Pickets in support of Crimean Tatars, against Kremlin repression held in St. Petersburg
On January 18, the Russian opposition initiative Strategy 18 has held its third action in the center of St. Petersburg to protest official xenophobia and oppression of the native people in Russian-occupied Crimea.
The activists have condemned the most recent ‘invention’ of the Russian investigative authorities, that is, the charge of the Crimean Muslims with ‘plotting coup d’etat’ in Russia. One poster calls to free the political prisoners Emir Husein Kuku, Enver Bekirov, Muslim Aliev, and Vadym Siruk, who have spent already almost a year in pretrial jail under another absurd and groundless pretext. Now the occupation investigators claim that the four men, possessing no weapons, could allegedly afford to ‘overthrow the Russian government’ (while living and working peacefully in the Ukrainian Crimean town of Yalta seized by Russian invaders in 2014). “Do you believe in such a nonsense?,” a poster asks.
Other banners have been devoted to the shameful similarities between the Soviet genocidal deportation of 1944 and the contemporary Kremlin policy of ethnically-targeted repression and expulsion of Crimean Tatars from their homeland. “From Stalin to Putin: the crimes against Crimean Tatars are going on,” “Crimean Tatars today: searches, arrests, deportations. No to genocide!”, “Russia has no future without the repentance for the crimes against the deported nations,” read the slogans.
