Punitive Medicine? Crimean Tatars Shaken By Leader's Confinement To Mental Asylum
When a court in Russian-annexed Crimea ordered activist Ilmi Umerov to a psychiatric clinic for a month of assessment tests, the decision sent shock waves through the peninsula's indigenous ethnic Tatar minority.
For two and a half decades, authorities in Crimea have refrained from the routine Soviet-era practice of declaring dissidents mentally ill, condemning them to life in an insane asylum. But now, Umerov's sentencing and subsequent confinement to a psychiatric clinic in Simferopol suggests a return to the practice.
Crimean prosecutors first charged Umerov, the former deputy chairman of the Crimean Tatars' self-governing body -- the Mejlis -- with separatism in May after he made public statements opposing Moscow's seizure of the peninsula from Ukraine. Then, on August 11, while he was under home detention during his trial, a court ordered Umerov to undergo psychiatric testing. A week later, he was forcibly committed to Simferopol's Psychiatric Hospital No. 1 for a 28-day period.
The forced admission to the clinic stunned Umerov's colleagues and supporters, who say the 59-year-old community leader is anything but mentally unbalanced. "I have known him for 30 years, I know him well," Abdure**** Dzhepparov, coordinator of the Crimean Contact Group on Human Rights, told RFE/RL on August 22. "I may not be an expert psychiatrist, but on the eve of his removal to the psychiatric clinic, I know that he was without a doubt in full mental health."
Umerov's sudden dispatch to a mental institution, where for the first several days he was denied visitors or the use of a telephone, reminded many of the dark days when dissidents in the Soviet Union simply disappeared into asylums, never to be seen or heard from again. "This is the first case in [post-Soviet] Crimea where they have placed a normal person in a psychiatric hospital," said Dzhepparov. "If you do not fight against it now, and try to change it, there could be second, third, and fourth cases...until it becomes a conveyor belt."...........