In November 2023, Nariman Dzhelyal arrived in a icy Siberian jail and ate nothing but gruel and bread.
The devout Muslim is the bespectacled, bearded leader of the Crimean Tatar community. He claimed that pork was a major component of the meals he was served, which is against Islamic law.
Dzhelyal, who had been given a 17-year prison sentence for “blowing up a natural gas pipeline” and “smuggling explosives” in a trial Ukraine called Kremlin-orchestrated, told Al Jazeera, “I just took bread, it wasn’t of good quality, and ate it with tea.”
He refuted every claim made against him.
His diet slightly improved after arriving in Minusinsk, a dull town.
Only one lunch item had pork, and the rest of the meals had no flavor at all. Suppers had fish and only one of the lunches had pork.
However, the diet is not by far the biggest issue facing Russia’s infamously cruel penitentiary system’s tens of thousands of Muslims.
Soviet and Russian prisons have been characterized as a mysterious underworld governed by unwritten laws for almost a century.
The “crowned thieves” or “the black caste,” who have long since become criminals, still have elaborate tattoos, use sophisticated slang, and adhere to a strict, ruthless hierarchy.
The “black prisons” that they control are where wardens work with “crowned thieves” and ignore drug trafficking, card games, and extreme violence.
Wardens have control in “red prisons,” or “red prisons.” Career criminals have alleged that prison guards have provided inhumane conditions, including rape, solitary confinement, and torture.
Tens of thousands of Muslims have been found guilty of “terrorism,” “extremism,” or other crimes, but a third force has started to affect Russia’s prison population in the past two decades.
143 million people, or about 15% of Russia’s population, are Muslims. They represent the population’s population decline’s fastest-growing group.
According to Russian Mufti Albir Krganov, who reportedly made up 31, 000 of 206, 000 prisoners, in total, the number of prisons is roughly the same.
Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the prison population in Russia has more than halved. Unknown are the number of Muslims who volunteered or were drafted in exchange for pardons.
Russian convicts who convert to Islam are “automatically” listed as terror suspects, according to reports from rights organizations and media outlets, and have their sentences sporadically shortened for “extremism.”
Former analyst with Russia’s top prisoner-related organization, the Federal Service for Execution of Punishment, Anna Karetnikova, told Al Jazeera, “If a convict converts to Orthodox Christianity and gets baptized, he’ll be celebrated.”
According to Karetnikova, who previously worked at an agency overseeing penitentiaries in Moscow and at the Memorial rights group, “he will be listed as someone prone to extremism, his prison’s administration will be punished,” and intelligence services will pay particular attention to him.
According to rights groups, Central Asian Muslim migrants who work in Russia face criminal punishment because of their poor knowledge of Russian law and customs, according to rights groups.
Some people have been forced to fight in Ukraine, according to reports, while others have claimed that Russian police and prosecutors have targeted and prosecuted them for crimes they have committed.
In 2022, Abdulaziz, a construction worker in Moscow, claimed police had planted synthetic substances known as “spice” on his younger brother Abdulmumin.
Abdulmumin allegedly “confessed” to putting drug stashes under park benches after being electrocuted and beat him with plastic water bottles that leave no bruises.
Then, according to Abdulaziz, a judge sentenced Abdulmumin to five and a half years in prison in the Ural Mountains region, adding that, thanks to the number of “green” prisoners there, there are still enough “green” prisoners, referring to Muslim prisoners.
The only problem is the guards, he said, “They proved themselves on the zone” and, using a slang term for jail, “they proved themselves on the zone.” They also use a blind eye when required.
Abdulaziz declined to provide his last name and other details. His claims were not independently verified by Al Jazeera.
Muslim prisoners are not well suited in some Russian jails.
According to rights groups, schedules in some prisons forbid eating and leaving beds between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., making each early morning and late evening prayer a violation. Some convicts find it difficult to work during the Ramadan.
However, there are attempts to educate prison staff.
They must be taught the fundamentals of Islam, as well as the psychology of the [Muslim] prisoners they employ. According to Azat Gaunutdinov, an ethnic Tatar man who converted to Islam in prison and founded a rights organization to monitor the rights of Muslim convicts, “a Muslim prayer alone is a manifestation of extremism”,” he told the Kavkazsky Uzel news website in 2020.
Depending on the prisons, the situation frequently changes.
Dzhelyal, the Crimean Tatar leader, was given leniency by the wardens in Minusinsk, where he spent the majority of his sentence.
He and other Muslims were permitted to pray in their beds and consume their meals during the Ramadan.
Rights groups claim that they could borrow the Quran and other Muslim books from the prison library, in contrast to Muslims in other prisons, where the Quran and Arabic are completely forbidden and only some Russian translations are permitted.
Some jailed Muslims, such as those who smuggle cigarettes, mobile phones, or alcohol and drugs, refuse to engage in illegal activities while they are imprisoned, according to Dzhelyal.
“We have no use for these criminal rules of yours,” claim some Muslims, in fact. Because of the fact that [these rules] frequently conflict with the values that all Muslims live by, Dzhelyal said.
When the second Chechenya war broke out in the early 2000s, the number of Muslim prisoners in Russian jails started to rise.
In other North Caucasus provinces, particularly in multiethnic Dagestan, the Kremlin stepped up its clampdown on what it called “extremists.” There were many jails.
Source: Aljazeera
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