Muslims in Russia

“During the Great Patriotic War people said that every soldier, fighting for his Great Motherland is fighting for his people, his native city, his parents, brothers and sisters. And I was not an exception. Just as all my generation (and there is only 1 percent of it alive), I follow this principle.I am the only alive Full Cavalier of the orders of Glory in the region, an 80-year old disabled veteran, and for almost 9 years I’ve been trying to get a solution to the question of restituting mosques at 11, 13, 15 Lenin street and erecting a monument to the lost cadets “, – the letter says.

The head of the Tyumen Muslim organization notes that “many years passed since the return of the clerical buildings of the Orthodox, Polish-Catholic and Jewish- Judaic confessions. And the Jewish synagogue as neat as a pin has been shown twice on TV. It’s only the Muslim mosques that are not returned, the mosques built by the predecessors of the native people of the South Siberia, sybyrs, that have been living here for many thousands of years.And this is done in violation of the Decree N281 of April 23rd 1993, the government regulation of June 13th 19996, definite instruction of the Vice-prime minister V.I.Matviyenko, the resolution of the commission of the regional administration of October 5th 1994 on passing the mosques at 11, 13, 15 Lenin street”.

In his letter Khabibulla Yakin quotes the question by Akhtam Kayumov, the ex-chairman of the Tatar autonomy of the Tyumen region that was addressed to the head of the city administration S.M.Kirichuk. Neither in Tobolsk, nor in Jalutorovsk, nor in Ishim there is such chauvinism as in Tyumen. Who needs the chauvinism and why?”. S.M.Kirichuk never answered the question.

Khabibulla Jakin reminds that in 1956 owing to the efforts of the first secretary of the region committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union B.E.Scherbin the only Tatar national school was closed in Tyumen. Since then there is no national school in the city,- he writes, -and the people of the native population don’t have the opportunity to study the native language at school, and some of them don’t know it or are illiterate. It is my opinion and not only mine: this national Tatar school must be opened again. And what is more important- the chauvinistic national policy, that started with Scherbin and is developed by Roketsky, Omelchuk and Kirichuk must be stopped”.