kind of. Although only 0.6% of Ukrainians are Muslim, most of them live in the Crimean Peninsula, where they are 12% of the population.
Crimea used to be a Muslim Khanate until captured by Russia in 1793. Russia expelled most of the Muslims, called Tartars, at the time, and encourage Russian immigration to Crimea to repopulate it more “reliably”. By 1930 only 36% of Crimeans were Tartars. In 1943 Russia decided that the Crimean Tartars were enemies of the state and deported them completely, killing half of the remaining Tartar population. When Tartars were permitted to return to their homelands at the collapse of the USSR, their numbers were reduced to just being 12% of Crimea’s population today. As you can imagine, Tartars don’t like Russians given how much they suffered at Russian hands.
But that’s not the whole story. All those Russians who settled in Crimea… stayed there when Ukraine became independent. Russia was allowed to keep a major naval base in Crimea too.
And today, given the civil upheaval in Ukraine, the majority of the Crimeans being of Russian origin are very unhappy with the new government’s pro-EU, anti-Russian stance, and very unhappy with how the pro-Russian national leadership has been ejected. They are now agitating for Crimean independence from Ukraine.
The Crimean Tartars, on the other hand, are very enthusiastic about the change away from being pro-Russia and are very supportive of the new Ukrainian government.
With the pro-government people in Crimea mostly being its Muslim minority, and the majority in Crimea being anti-government, this places most of Ukraine’s Muslims in a perilous situation. They are the most fervent advocates of the new government but live in the middle of the stronghold of opposition to the government.
The Muslim leaders are already saying that their community witnessed the gunmen who took over Crimea’s parliament come directly out of the Russian military base… embarrassing Russia. On the other hand, pro-Russian separatists are now telling the media that Tartars are going around killing innocent Russians! The vicious anti-Muslim propaganda that we saw before atrocities in Bosnia seems to be kicking off again…
