Crimean Tatars from Soviet Deportation
in 1944 to Russian Annexation in 2018
The Deportation of the Crimean
Tatars (Ukrainian: Депортація кримських татар, Russian:Депортация крымских
татар, Crimean Tatar: Qırımtatar sürgünligi): was the ethnic cleansing of at
least 191,044 Tatars from Crimea in May 18-20, 1944. It was carried out by
Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Soviet state security and secret police, acting on
behalf of Joseph Stalin. Within three days, Beria's NKVD used cattle trains to
deport women, children, the elderly, even Communists and members of the Red
Army, to the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, several thousand kilometers away.
They were one of the ten ethnicities who were encompassed by Stalin's policy of
population transfer in the Soviet Union.
Background:
The deportation ostensibly was
intended as collective punishment for the perceived collaboration of some
Crimean Tatars with Nazi Germany. Soviet sources indict the Tatars as traitors;
Tatar nationalists dispute this, maintaining the program was part of the Soviet
plan to gain access to the Dardanelles and acquire territory in Turkey where
the Tatars had ethnic kinsmen. Although the Nazis initially viewed the Crimean
Tatars negatively, their policy changed in face of determined Soviet
resistance. Many of the Soviet Prisoners of War were recruited by the Wehrmacht
as support units. Meanwhile, 15,000 to 20,000 Crimean Tatars were persuaded to
form self-defence battalions to protect Crimean Tatar villages from attacks by
Soviet partisans as well as hunting them down, though these units typically
sided with whoever was stronger in an area. In addition, Muslim Committees were
also formed, giving them limited self-governance. This increased the suspicion
despite a similar number as the self-defence volunteers also having joined the
Red Army and thousands still serving when the Soviets attacked Berlin, with
numerous Crimean Tatars also joining the partisans. Majority of Hiwis (Tatar
collaborator volunteers) and their families, along with those associated with
Muslim Committees eventually were evacuated to Germany and Hungary. Although
many Soviet officials recognised that the guilty segments of the population had
been evacuated, the demand to collectively punish the Crimean Tatars grew
louder.
However, not all Tatars joined
the collaboration; Crimean Tatar Ahmet Özenbaşlı, for instance, strongly
opposed the occupation and nurtured secret contacts with the Soviet resistance
movement to provide valuable strategic and political information. Other Crimean
Tatars also fought on the side of the Soviet partisans, like the Tarhanov
movement of 250 Tatars which fought throughout 1942 till its destruction. Furthermore,
25,033 Crimean Tatars fought in the Red Army during World War II, a greater
number than the 15,000 to 20,000 persuaded to join the self-defence units that
protected Tatar villages and also hunted down partisans. Eight Crimean Tatars were even named the
Heroes of the Soviet Union. In addition to this, even though the Volga Tatars
actually participated in collaboration in higher number than the Crimean
Tatars, with 35,000–40,000 volunteers fighting with the Axis, they avoided any
kind of collective punishment. Many other ethnicities were also Nazi
collaborators, even numerous Russians Jews, suggesting that some people in the
occupied territories had been forcibly drafted.
Deportation:
On 10 May 1944, Lavrentiy Beria
recommended to Stalin that the Crimean Tatars should be deported away from the
border regions due to their "traitorous actions". Stalin subsequently issued GKO Order No.
5859ss, which envisaged the resettlement of the Crimean Tatars. The deportation
lasted only three days, 18–20 May 1944, during which NKVD agents went house to
house collecting Crimean Tatars at gunpoint and forcing them to enter
sealed-off cattle trains that would transfer them almost 3,200 kilometres
(2,000 miles) to remote locations in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. The
Tatars were allowed to carry up to 500 kg of their property per family. By 8:00 on the first day, the NKVD had already
loaded 90,000 Crimean Tatars distributed in 25 trains. The next day, a further 136,412 persons were
boarded onto railroad cars. The only
ones who could avoid this fate were Crimean Tatar women who were married to men
of other non-punished ethnic groups. They traveled in overcrowded wagons for
several weeks and were plagued by a lack of food and water. It is estimated that at least 228,392 people
were deported from Crimea, of which at least 191,044 were Crimean Tatars in
47,000 families. Since 7,889 people perished in the long transit in sealed-off
railcars, the NKVD registered 183,155 Crimean Tatars who arrived at their
destinations in Central Asia. The majority of the deportees were rounded up
from the Crimean countryside. Only 18,983 of the exiles were from Crimean
cities.
On 4 July 1944, the NKVD officially informed Stalin
that the resettlement was complete. However, not long after that report, the NKVD
found out that one of its units forgot to deport people from the Arabat Spit.
Instead of preparing an additional transfer in trains, the NKVD boarded
hundreds of Crimean Tatars onto an old boat, took it to the middle of the Azov
Sea, and sank the ship, on 20 July. Those who did not drown were finished off
by machine-guns. On 14 July 1944 the GKO authorized the immigration of 51,000
people, mostly Russians, to 17,000 empty collective farms on Crimea. On 30 June
1945, the Crimean ASSR was abolished.
Crimean Tatar Red Army Soldiers:
In March 1949, a total of 8,995
former soldiers of the Red Army of Crimean Tatar descent were registered in
special settlements. Among these veterans, there were 534 officers, 1,392
sergeants, and 7,079 soldiers. There were also 742 members of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union and 1,225 members of Komsomol. According to one
Russian witness of the deportation, some men were still fighting at the Eastern
front, but the deportation awaited them at the end of the war. This was especially humiliating for war
heroes; Ilyas Ablayev, for instance, fought on various fronts in the war and
served in the Red Army until May 1947, only to then live in exile in the region
of Tashkent.
Life in Exile:
Like the other deported peoples,
the Crimean Tatars were placed under the regime of special settlements. Many of
those deported performed forced labor: their tasks included working in coal
mines and construction battalions, under the supervision of the NKVD. Deserters
were executed. Special settlers
routinely worked eleven to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Despite this difficult physical labor, the
Crimean Tatars were given only around 200 grams (7.1 oz) to 400 grams (14 oz)
of bread per day. Accommodations were insufficient; some were forced to live in
mud huts where "there were no doors or windows, nothing, just reeds"
on the floor to sleep on. The Tatar exile resulted in the abandonment of 80,000
households and 360,000 acres of land. Stalin sought to eradicate all traces of
the Crimean Tatars and, in subsequent censuses, forbade any mention of the
ethnic group. Stalin's government denied the Crimean Tatars the right to
education or publication in their native language. Despite the prohibition, and
although they had to study in Russian or Uzbek, they maintained their cultural
identity.
Deported and Exiled Deaths:
Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died
during the deportation, while tens of thousands perished subsequently due to
the harsh exile conditions. The high mortality rate continued for several years
in exile due to malnutrition, labor exploitation, diseases, lack of medical
care, and exposure to the harsh desert climate of Uzbekistan.
After Stalin:
In 1954, Khrushchev allowed
Crimea to be included in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic since Crimea
is linked by land to Ukraine and not with the Russian SFSR. On 28 April 1956,
the directive "On Removing Restrictions on the Special Settlement of the
Crimean Tatars... Relocated during the Great Patriotic War" was issued,
ordering a de-registration of the deportees and their release from
administrative supervision. However, various other restrictions were still kept
and the Crimean Tatars were not allowed to return to Crimea. Moreover, that
same year the Ukrainian Council of Ministers banned the exiled Tatars, Greeks,
Germans, Armenians and Bulgarians from relocating even to the Kherson,
Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv and Odessa Oblasts in the Ukrainian SSR. In 1956, the new Soviet leader, Nikita
Khrushchev, condemned Stalin's policies, including the deportation of various
ethnicities, but did not lift the directive forbidding the return of the
Crimean Tatars.
Although a 1967 Soviet decree
removed the charges against Crimean Tatars, the Soviet government did nothing
to facilitate their resettlement in Crimea and to make reparations for lost
lives and confiscated property. They remained in Central Asia for several more
decades until the Perestroika era in the late 1980s when 260,000 Tatars
returned to Crimea. Their exile lasted 45 years.
Return:
It was not until Perestroika and
the ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev to power in the late 1980s that things started
to change. In 1987 Crimean Tatar activists organized a protest in the center of
Moscow near the Kremlin. This compelled
Gorbachev to form a commission to look into this matter. The first conclusion
of the commission, led by hardliner Andrei Gromyko, was that there was "no
basis to renew autonomy and grant Crimean Tatars the right to return," but
Gorbachev ordered a second commission that recommended the renewal of autonomy
for Crimean Tatars. Finally, in 1989,
the ban on the return of the deported ethnicities was officially declared null
and void; the Supreme Council of Crimea also issued a declaration on 14
November 1989 that the previous deportations of peoples were a criminal
activity. This paved the way for 260,000 Crimean Tatars to return to their
homeland. That same year, Dzhemilev returned to Crimea, and by 1 January 1992
at least 166,000 other Crimean Tatars had done the same. The 1991 Russian law
On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples addressed the rehabilitation of all
ethnicities repressed in the Soviet Union. It adopted measures which involved
the "abolition of all previous RSFSR laws relating to illegal forced
deportations" and called for the "restoration and return of the
cultural and spiritual values and archives which represent the heritage of the
repressed people.
Independent Ukraine
After the dissolution of the
USSR, Crimea found itself a part of Ukraine, but Kyiv gave only limited support
to Crimean Tatar settlers. Some 150,000 of the returnees were granted
citizenship automatically under Ukraine's Citizenship Law of 1991, but 100,000
who returned after the country declared independence faced several obstacles,
including a costly bureaucratic process. Since the exile lasted for almost 50 years,
some Crimean Tatars decided to stay in Uzbekistan, which led to the separation
of families who had decided to return to Crimea. By 2000 there were 46,603
recorded appeals of returnees who demanded a piece of land. A majority of these
applications were rejected. Around the larger cities, such as Sevastopol, a
Crimean Tatar was on average given only 0.04 acres of land, which was of poor
quality or unsuitable for farming.
By 2004, sufficient numbers of
Tatars had returned to Crimea that they comprised 12 percent of the peninsula's
population. The local authorities did not assist their return or compensate
them for the land they lost. The Russian Federation, the successor state of the
USSR, did not provide reparations, compensate those deported for lost property,
or file legal proceedings against the perpetrators of the forced resettlement.
The deportation was a crucial event in the history of the Crimean Tatars, and
has come to be seen as a symbol of the plight and oppression of smaller ethnic
groups by the Soviet Union. On 12 December 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament
issued a resolution recognizing this event as genocide and established May 18th
as the "Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar
genocide".
Russian Invasion, Occupation and
Annexation:
In March 2014 the annexation of
Crimea by the Russian Federation unfolded, which was in turn declared illegal
by the United Nations General Assembly (United Nations General Assembly
Resolution 68/262) and which led to further deterioration of the rights of the
Crimean Tatars. Even though the Russian Federation issued decree No. 268
"On the Measures for the Rehabilitation of Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek,
Crimean Tatar and German Peoples and the State Support of Their Revival and
Development" on 21 April 2014, in practice it has treated Crimean Tatars
with far less care. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Human Rights issued a warning against the Kremlin in 2016 because it
"intimidated, harassed and jailed Crimean Tatar representatives, often on
dubious charges", while the Mejlis,
their representative body, was banned.
The UN reported that over 10,000
people left Crimea after the annexation in 2014, mostly Crimean Tatars, which
caused a further decline of their fragile community. Crimean Tatars stated
several reasons for their departure, among them insecurity, fear, and
intimidation from the new Russian authorities. In its 2015 report, the Office
of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that various
human rights violations were recorded in Crimea, including the prevention of
Crimean Tatars from marking the 71st anniversary of their deportation. Dzhemilev, who was in Turkey during the
annexation, was banned from entering Crimea for five years by the Russian
authorities, thus marking the second time that he was evicted from his native
land.
During the occupation of Crimea by
Russian Federation, Crimean Tatars are reportedly persecuted and driscriminated
by Russian authorities, including cases of torture, arbitrary detentions,
forced disappearances by Russian security forces and courts.
On June 12 2018, Ukraine lodged a
memorandum consisting of 17,500 pages of text in 29 volumes to the UN's
International Court of Justice about racial discrimination against Crimean
Tatars by Russian authorities in occupied Crimea and state financing of
terrorism by Russian Federation in Donbass
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.