We are not terrorists. The story of a Crimean Tatar citizen journalist Ruslan Suleymanov

In July 2020, Ukraine was shocked by the news of the missing 3-year-old Musa Suleymanov, the son of the Crimean Tatar activist Ruslan Suleymanov, who was illegally imprisoned by the occupation authorities. After two days of searching, the boy’s body was found in a cesspool near the house. When the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) officers informed Ruslan about the death of his son, he lost consciousness. The boy’s death caused a great outcry. The same evening, President Zelensky appealed to Putin to release Ruslan Suleymanov.

However, Musa’s father has not been able to visit his son’s grave yet.

We are presenting the story of Ruslan Suleymanov, a Crimean citizen journalist and streamer of the Crimean Solidarity NGO, a participant in the second Simferopol “Hizb ut-Tahrir case”, who has been in a Russian detention center for four years, as part of the second half of the #EmptyChairPeople media project implemented by Chytomo and PEN Ukraine with the support of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Born in deportation

Ruslan’s desire for honesty and justice has been evident since his childhood. His mother, Zera Suleymanova, recalls that the boy’s first protest was at school, when he received an undeserved “F” grade. He climbed into the school attic and did not want to come down until the teacher apologized for the unfair grade. Ruslan even threatened to jump from there. His mother was summoned to the school to ask her son to come down from the attic.

“I was so scared! I ran down and saw his whole class standing there. All the teachers were there! And he was in the attic, screaming for the teacher to apologize because she was wrong. He said that she had given him an ‘F’ unfairly! I climbed into the attic and asked him to come down. He flat-out refused! Then the teacher had to apologize, and only then did he listen to me.”

Zera Suleymanova

Ruslan Suleymanov was born on April 21, 1983 in Uzbekistan. He tells us about himself as follows: “I am the great-grandson and grandson of deportees, the son of those born in deportation, I was born in deportation, and today I am in deportation again.” The political prisoner’s mother recalls how her son once ran to her and asked her to return to Crimea. He was in the first or second grade and his peers called him “Russian” because of his blue eyes, even telling him to leave. Ruslan promised to study with the best grades if they returned to their homeland.

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“And he kept his word. After returning to Crimea, he started receiving excellent grades! The school principal and class teacher said that Ruslan was very smart and predicted that he would become a mathematician or physicist. He was very fond of these subjects. He graduated with a gold medal,” Zera says.

Photo by the public movement Crimean Solidarity (CS)

After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the V. I. Vernadsky Taurida National University, Faculty of Physics of Magnetic Phenomena. Upon graduating, he began working as a laboratory assistant at the Tauride Environmental Institute. He worked in this position for two years and then taught physics at a college. Prior to the occupation of Crimea, he worked as a programmer for a Turkish company. However, when Russia occupied the peninsula, the company closed and Ruslan lost his job. After that he started tutoring, teaching physics to children.

The political prisoner’s mother recalls: “Ruslan was teaching physics to a boy, preparing him to enroll in the Sevastopol Institute of Nuclear Physics. But in the middle of the semester, Ruslan was taken away and accused of terrorism. The boy was forced to study physics on his own, and then finally joined that institute. Later, his parents said they were amazed at how Ruslan managed to get the boy interested in physics. They were very grateful for him.”

Photo from a family photo archive

Marry me if you like me

In Crimea, Ruslan met his future wife Elzara: “We met in December 2008. My aunt introduced us. Once she was visiting her friends who lived on the southern coast of Crimea. She liked it there so much! And she asked if they knew a good boyfriend for her niece, so that I could live among these beauties too. Ruslan was working there. So we were brought together.”

After they met, Ruslan and Elzara saw each other four more times and fell in love. The woman recalls her first meeting with Ruslan with a smile: “His pleasant appearance, blue eyes, always smiling… He somehow immediately attracted me. I was very pleased to communicate with him and always had the impression that I had known him for a long time. He is a very caring, attentive man, very fond of children. I fell in love with him then and I still love him.”

Photo by the public movement Crimean Solidarity (CS)

Ruslan told Elzara that he would not wait long: “If you like me, then marry me.” In January of the following year, the couple got married. Together they lived happily for 10 years until the occupation authorities separated them.

The couple had three children: Muhammad, Asiya and Musa. A year after the arrest of the political prisoner, Ukrainians were shocked by the mysterious death of his youngest son Musa. Although the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation in the temporarily occupied Crimea found no signs of criminal death, the head of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people Refat Chubarov stated that the official version of the boy’s death raises many questions.

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President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy raised the issue of Ruslan Suleymanov’s release twice: to Vladimir Putin and later to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, but to this day, the Crimean activist has not been able to visit his son’s grave.

“I was hoping to the very end that my son would be found alive and well. In every news report, as dangerous areas of the search were deemed closed, my hope grew stronger. But the inevitable happened. Yes, Musa was in our family for three years – not long, but I am grateful to God with all my heart for giving us such a brilliant son. The loss is heavy and irreparable. I felt what parents whose children go missing every day experience, and how they hope that their children will return soon.”

Not the terrorists

Ruslan Suleymanov has been in illegal detention for over three years. He belongs to the second Simferopol group of the Hizb ut-Tahrir case. Representatives of this organization claim that their mission is to unite all Muslim countries in an Islamic caliphate. Importantly, they reject terrorist methods of achieving this goal. In 2003, Russia recognized the organization as a terrorist organization.

“Hizb ut-Tahrir in Russia is considered a terrorist organization without a single valid conviction for a terrorist act, without evidence of involvement in terrorism. Usually, Russian security forces detain people in this case twice a year: at the beginning of the first half of the year and at the beginning of the second. This is due to reporting periods. It is very easy to “solve” such cases: the employees are not exposed to any danger, and they receive bonuses for this, they get seniority and promotions. These are cases where our clients are called “paper” or “kitchen” terrorists. In fact, they are recognized as members of a terrorist organization for the conversations they have,” says lawyer Lilya Gemizhe.

“We are not terrorists or extremists. These things are alien to my people, they have never experienced anything like this. Today we are being judged for our views,” Ruslan Suleymanov emphasizes.

Ruslan’s persecution began long before his arrest. In February 2017, the man was arrested near the house of Crimean Tatar activist Marlen Mustafayev. Then he was accused of allegedly holding an unauthorized rally and sentenced to administrative arrest for 5 days.

On October 15 of the same year, the activist held a solo picket in support of the arrested Crimean Tatars. He came to the protest with a poster that read: “In 1944 they deported, today they imprison us”. Then he was fined 10 thousand rubles. He was also subjected to forced fingerprinting and saliva samples, photographed and released without any procedural documents.

“Before I decided to go out with a solo picket, a number of events had occurred. These include the mass arrests of our compatriots, including the father of 13 children, the torture of Renat Paralamov, which still remains unanswered for, and the culprits have not been found. All this simply could not have left me indifferent.”

On March 26, 2019, the day before the man’s arrest, Russian border guards arrested him at the Kalanchak administrative border. He was detained for 7 hours and his passport was destroyed. He was not released from Crimea to the mainland of Ukraine.

Raids and detentions

The mother and wife of the political prisoner remember in detail the day of the activist’s detention. It was dawn on the 27th of March. That was when Zera Suleymanova and her husband heard a noise on the street and ran out to see what was happening: they lived next to their son. They saw a lot of cars, prisoner transport vehicles and Russian soldiers. First, the security forces broke into the house of Osman Arifmemetov, but he was not at home at the time – he went to the mainland of Ukraine to prepare documents. Later, he was arrested.

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Afterwards the armed men turned their attention to Ruslan Suleymanov’s parents: they forced them to the ground and ordered them not to move. The security forces stood over them with weapons and guarded them. They also put their eldest son Eskander next to them and asked where Ruslan Suleymanov lived. The brother of the political prisoner showed the brother’s house, but asked not to scare the children, so that they would not see this horror.

“We took the children home. Ruslan opened the door, and there the raid started. I don’t know what was there, but they searched everything. After a while, this whole gang of armed men came to us and started searching the place. They turned everything upside down: all the papers, everything! The little kids were crying, and my eldest grandson was sitting with a tablet. They took that tablet away from him. Then he had been crying for a month and asking when he would get his tablet back. What was on it? Children’s games, online lessons, because back then, classes were online. Nothing forbidden, and they took it away.”

Ruslan’s wife, Elzara Sifersha, emphasizes that her husband’s human rights were ignored during the raid and detention: “When they entered our house, my mother fainted. They didn’t want to call an ambulance for her: they said we were organizing a circus. I told them that she was an older woman, she had a heart disease! When they realized that my mother was not regaining consciousness, only then did they call an ambulance.”

During the inspection, the security forces planted two books on Ruslan: “They were brand new books. They were planted behind the stove that provided heating for the whole house. There was coal, firewood, dust, and the books were new, without a single speck.”

Elzara Sifersha, photo from a family photo archive

The women say that there were two or three people in each room of the house. In desperation, Ruslan’s mother asked the investigator, surnamed Makhnov, to tell her when they would take her son away so that she could at least give him a goodbye kiss and a hug. At one point, the security forces began to pack up and leave the house. The mother started looking for Ruslan, but in vain. Lilya Gemizhe, who was there, told the woman that her son had already been taken away. And a month and a half later, the security forces took Ruslan’s brother, Eskander Suleymanov, away from his mother.

With bags over their heads

A day after his arrest, Ruslan Suleymanov and other political prisoners were taken from the Simferopol detention center by plane with bags over their heads to Rostov-on-Don.

Lawyer Lilya Gemizhe says that Ruslan was subjected to torture popularly known as “carousel”: when a prisoner is constantly transferred from cell to cell. A political prisoner could stay in one cell for two or three days, up to a week. Ruslan was almost always in a separate cell, where there was constant video surveillance: even when he went to the restroom. A small cell, no TV and this “carousel”, according to Lili, were supposed to lead to the results the FSB needed. However, despite the torture that was used for a long time, Ruslan did not break down.

Photo by the public movement Crimean Solidarity (CS)

As a physicist, he was always trying to create formulas. He measured the steps of the camera and made mathematical problems out of it. Following that, he was labeled “prone to escape.”

The Rostov-on-Don pre-trial detention center has very strict conditions for access to prisoners. Even Gemizhe has difficulty getting in, it is a rather lengthy procedure. “Whenever I came to see him, we were placed not in the investigator’s office, but in the room for meetings with relatives. We could only communicate through the glass, I could not show him any documents, he could not sign anything. If I need to sign any documents, I have to do it exclusively through the staff of the detention center. Therefore, there is no question of any confidentiality: they could study and censor all these documents that Ruslan could and should have signed. In addition to the fact that we were talking through the glass, there is a CCTV camera in this office, and an employee of the detention center was constantly with us,” the lawyer says.

The parents are unable to visit their son, so they communicate through letters. Zonatelecom, a telecommunication network for communication with prisoners in Russia, also operates. Elzara Sifersha sees her husband in courts, but they cannot exchange even a few words with each other there – it is forbidden. At first, she was denied visits with the political prisoner, but later it was explained by COVID restrictions.

Done with a heavy hand

Ruslan Suleymanov is being charged with two particularly serious articles of the Russian criminal code: participation in a terrorist organization and an attempt to seize power or disturb the constitutional order in Russia.

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Lilya Gemizhe explains that the charges refer to audio recordings of wiretaps that were recorded in a house where Muslims gathered and discussed various issues: “To make it clear, one of the topics discussed at the meeting, where Ruslan was present, was as follows: How should a person spend their time? They discussed that playing military games is not productive until you have an unfed family or have not done some household chores. After you fulfill your responsibilities as a family man, then you can relax and play games or do some hobbies. These are the themes that have become the basis for criminal prosecution.”

Ukrainian poet and publisher, editor-in-chief of the Old Lion Publishing House Marjana Savka became Ruslan Suleymanov’s ambassador within the #SolidarityWords program.

“I think it’s terribly unfair that they are in a double trap: they wanted to return to their homeland after Stalin’s deportation, and after their long-awaited return they are again pushed out of their territory. For every Crimean Tatar, a place of home is very important. For them, the fact that they finally settled on their own land was a very important mission for them. But the invaders came to their home again.”

Marjana Savka

The writer labels politically motivated cases as “done with a heavy hand”. “The invaders are openly and cynically stitching these cases together and do not bother to stage it all skillfully,” she emphasizes.

Translation: Vitalina Marko
Editing: Olena Pankevych, John G Sennett