Ukraine commemorates the victims of the deportation of Crimean Tatars

Augusto Sarmento - International
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Editor : Augusto Sarmento
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Every year on May 18, Ukraine commemorates the victims of the genocide of the Crimean Tatar people. ‎‎Crimean Tatars are an indigenous nation of Ukraine along with two other Crimean nations: Karaites and ‎Krymchaks. Due to the modern forcible deportation of Ukrainians, this date has an additional meaning to ‎every Ukrainian.‎

The USSR committed many atrocities against occupied nations, including 110 deportations. In 1944, they ‎committed genocide against the Crimean Tatars, forcing them out of their homeland, the Crimean ‎Peninsula. ‎
The deportation of Crimean Tatars (Qirimlar) was a mass punitive action. The communist regime sought to ‎forcefully change the ethnic makeup of the territories it controlled and destroy any possible resistance.

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In just three days in May 1944, between 180,000 and 200,000 people, adults and children, were expelled ‎from their homes and put on crowded trains to be resettled in Central Asia and the Ural mountains. The ‎official reason for the deportation was tied to false treason charges brought against the whole population ‎by the Stalin regime. Publications and education in the indigenous Crimean Tatar language (Qırım Tili) also ‎faced restrictions: to this day the language is designated by UNESCO as under serious threat of extinction ‎‎(severely endangered).‎

Crimean Tatars in soviet freight wagons preparing for deportation. Photo source: zmina.info
Crimean Tatars in soviet freight wagons preparing for deportation. Photo source: zmina.info

The ban on their return was officially abolished on 14 November 1989, when the Supreme Council of ‎Crimea declared that the deportation had been a crime. On 12 December 2015, the Ukrainian ‎Parliament‎(Verkhovna Rada) issued a resolution recognizing the deportation as genocide and established ‎‎18 May as the “Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide”.‎

The trauma and memory of the deportation remain central to the history and identity of the Crimean ‎Tatars, ‎
and having returned home from deportation only after 1989, Crimean Tatars were forced to leave their land ‎again due to the occupation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014. The ones who stayed, are being ‎persecuted, imprisoned and tortured. ‎

The Russia-installed Crimean authorities banned the Crimean Tatars’ representative body, the Mejlis, and ‎since ‎then, ‎over 10,000 people, most of them Crimean Tatars, have left the occupied peninsula.‎

In 2016, Ukraine participated in the Eurovision Song Contest with “1994”, ‎a song about Soviet Union’s ‎repressions against the Crimean Tatar community. Jamala, a Ukrainian Crimean Tatar artist, won the contest ‎that year. ‎

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