Latest news with #NarimanDzhelyal
Al Jazeera
17-03-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
As Islam grows in Russia, Muslim prisoners struggle to practise their faith
After arriving in a frigid Siberian jail in November 2023, Nariman Dzhelyal ate nothing but bread and gruel. The bespectacled, bearded Crimean Tatar community leader is a devout Muslim. He said most of the meals he was served contained pork, the consumption of which is forbidden in Islam. 'I just took bread, it wasn't of good quality, and ate it with tea,' Dzhelyal, who had been sentenced to 17 years in jail for 'blowing up a natural gas pipeline' and 'smuggling explosives' in a trial Ukraine called Kremlin-orchestrated, told Al Jazeera. He denied all the allegations against him. Within days after arriving in the drab town of Minusinsk, his diet got marginally better. Breakfasts were tasteless, unsweetened gruel, suppers contained fish, and only one of the lunch dishes was with pork. But diet is by far not the biggest problem tens of thousands of Muslims face in Russia's notoriously cruel penitentiary system. For almost a century, Soviet and Russian jails have been described as a dark underworld governed by unwritten laws. Hardened criminals known as 'crowned thieves' or 'the black caste' still sport elaborate tattoos, speak a sophisticated slang, and maintain a strict, ruthless hierarchy with themselves on top. The jails they control are known as 'black prisons', where wardens collude with 'crowned thieves' and turn a blind eye to drug smuggling, card games and extreme violence. 'Red prisons' are the ones where wardens hold sway. Here, career criminals have accused prison officials of inhumane conditions including torture, solitary confinement, malnutrition and rape. But in the past two decades, a third force has begun affecting Russia's prison population as tens of thousands of Muslims have been convicted of 'terrorism', 'extremism', or other crimes. About 15 percent of Russia's population of 143 million is Muslim. They represent the fastest-growing demographic amid a population decline. Muslim inmates constitute roughly the same percentage of the prison population – 31,000 out of 206,000, Russian Mufti Albir Krganov reportedly said in November 2024. Russia's prison populace has more than halved since Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022. The number of Muslims who volunteered or were enlisted in return for pardons is unknown. According to rights groups and media reports, Russian convicts who convert to Islam are 'automatically' listed as terror suspects and occasionally have their sentences extended for 'extremism'. 'If a convict converts to Orthodox Christianity and gets baptised, he'll be celebrated,' Anna Karetnikova, a former analyst with the Federal Service for Execution of Punishment, Russia's main organisation that runs correctional facilities, told Al Jazeera. If someone converts to Islam, he 'will be listed as someone prone to extremism, his prison's administration will be punished' and intelligence services will pay special attention to him, said Karetnikova, who also worked at an agency overseeing penitentiaries in Moscow and in the Memorial rights group. Muslim migrants from Central Asia who travel to Russia to work are especially vulnerable to criminal persecution because of their poor knowledge of the Russian language, laws and ways of life, rights groups say. Some have been made to fight in Ukraine, reportedly by force, and others have claimed that Russian police and prosecutors target and frame them for crimes committed by others. Abdulaziz, a construction worker in Moscow, told Al Jazeera that police had planted synthetic drugs known as 'spice' on his younger brother, Abdulmumin, in 2022. They electrocuted and beat Abdulmumin with plastic water bottles that leave no bruises so that he 'confessed' to placing drug stashes under park benches, Abdulaziz claimed. Then a judge sentenced Abdulmumin to five and a half years in jail in the Ural Mountains region, but 'luckily, there are enough 'green' inmates there,' Abdulaziz said, referring to Muslim convicts. 'They proved themselves on the zone,' he said, using a slang term for jail, 'and other convicts don't mess with them … The only trouble is the guards, but they accept bribes and turn a blind eye when they have to.' Abdulaziz refused to provide his last name and other details. Al Jazeera could not independently verify his claims. Some Russian jails are badly suited for Muslim inmates. Rights groups say that in some prisons, schedules ban eating and leaving beds between 10pm and 6am, turning each early morning and late evening prayer into a violation. Fasting during Ramadan can also be difficult for some convicts. There are, however, attempts to educate prison staffers. 'They have to be taught the basics of Islam, they have to know the mentality of [Muslim] inmates they work with. For some, a Muslim prayer alone is a manifestation of 'extremism',' Azat Gaunutdinov, an ethnic Tatar man who converted to Islam in jail and started a rights group that monitors the rights of Muslim convicts, told the Kavkazsky Uzel news website in 2020. The situation often depends on individual prisons. The wardens in Minusinsk, where Crimean Tatar leader Dzhelyal served most of his sentence, were lenient. He and other Muslims were allowed to pray and eat their Ramadan meals in their beds. They could get the Quran and Muslim books from the prison library – unlike Muslims in other prisons, where the Quran and Arabic are banned altogether, and only certain Russian translations are permitted, rights groups say. According to Dzhelyal, some jailed Muslims refuse to engage in illegal activities while imprisoned, such as smuggling cigarettes, mobile phones or alcohol and drugs. 'There are, indeed, Muslims who say, 'We have no use for these criminal rules of yours.' Because [these rules] can often contradict the norms every Muslim lives according to,' Dzhelyal said. The number of Muslim inmates in Russian jails began to increase in the early 2000s, when the second war in Chechnya began. The Kremlin cracked down on what it called 'extremists' in other North Caucasus provinces, especially in multiethnic Dagestan. Thousands were jailed. Decades later, Russian authorities and prison administrations still have not found 'any response whatsoever' to the challenge, analyst Karentikova said. 'There's nothing but sticks and carrots, no attempts to understand something, to work out some strategy.'
Al Jazeera
28-01-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
The Crimean Tatar imprisoned by Russia, promoted to high office by Ukraine
Kyiv, Ukraine – Seventeen years in jail for 'smuggling explosives' and 'organising a diversion' to blow up a natural gas pipeline. That's the sentence Nariman Dzhelyal, a Crimean Tatar community leader in the annexed Black Sea peninsula, was handed in 2022 after a year-long trial that Ukraine decried as 'trumped-up' and orchestrated by the Kremlin. Dzhelyal, 44, denied all of the allegations against him. He said he could have been charged with anything from 'separatism' to 'attempts to undermine Russia's constitutional order'. These are the accusations thousands of Kremlin critics and Muslims have faced in Chechnya, Dagestan and other mostly Muslim regions. But in Dzhelyal's case, he and other Tatar activists believe the Kremlin chose 'diversion' as a possible pretext for wider persecution of activists of the Mejlis, the informal Tatar parliament, and the entire Tatar community. The Kremlin labelled the Mejlis an 'extremist' organisation' in 2016. 'Through my case, there was a possibility – and there's still one – to proclaim the Mejlis not just an extremist, but a terrorist organisation, and spread harsher persecution to all of its activists,' Dzhelyal told Al Jazeera in the Kyiv office of the Mejlis. He was released in a prisoner swap in June 2024, arriving in Kyiv to be greeted by his family, dignitaries and reporters. Had the Mejlis been branded 'terrorist', anyone displaying its insignia – including the tamga, a blue flag with a yellow seal that is ubiquitous among Tatar drivers – would have faced jail. The tamga dates back to the Muslim dynasty that ruled Crimea as part of Ottoman Turkiye until Russia annexed it in 1783. However, the Kremlin appears to have opted against widening the crackdown. Observers say the reasons may vary from pressure from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the conflict of interests among Russian law enforcement agencies and political clans. 'There's no reasonable logic; there are uncoordinated and not-always-compatible interests and views of various agencies,' Kyiv-based rights advocate Vyacheslav Likhachyov told Al Jazeera. However, Moscow still singles out Tatars, whose community of 250,000 comprises only 12 percent of Crimea's population. Out of what rights groups have termed Crimea's 208 'political' prisoners, they say 125 are Tatars. Many arrested Tatars await trials for months or even years, and those sentenced to jail on charges ranging from 'terrorism' to 'discrediting Russia's military' often end up in distant Siberian prisons. 'People are jailed for nothing. These people didn't blow up anyone, didn't kill anyone, did nothing of the kind,' Dzhelyal said. Tatars once dominated Crimea, but these days, the majority of the peninsula's population are ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, whose forefathers arrived after the 1944 deportation of the entire Tatar community. Soviet leader Josef Stalin accused them of 'collaboration' with Nazi Germany, but experts say the real reason was Crimea's geographic and cultural proximity to Turkiye – only 270km (170 miles) across the Black Sea and sharing hundreds of years of history. The Tatars were deported to Central Asia in cattle cars, with little food or water, and almost half died en route. 'One day won't be enough, one or two books won't be enough to tell how they tortured us. When we die, our bones will remember it,' an elderly villager who survived the deportation told this reporter in 2014, just days before the Moscow-organised 'referendum' that made Crimea part of Russia. Dzhelyal's father, Enver, was six in 1944. His family ended up in the sun-scorched Uzbek city of Navoi, where he would work at a chemical plant and meet Nariman's mother. He died in 2022, and Nariman was not allowed to leave jail to attend his funeral. 'Not being able to say farewell wasn't easy,' Dzhelyal said. 'But it was Allah's will; I perceive it the way a Muslim should.' The community dreamed of returning to Crimea, but Moscow allowed it only in the late 1980s – without compensation for lost lives and property. Tatars mostly settled in arid northern Crimea, while locals demonised and ostracised them, and regional authorities did not allow them to hold jobs in law enforcement and administration. When Moscow flew in thousands of soldiers and organised pro-Russian rallies in Crimea in February 2014, Tatar leaders immediately understood the danger. They knew how Moscow handled 'extremism' in the Muslim-dominated areas in the North Caucasus and the Volga River region. Dzhelyal recalled a conversation with a Chechen man who pleaded with him not to 'let them treat you the way they treated us'. 'They killed as many Chechens as there are Tatars,' the man told him. The Mejlis chose a Gandhian policy of non-violent resistance. 'Russia was provoking a conflict. They just needed one, because it would justify the presence of the Russian army as 'peacekeepers',' Dzhelyal said. Tatars stayed away from altercations with taciturn Russian servicemen and 'self-defence' units that were put together and trained by Russian officers. Dzhelyal and other Tatar leaders claimed that Moscow specifically brought in Serbian ultra-nationalists who had participated in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide of Muslims. In March 2014, this reporter saw four armed Serbians patrolling a road in southern Crimea. The non-violent resistance helped prevent turning Crimea into another Chechnya, where Moscow's 'counter-terrorist operation' morphed into a war, analysts said. 'There is no counter-terrorist operation because the Tatars' resistance is essentially non-violent. And the religious factor is less' significant than in other Muslim regions of Russia, Maksym Butkevych, a Kyiv-based human rights advocate and serviceman, told Al Jazeera. However, blood was spilled. According to activists, a Tatar protester was abducted before the 'referendum', and his tortured body was found with his eyes poked out. Dozens of Tatars were abducted and are presumed dead. Hundreds have been arrested, or have had their houses searched by armed men who often broke in at dawn, frightening children. Tatar businessmen face pressure, blackmail and expropriations. However, Dzhelyal is adamant that 'Ukraine is doomed to be independent' from any Russian meddling. 'Sooner or later, we will get some preferences for [Tatars], and it will always displease Moscow,' he said. On December 20, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appointed Dzhelyal Ukraine's ambassador to Turkiye.
