Crimea’s occupation rulers issue long persona non grata list

28.03.2014

Source: http://khpg.org/en/index.php?id=1395939559

Human Rights in Ukraine
Information website of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group

The Crimean parliament under the puppet government installed on Feb 27 after armed soldiers seized government buildings in Simferopol has issued a list of 321 people whose presence in the Crimea they call “undesirable”.  The only positive thing to be said is that the list does not, as reported earlier, include Mustafa Dzhemiliev, now a Ukrainian MP, but also the long-standing head of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people and veteran of the movement for the restoration of Crimean Tatar rights.  Both Dzemiliev and the current head of the Mejlis, Refat Chubarov have been resolute in their opposition to the Russian annexation and affirmation that the Crimean Tatars are Ukrainians.

The list includes Arseny Yatsenyuk and members of his government, as well as a large number of Ukrainian MPs.  Some of these are from the Party of the Regions, including two MPs either from the Crimea (Yulia Lyovochkina() or who stood for election from Sevastopol in 2012 (Serhiy Novinsky).  It does not however include prominent MPs known for their pro-Russian leanings, for example, Oleg Tsaryov and Vadim Kolesnichenko (one of the authors of the highly controversial language bill which effectively allowed Russian to push out the Ukrainian language in whole regions)