The Crimean Tatars
80 years ago, Stalin tried to exterminate Crimean Tatars. Today, Vladimir Putin is striving to finish the job.
US President Joe Biden has said the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine is a “battle between democracy and autocracy.” It is a frame that has been effective in mobilizing Western resistance to Russian aggression and necessary for pressuring US lawmakers into supporting military assistance to Ukraine. Unfortunately, it is also one that has served Vladimir Putin and his ultranationalist crusade.
Russia’s leader has cast his country’s conflict with Ukraine, not as a struggle between ideologies, but of peoples — Russians v. everyone else. Putin has long spoken about protecting Russia from outside forces who want to dismantle Russian identity and values. It is what he used to justify his invasion into Ukraine, which he does not consider to be a separate nation or culture. “Russia and Ukraine are one,” he wrote back in 2021 and has repeated ever since.
Moreover, it has been Biden’s so-called “fight for democracy” in Ukraine that has provided Putin proof that the West poses a threat to Russia. He has used that to target civilians, destroy infrastructure such as hospitals and schools, and ethnically cleanse indigenous peoples. This includes not just the Ukrainians, but the Crimean Tatars.
The Crimean Tatars are a Turkic group native to Crimea, whom the Russians have long sought to evict from the strategically valuable peninsula. In 1783, when the Tatars comprised an absolute majority of the population, Catherine the Great annexed Crimea and began repatriating ethnic Russians to the peninsula and driving out Tatars. During the Crimean War from 1853-1856, the Tatar population further suffered as more Tatars left and Russians imposed the use of Russian language and renamed Tatar street and place names with Russian ones. Eighty years ago on May 18, 1944, Stalin ordered the purging of a quarter of a million Tatars from their homes, what the Tatars call the sürgün, or exile. The majority were deported to Central Asia in cattle cars, without food or water or sanitation. Approximately 8,000 died on the journey east. My father’s family managed to escape to Europe and, eventually, the United States.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, several thousands of Crimean Tatars returned to their homeland. Unable to reclaim abandoned property, they started anew with new homes amid a repopulated territory filled with Russians. These Russians often subjected the Tatars to discrimination and difficulty. Still, the Crimean Tatars persisted. By 2014, a quarter of a million lived in Crimea, until Putin invaded and illegally annexed the territory.
Eskender Bariiev and Zarema Bariieva of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center describe what has happened to the Tatars since as the equivalent of genocide.
According to the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, Russia relocated 100,000 citizens to Crimea, while 50,000 people registered as internally displaced peoples in Ukraine, the majority Tatars. There have been over 100 enforced disappearances of pro-Ukrainian activists, affiliates of Crimean Tatar institutions, and journalists in Crimea. Russian authorities are using policies, as Amnesty International has noted, “that aim to suppress non-Russian identities throughout the peninsula.”
In 2015, the Russian government would not renew broadcasting licenses for the independent Crimean Tatar station ATR and the children’s channel Lale. Crimean Tatar radio stations Meyden and other Tatar language publications also shuddered. In its place, Moscow has propped up Millet, a pro-government Tatar channel that it claims counters “anti-Russian propaganda.”
In schools, Russia wasted no time imposing its own curriculum in Crimea, along with threats against teachers, students and parents who objected. Zarema Bariieva told me that there had been 16 Crimean Tatar schools before 2014. Today, there are only seven, which are under constant pressure to reduce teaching hours and make the Tatar language an elective.
In 2016, Russia banned the Mejlis, the representative body of the Crimean Tatars and banned its leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, from returning to Crimea. Under the claim of “Islamic extremism,” a significant number of Crimean Tatar men are unlawfully arrested and sent to prison. Last year the Council of Europe noted that “many criminal cases concerning Crimean Tatars have been decided either on the basis of testimonies of so-called anonymous witnesses - sources supportive of the indictment whose identity is concealed from the defense - or evidence prepared by experts who cooperate with Russian law enforcement bodies.”
Following Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Tatar men have been leaving Crimea to avoid having to fight against Ukraine. Putin announced a partial mobilization, in which former military personnel would be called in to aid in the war. According to Evgeniy Yaroshenko of Crimea SOS, an NGO, though Crimean Tatars make-up only 13-15 percent of the population in Crimea, they received 90 percent of the conscription notices. That is a violation of the Geneva Convention, which stipulates that occupying powers may not force “protected persons to serve in its armed forces.”
It is the violation of international law, from the Geneva Convention to the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the persecution of peoples that makes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in 2014 and in 2022 — wrong, not the country’s form of government. The US and EU engage with numerous autocracies, including Hungary, Turkey, India, Saudi Arabia, and China, with little issue. What’s at stake in Ukraine is not a form of governance but the respect for territorial integrity and the survival of peoples. You cannot have democracy where there is no justice. That is what the Crimean Tatars need today. — Elmira
Editorial Team
Elmira Bayrasli - Editor-in-Chief
Editors:
Pin-Shan Lai
Catherine Lovizio
Emily Smith