The morning of 2 June sent shockwaves through the Crimean Tatar online community. A Telegram group called “Crimean Tatars: Resettlement Programme and Citizenship” appeared. The group’s founders decided to bring together Crimean Tatars who wish to become Turkish citizens.

According to the group’s founders, they held a preliminary meeting with Osman Mesten, a member of the Turkish parliament from the ruling Justice and Development Party, who represents the city of Bursa. The MP reportedly expressed his support for the activists, but first asked them to gather information on the exact number of Crimean Tatars involved. Within five hours of the group’s launch, nearly a thousand people had joined it.

The group’s founders are brothers Ruzhi Teyfuk and Rustem Teyfuk, who are known for their religious activism on social media, and Ismail, a 44-year-old resident of Turkey.

He does not give his surname, but leaves voice messages on Telegram and guarantees that applicants’ personal details will be kept secure. Applications are not yet being accepted: a separate group will be set up for this purpose, once Ismail has developed an algorithm for storing personal data and monitoring leaks of sensitive information.

The group included people who viewed the initiative put forward by Ismail from Bursa and the Teifuk brothers living in Europe with scepticism. Some of them demanded to know which Crimean Tatar leaders had been consulted regarding such an initiative.

The idea of a new Telegram group runs counter to the decision taken at the World Congress of Crimean Tatars, held in Istanbul in 2015. At that time, a year after the illegal annexation of the peninsula, the Crimean Tatars resolved not to leave Crimea of their own accord under any circumstances, so as not to make the occupiers’ task any easier.

The head of the Mejlis, Refat Chubarov, has described the current initiative as a revival of the spirit of Catherine the Great and Stalin. Chubarov makes no secret of the fact that, as far back as 2014, the Mejlis categorically rejected any form of assistance with the resettlement of Crimeans to Turkey or their acquisition of citizenship. 

The Mejlis is convinced that any liberalization of the rules in this area will lead to the complete eradication of the indigenous people from their own land.

We spoke to the group’s founder, Ismail, via a messaging app. He is currently declining to give a full interview. He says that the activists’ aim is not to uproot people from their homeland. The focus is solely on those Crimean Tatars who have been wandering the world since 2014 and feel no sense of security about the future anywhere. Ismail also highlighted two further categories of Crimean Tatars who need such assistance: relatives of political prisoners and those who themselves face danger in occupied Crimea.

By the evening of 2 June, the group’s organisers had shared further details of their initiative. As with the Bulgarian Turks, the Kyrgyz from Afghanistan, and the Meskhetian Turks, the resettlement of Crimean Tatars will take place in those Turkish regions which the Turks themselves are leaving: Erzincan, Elazığ, and Kars. The last of these cities lies on the closed border with Armenia.

The benefit for Turkey is to attract members of Turkic peoples to the country’s economically depressed regions, who will become loyal Turks within a single generation. The group’s organisers have set themselves an ambitious goal: to gather 10,000 Crimean Tatars wishing to resettle in Turkey and obtain citizenship there.

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CEMAAT has approached Osman Mesten, a member of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, as well as the organisers of the initiative, for comment. We are awaiting their responses.