Vol. 81/No. 22 June 5, 2017
Crimean Tatars protest against Moscow occupation
In the midst of World War II, the Soviet regime headed by Joseph Stalin slandered the Tatars as Nazi collaborators and forcibly removed the entire population — some 200,000 — to settlements in Uzbekistan, Siberia and the Urals. Nearly half perished from starvation, disease and other causes during the trip and over the following two years.
Among those addressing the protest was Mustafa Dzhemilev, a historic leader of the Tatars’ fight and former head of the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar people’s assembly.
Dzhemilev was banished from Crimea again following the March 2014 Russian armed seizure and annexation of Crimea, along with other leaders of the Mejlis. He was part of the deportations of 1944 when he was one year old.
“The world is different now,” he said. “The occupier will be expelled from our territory; the invader will definitely answer for all crimes against the Ukrainian state and the Crimean Tatar people. And let the souls of the innocently murdered ones inspire us to struggle for the restoration of our rights.”
In Simferopol, the Crimean capital, Russian authorities attempted to block Crimean Tatars from marking the deportation anniversary. They banned a picket against political and religious persecution May 19, arresting people who attended. “Eight youth were released in the early afternoon after being detained for walking with the Crimean Tatar flag,” wrote Halya Coynash from the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. Among others harassed and arrested were elderly people, gathered in prayer, she wrote.
Conditions were much different with the victory of the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution. After the White Army defenders of the czar’s totalitarian regime were defeated in Crimea, Tatars and other revolutionaries formed the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1921, which encouraged the flowering of Tatar culture. They made the Tatar language an official state language. Tatar cultural institutions grew, including newspapers, journals, museums, schools, libraries and theaters.
But all this was reversed and more with the consolidation of counterrevolutionary bureaucratic rule under Stalin.
On May 11, 1944, Stalin ordered the deportation of all Crimean Tatars. At the time tens of thousands of Tatars were fighting in the Soviet army against Nazi Germany.
Over three days some 200,000 Crimean Tatars were rounded up and loaded on boxcars similar to those used to transport cattle. Thousands died along the way, many of them children and the elderly.
The Soviet government confiscated all their property, including buildings, furniture, livestock and agricultural produce, with no compensation.
A year later Moscow abolished the Crimean Autonomous region and incorporated the peninsula into Russia proper. Stalin organized transfers of Russian nationals to replace the Tatars and deepen Russification in Crimea.
The vast majority of exiled Crimean Tatars ended up in special settlements in Uzbekistan, mostly women and children. The majority of adult Crimean Tatar men had not yet been discharged from the Red Army.
Soviet authorities then assigned the Crimean Tatars to work in mines, factories, cotton fields and industrial construction under dangerous, unhealthy conditions. They faced outbreaks of malaria, yellow fever and dysentery.
It was not until 1956 that the Stalinist regime allowed Crimean Tatars to leave East Asia. But it took another 33 years to win the right to return to their homeland. In the early 1990s nearly 250,000 Tatars went back to Crimea, with no land or homes, facing discrimination and hostility.
The Tatars joined in the mass Maidan mobilizations that overthrew the pro-Moscow rule in Ukraine of Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. They were backed by the majority of Crimeans. But Moscow used the 16,000 troops they had based there on a long-term lease agreement with Kiev and a small gang of local thugs to take power. The Tatars have been in their gunsights ever since.
“We will never give up our struggle,” Dzhemilev told the Militant in 2015.
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