BAKHCHISARAY, Crimea – When Khaiser Dzhemilev shot the family security guard to death in Bakhchisaray three years ago, the local tragedy soon took on political dimensions.
The case of Dzhemilev, the son of Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev, became caught up in the dispute between Ukraine and Russia following the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Khaiser, now 33, had a history of mental illness and said he killed the security guard, Fevzi Edemov, by accident.
Because Khaiser’s father Mustafa was a famous Soviet dissident, a Ukrainian member of parliament and leader of Crimea’s indigenous Muslim group, the Crimean Tatars, the case made the news. Khaiser was jailed in Crimea, awaiting sentencing.
But then the lives of the Dzhemilevs and many others were turned upside-down, as Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in the days after the EuroMaidan Revolution in early 2014.
Mustafa Dzhemilev was banned by Russian authorities from entering Crimea, and Khaiser’s domestic criminal case became entangled in Russian, Ukrainian and international relations.
But for Khaiser’s mother, Safinar Dzhemileva, the death and her son’s jailing remains, first and foremost, a “tragedy of our family,” she said.
Born in Siberian exile
In October, in the same attic room in Bakhchisaray from which her son stole the gun which killed Edemov, Safinar looked at an old family photograph. It shows Khaiser as a baby with his parents in Siberia. He was born while Mustafa Dzhemilev was there in exile between six prison sentences in the Soviet Union for campaigning for the right to return to Crimea after Joseph Stalin-era deportations of the Crimean Tatars in 1944.
“Khaiser was born there on the banks of the Kolyma River,” said Safinar. “Such a communicative, happy, lovely child; there was nothing to predict this disaster.”
It’s unlikely anyone could have preicted geopolitical and legal maneuvering that enmeshed Khaiser’s court proceedings.
After Russian annexation of Crimea, opposed by most of the 250,000 Crimean Tatars on the peninsula, the imprisoned Khaiser — became subject to Russian law as far as Russia was concerned.
As a result, Khaiser has the possibly unique distinction of being simultaneously sentenced twice for the same crime, by Russia and by Ukraine. “As far as I know there’s no such precedent,” said his lawyer, Nikolai Polozov.
Ignoring Ukraine court
In September 2014 Russian authorities transferred Khaiser to the southern Russian Krasnodar district. He was convicted of manslaughter and theft and illegal possession of a firearm, and sentenced in June 2015 to three years and six months in prison. A Ukrainian court also convicted him in absentia of manslaughter in May 2015, and sentenced him to three years and eight months.
Ukraine and Russia have an agreement to recognize each other’s court rulings, says Polozov. “But when I took the Ukrainian ruling to the Russian court they ignored it,” he said. “Khaiser was held by Russia only as an instrument of political pressure on his father.”
Russian authorities refused requests from both Ukraine and the European Court of Human Rights to return Khaiser to Ukrainian jurisdiction as a Ukrainian citizen who committed a crime on Ukrainian soil against another Ukrainian citizen. Mustafa Dzhemilev has said that he was offered his son’s release by Russia, in return for ceasing to oppose Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Mustafa Dzhemilev, the leader of Crimea’s Tatar community and former Soviet dissident (R), and his son Khaiser Dzhemilev. (Courtesy)
Safinar too agrees her son was kept in Russia to put pressure on the family. “They’re keeping him hostage so I don’t open my mouth too much,” she said in October, asking that material from the interview not be published until Khaiser was released.
According to Polozov, Khaiser’s case is also the first in Ukraine of a court sentence passed in absentia, following legal changes adopted in 2014 in order to try Ukrainian officials who fled the country after the deaths of protestors in Kyiv in February that year.
Safinar was given permission to visit her son twice after his sentencing in prison in Astrakhan – a journey of over 1,000 kilometers from Bakhchisaray. She said the scene was all too familiar from her years visiting her husband in Soviet prisons.
“The whole punishment system has been like this ever since Stalin,” she said. “When you see the squalor… it’s all created to humiliate and pressure people morally, psychologically and physically.”
Freed on Nov. 25
Khaiser was released on Nov. 25 at the end of his Russian prison sentence. Initially Russian courts called for administrative conditions to his release, including a curfew and a ban on leaving Crimea, but Polozov successfully appealed on the basis that he is not a Russian citizen. Instead, as a foreign citizen who committed a serious crime on Russian territory, the appeal court ruled that he must leave Russia after serving his sentence.
Since according to Russia law Crimea is part of Russia, this means Khaiser, rather than being banned from leaving Crimea, is banned from entering it, along with his father Mustafa.
Safinar now plans to divide her time between the Ukrainian mainland or elsewhere, to be close to her son, and the family house in Bakhchisaray.
After Russian annexation, she refused to take a Russian passport, which means she has no pension or Russian state medical insurance in Crimea. The attic room in Bakhchisaray, once Mustafa Dzhemilev’s office, now looks more like a junk room. In 2014 Russian authorities evicted the Crimean Tatar governing body the Mejlis from its premises, and much of the building contents ended up in boxes in this attic.
Barred from home
The room is a horde of Soviet dissident and Crimean Tatar history. Human rights medals and awards fill the wall cabinets; on the desk is an old-fashioned radio given to Mustafa Dzhemilev by Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Russian physicist and dissident.
Mejlis members and veterans of the Crimean Tatar National Movement that campaigned to return to Crimea used to meet here. But since 2014, the new campaign to return Crimea to Ukrainian control has largely moved to Kyiv.
The Mejlis has been ruled an extremist organization and Russian criminal cases brought against Crimean Tatar leaders, activists and observant Muslims, while other Mejlis members have been fined for holding a meeting in a private house in Bakhchisaray. Many people who oppose annexation but remain in Crimea are now afraid to speak out or meet together.
“Now no one comes here. Where to, in this mess?” Safinar said. “Now it’s all been halted, it’s all frozen. On occupied territory there can be no development; everything just stands still.”
