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October 07, 2009
World War II Memorial In Ukraine Vandalized
SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine -- A memorial in Sevastopol to the ethnic Azeri veterans of
World War II has been vandalized, RFE/RL's Russian Service reports.

The memorial was established in the 1970s on Sapun Mountain near the Crimean
city of Sevastopol to honor ethnic Azeris who helped Soviet forces liberate the
city from German forces on May 9, 1944.

The head of the Azeri community in Crimea, Ragim Gumbatov, told RFE/RL that some
bronze parts of the memorial are missing and several granite slabs have been
broken.

There are several other memorials in Sevastopol honoring other nationalities of
the former Soviet Union who helped liberate the city during World War II, but
only the Azeri memorial was vandalized.
comments
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty � 2009 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

August 09, 2009
In Volatile Crimea, Tatars Bang The Drum For Land Return
by Claire Bigg
For the 88th day in a row, Lyubov Halilova packed her banners and headed to
government headquarters in central Kyiv.

The elderly Halilova has spent the last four months camped outside the building
in the Ukrainian capital with some 20 other protesters, banging on drums,
sounding horns, and calling on Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to hear their
grievances.

The protesters are Crimean Tatars, the indigenous people of Crimea, and they are
in Kyiv to voice their nation's longstanding demand: the return of land seized
during the World War II deportation of Tatars from the Crimean peninsula, in
what is today Ukraine.

So far, Ukrainian officials have largely ignored the protest on their doorstep.

"There has been no progress," sights Halilova. "Nobody is coming out, nobody is
taking an interest in us."

'Please Go Home'

President Viktor Yushchenko last year set up a committee to settle the dispute.
But critics accuse the new working group, which has yet to distribute a single
plot of land, of deliberately dragging its feet.

Volodymyr Haptar, a spokesman for the Environment Ministry which oversees the
committee, insists the issue is in capable hands.

"We're doing wearisome, difficult work trying to create a register of people who
are to be allotted land. We are trying to determine the state of the land in
these regions and to whom it belongs," he told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service.
"Crimean Tatars are displaying their strength of will, but not everything can be
settled through force and strikes. People, please go home. Sooner or later, this
issue will be settled."

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the mass deportation of Crimea's Turkic,
Muslim Tatars in May 1944 on grounds that they had allegedly collaborated with
Nazi Germany.

In a three-day operation, the peninsula's more than 180,000 Tatars were rounded
up and loaded onto cattle trains bound for Central Asia and Siberia.

An estimated 40 percent of them died during the journey or in the first year of
exile.

Although the Tatars were rehabilitated by the Kremlin and allowed to return in
the late 1980s, neither the Soviet regime nor post-Soviet Ukraine has helped
them resettle in their historical region.

Paradise Lost

Ismet Sheikh-Zade, a well-known Crimean Tatar artist, was born in Uzbekistan.

His parents had settled down in the Central Asian republic after being deported
from Crimea as children, together with their entire families.

Today, Ismet and his parents are back in their ancestral land. But he says they
are treated like intruders.

"Five Russian families now live in the house in Feodosia where my mother was
born and from which she was deported. Six Russian families live in my father's
house in Belogorsk," he says.

"We are not asking for these houses, because we know this would create a
conflict. We'll compromise and take empty land instead. But the surrounding
population doesn't understand that Crimean Tatars are making concessions by not
demanding the restitution of their property," Ismet says.

Some 270,000 Crimean Tatars have returned to the peninsula over the past two
decades. Many live in chaotic settlements erected in recent years, sometimes
without running water.

Although they now represent just 12 percent of their homeland's total
population, Crimean Tatars have been extremely vocal in lobbying for land and
for recognition of the crimes perpetuated against their people.

They held the first-ever World Congress of Crimean Tatars this year on May 18,
the 65th anniversary of the deportation. Some 20,000 protesters rallied in
Crimea's main city of Simferopol on the congress' sidelines to renew demands for
greater rights.

The Crimean Tatar community, however, is divided over how to promote its
interests.

Like Mustafa Dzhemilyov, the head of the Crimean Tatars' Mejlis representative
body, some disapprove of the current protest in Kyiv and say Tatars should
instead seek to resolve the land dispute through diplomatic channels.

"We were against it from the start. We formed a commission, and that commission
is working," he says. "There are 47 million people in this country. If everyone
came to the ministers' cabinet and started beating drums, I don't think problems
would get solved in our country."

Others, weary of waiting, believe only rallies, hunger strikes, and other
protests can draw attention to their plight.

Mounting Resentment

In May, Yushchenko ordered the creation of a special unit to investigate the
deportation of Crimean Tatars and other minorities from the peninsula.

But this has done little to soothe feelings of anger and disappointment among
Crimean Tatars.

Many say Yushchenko and his former ally Tymoshenko, whom Crimean Tatars
massively supported during the 2004 Orange Revolution, have not made good on
promises to improve their fate.

"They've gone to extreme lengths to repatriate in a peaceful manner, but I often
wonder about their patience with the amount of resistance that they've had to
push through," says Dr. Greta Uehling, a U.S. anthropologist and an expert on
Crimean Tatars.

"I worry about that in terms of the sheer frustration level of having tried so
hard for so long and to continue to meet all these barriers and obstacles, to
the point where their needs simply aren't met," Uehling says.

The simmering discontent among Crimean Tatars is particularly alarming since it
is playing out on the backdrop of souring relations between Moscow and Kyiv.

Many Ukrainians accuse Moscow of plotting to stoke unrest in Crimea, an
increasingly disputed region that is home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet and
growing pro-independence sentiment among its majority ethnic Russian population.

Russia has reportedly handed passports to thousands of Crimean residents.

"I think the region is very unstable and very vulnerable to various parties'
attempts to bring it into their sphere of influence," says Uehling. "On that
score, I see things getting worse before they get better, because there is such
intense interest and so many factions within Crimea that can be recruited onto
various sides."

The current protest in Kyiv illustrates how desperate many Crimean Tatars have
become in recent years.

One month into their sit-in, seven of the protesters launched a hunger strike
that lasted two weeks and resulted in the hospitalization of three participants.

The demonstrators have also accused Ukraine of genocide, and have issued a
declaration threatening to disrupt the country's efforts to integrate with the
West and ensure the Crimean Tatar question becomes "the main problem" in
Ukraine. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty � 2009 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights
Reserved.

The Vandalism of the Authorities at the Crimean Tatar Cemeteries in Crimea
Continues

Yesterday, Crimean Tatars gathered for a rally in the Crimean town of Lenine to
protest against the ongoing demolition of the Crimean Tatar graves there.

The rally, speaking on behalf of the Crimean Tatars who were forcibly,
criminally exiled by the Stalin regime from the villages of Qazan Tip, Aq Tas,
Kiten and Aqmanay and who now have returned from destinations to which they were
illegally deported, to Crimea, their Historic Homeland, adopted an appeal to the
Head of the Supreme Council (Parliament) of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea,
Anatoliy Hrytsenko.

Soon, it will be 20 years since our long-suffering nation has started to return
en masse to our Historic Homeland.

Through all these years, we have sent numerous appeals to the local government
bodies, asking them to allocate land plots to us for building homes in the
villages from which we were brutally evicted. However, the authorities refused,
providing various incomprehensible reasons for the denials.

With pain in our hearts, we watched how the land where we walked barefoot in our
childhood, where we remember every stone, the land with the ruins of our homes
still standing, still preserving the warmth of hands of our mothers and fathers,
was hastily distributed to everyone but the Crimean Tatars and turned into
holiday homes.

And now, they have started using our cemeteries to build holiday homes.

In the village of Kiten, now called Semenivka, they are building a scuba diving
centre in one part of the Crimean Tatar cemetery and in another part,
foundations of several holiday homes have been already set up. In the village of
Aq Tas, a local mosque was demolished in 1970s and its stones removed to the
village of Azovske to build a wall. Now, the land plot with the ruins of the
mosque, a nearby cemetery and the surrounding village has been sold, also for
building holiday homes.

If today you take a stroll among the holiday homes, you will see human bones
everywhere and find yourself stepping on them. These are the bones of our
ancestors.

And what would be your reaction, how would you feel, Mr. Anatoliy Pavlovych
Hrytsenko, when some barbarians dig out the bones of someone of your relatives,
someone close to you, throw them onto the road, and use their graves to build a
nice holiday home for themselves?

That's how we feel. Pain. We still remember them being alive, our fathers,
mothers, our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, buried in this soil.

And how are we, both You and us, going to explain this barbarity to our children
and our children's children?

We demand that You, urgently and without delay, should interfere and put an end
to this moral outrage.


Adopted on 3 August 2009, at the rally of the Crimean Tatars who were illegally
deported (ethnically cleansed) on 18 May 1944 from the villages of Lenine
District, Crimea, as well as their descendants.

Lenine, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

July,30, 2009

DEMOCRACY "BY TIMOSHENKO"

More than 20.000 Crimean Tatar' families, which have returned from the places of
deportation, for many years get the ungrounded refusals in land allotments by
Crimean authorities. They organized a picket near the building of the Supreme
Ministers, which is already for 80 days requiring from the Government the
allotment of lands for habitation building. These lands are located on empty and
unutilized for many years fields, and the ownship belongs to different
ministries and departments of the state.

The decree of the President of Ukraine # 435/2008 "About additional measures on
providing the right for land of the citizens, who live on the territory of
Crimean Autonomic Republic" (May, 14, 2008), set up the task for the Supreme
Ministers to solve the land problem in Crimea.

Within the past year the Government of Timoshenko did nothing for solving the
acute problem. Moreover, during this year several serious land conflicts
happened in Crimea, when to the fields of protest the special troops were
attracted with the permission to apply the table weapon against the unarmed
repatriates in their built houses and mosques. At the same time hundreds of
hectares of Crimean land were sold out to business corporations close to
authorities, that was made with violation of all norms and requirements of the
Ukrainian land legislation.

Indignant at open sabotage of the Decree of President, on May, 12, 2009 Crimean
Tatars have organized the picketing of the Supreme Ministers of Ukraine,
requiring from the Government to stop the land lawlessness in Crimea and to
decide the land problems of repatriates.

During the picket the two-week hunger-strike was held, which resulted in
hospitalization of three participants of action. Dozens of written appeals of
the picketers remained without any answer, that also contradicted with all
operating norms of law in Ukraine.

Moreover, instead of the execution of the task of the President, the Government,
with the help of law structures, renders the psychological and physical pressure
on the picketers, trying to force them to give up the requirements. The
picketers are forbidden to put the tents, people are forced to spend the nights
in the open sky, regardless any weather conditions. The informative block of the
picket was set - not a single central TV channel of Ukraine during 80 days gave
at least one report about the action. The Government blackmails the protesters,
saying that the land question will not be decided until the picket is not cut
down. But how is it possible to trust those, who have built the policy on
deception? During the hunger-strike the picketers were promised that the
question will be decided, as soon as they will stop the hunger-strike. The
exhausted people trusted the authorities, stopped the hunger-strike and even
purchased the tickets to return to Crimea, but they were cynically deceived. The
question is not decided till now. Moreover, the authorities from demonstrative
inactivity have turned to the active actions against the picketers.

At night, July 29-30, the Crimean Tatar picket was attacked. More than thirty
men, who have arrived by bus with darkened windows and mudded numbers, attacked
asleep participants of action of protest, broke the placards and transparencies,
scattered about and stole the property of the picketers. The militiamen, instead
of providing safety of action, were watching apathetically what was going on,
that obviously specifies the involvement of authorities to the happened attack.

The picketers have sent the statements to the President of Ukraine, Prime
Minister, the Executive of Verkhovna Rada in human rights, General Prosecutor,
minister of the Ministry of Internal Affaires, with a requirement to halt the
lawlessness, find and call for responsibility the guilty in that violation of
human rights.

The participants of the action of protest declare that no intrigues of the
Government will compel them to cut down the picket and give up the requirements.
"We have no other choice. Our children need habitation, and our parents, who
were deprived the houses by the criminal Stalin regime and experienced all
horrors of genocide in deportation, need roof over a head", say the picketers.
On their opinion, the responsibility for the gross violation of human rights
lies on the Prime-Minister Julia Timoshenko, as the Chief of the executive power
in the country.

Window on Eurasia: Is Kyiv Preparing to Change Course on the Crimean Tatars?


Paul Goble


             Vienna, July 3 �Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has asked
prosecutors to consider opening a criminal case against those who deported the
Crimean Tatars and other ethnic groups from Crimea in 1944, an apparent response
to a Crimean Tatar hunger strike in Kyiv and a possible indication that Kyiv is
about to change its approach to the Crimean Tatars.

             In announcing this step, presidential press secretary Iryna
Vannykova said yesterday that "the chief of state says that he fact of illegal
and forced mass deportation of the Crimean Tatar people from Crimea in 1944 is
undeniable, as is the fact of deportation of other ethnic groups living in
Crimean territory" (www.kyivpost.com/nation/44486).

             She added that the prosecutor general's office and the Ukrainian
security services are "to conduct an impartial pre-trial inquiry in to the
matter," on the basis of which "the actions of the Soviet totalitarian regime in
Crimea could be appropriately qualified in legal terms" and charges filed.

             Given recent threats by Moscow officials to punish anyone who
questions the Russian version of World War II and given Ukrainian efforts in the
past to use the courts to focus attention on the tragedies Ukraine suffered
under the Soviets, Yushchenko's order may represent only an act of defiance that
is entirely consistent with past policy.

             But there may be another factor at work here as well: Kyiv's desire
to mollify the increasingly angry Crimean Tatars, given the Ukrainian
government's less than entirely satisfactory relationship with that community in
the past and Kyiv's need for allies on the peninsula where some Russian
nationalists have been promoting secessionist ideas.

             Groups of Crimean Tatars have been staging protests continuously
since April 6 to demand that the Ukrainian authorities address their demand for
the return of land that was seized by the Soviets after Stalin deported the
Crimean Tatars 65 years ago.  And then the World Crimean Tatar Congress raised
this and other issues in a telegram to the Ukrainian government.

             Not having gotten a response, ten Crimean Tatar activists on May 12
began a hunger in Kyiv, initially in tens as in Moscow 20 years ago.  Three
dropped out because of health problems, but 16 more later joined. And these
strikers are now in the third month of their action.

Senior Ukrainian leaders have refused to receive them, although they have sent
more junior officials out to urge the Crimean Tatars to end this protest. In the
hope of gaining more attention, the hunger strikers began beating metal barrel
drums every 15 minutes to insure that Ukrainian officials know they are still
there and have issued an appeal to the world.

             That appeal says that the failure of the Ukrainian authorities to
address the land problem in Crimea has convinced those taking part in this
protest that they can no longer "trust that the government considers the Crimean
Tatars part of the Ukrainian people" and that the Ukrainian authorities are
acting in ways that have "only one name � genocide!"

             Given that the Ukrainian government does not live up to its own
constitution and chooses not even to meet with the Crimean Tatars, "openly
ignoring not only picketers but those who may die from their hunger strike," the
activists say that they have only "one way" left � "to appeal directly to the
international community."

             "The entire world," they continued, "must know about the criminal
behavior of [Kyiv] toward an entire nationality! It must know about the
falseness of Ukrainian claims to the UN and European Union that Ukraine is
developing as a democratic and law-abiding state! [And] it must know about this
genocide and that Ukraine, with such a government, cannot be in Europe."

             Lest that anger lead a few Crimean Tatars to line up with Russian
nationalists in Crimea against the Ukrainians, something Crimean Tatars are
overwhelmingly loathe to do, and in order to strengthen the sometimes frayed
ties between Ukrainians and the Crimean Tatars as a whole, Kyiv does not need to
do very much.

             The hunger strikers are asking only that the land issue be addressed
fairly, but if they continue to be ignored, their demands may become more
political and more difficult for Kyiv to cope with.  President Yushchenko's
decision this week to address one key issue suggests he understands that and may
be open to more changes in Ukraine's dealing with the Crimean Tatars.

Crimean Tatars Divide Ukraine and Russia
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 6 Issue: 121
June 24, 2009 01:04 PM Age: 2 days
Category: Eurasia Daily Monitor, Home Page, Russia, Ukraine, Domestic/Social
By: Taras Kuzio

Crimean Tatars gather for a rally during a ceremony marking the 64th anniversary
of their people's deportation from the peninsula to distant parts of the Soviet
Union, in Simferopol May 18, 2009.

President Viktor Yushchenko has strongly condemned the 1944 deportation of
Crimean Tatars on many occasions and ordered the Security Service (SBU) to open
a special investigative unit examining crimes against humanity committed by the
Soviet regime against them. Since the 1998 Ukrainian parliamentary elections,
Rukh and President Yushchenko's Our Ukraine have included Tatar leaders within
their party lists.

The SBU unit will investigate the 1944 deportation and the earlier persecution
of the Crimean Tatar intelligentsia. The SBU has declassified 63 criminal cases
against Crimean Tatar members of the Milly Firqa separatist organization that
operated from 1918-1928. SBU chairman Valentyn Nalyvaychenko recently outlined
how the special unit would investigate who was responsible for the deportations.
Crimean Tatars seek to have all former KGB documents pertaining to them
declassified and made available for public scrutiny on the internet. The SBU
promised the declassified documents would be given to families who suffered
during the repressions.

On the 65th anniversary of the deportation of Crimean Tatars, Prime Minister
Yulia Tymoshenko condemned it in no uncertain terms: "This terrible and severe
page in our history we, as Ukrainians who ourselves went through the
famine-genocide and repression, and for a long period of time defended their
right to independence, feel the sufferings and consequences of each and every
Crimean Tatar" (www.kmu.gov.ua May 18).

The anniversary coincided with the first World Congress of Crimean Tatars
attended by 800 delegates from 11 countries. The congress, held in the famous
Bakhchysaray palace, the former seat of the Tatar Khanate, was followed by a
procession to the historical Zincirli Madrasah. The congress released the pent
up frustrations felt by Crimean Tatars who are dissatisfied with the manner in
which they have been treated by successive Ukrainian governments. Throughout
much of May the Crimean Tatar protestors stood outside the cabinet of ministers'
office in Kyiv demanding greater attention for their economic and social plight.

Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev, a veteran Soviet dissident, complained
that no legislation has ever been adopted in Ukraine to reinstate the social and
legal rights of his people (Voice of America Russian service, May 18). The World
Congress called upon the Ukrainian president and prime minister, "to take urgent
steps to deliver on all the previously reached agreements, and your instructions
and promises regarding the fair resolution of land disputes in Crimea and
providing Crimean Tatars with land" (UNIAN, May 23).

All of the infrastructure of the Crimean Tatars up to their 1944 deportation -
theaters, schools, mosques, and other buildings - were expropriated by the
Soviet regime and have not been returned. Crimean Tatar place names were
subsequently Russified. Currently 15 out of 650 Crimean schools provide
instruction in Crimean Tatar, but only 13 of these do so in the first three
grades.

Land is the major source of dispute, as many Tatars live illegally as squatters,
pushed into rural areas by developers taking prize urban real estate. High
unemployment forces many Crimean Tatars to eke out a living within the shadow
economy, as shuttle-traders where they regularly face violence from organized
criminal gangs who control the street markets. The issue of the plight of the
Crimean Tatars is seen in diametrically opposite ways by Ukrainians and
Russians. Russian nationalist and communist parties and NGO's in the Crimea hold
to the Russian world view of Tatars as rabidly anti-Russian and "Nazi
collaborators." They, and the Russian authorities, see Tsarina Catherine as a
great builder of the Russian empire. Ukrainians and Tatars see her as a
destroyer of their autonomy and independence in the last two decades of the
eighteenth century. Following the Russian occupation of the Crimea, between the
1780's to 1914 hundreds of thousands of Tatars emigrated to Ottoman Turkey,
where in modern Turkey they remain a vocal lobby.

The charge of "Nazi collaborators" was first raised in May 1944 when the Soviet
leader Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of 200,000 Crimean Tatars to
Uzbekistan. Between 25 percent (Soviet government figure) and 46 percent
(Crimean Tatar estimate) died in the first year in exile. Smaller numbers of
Germans, Armenians and Bulgarians were also deported. The place of these four
ethnic groups was largely filled by ethnic Russians. The autonomous status of
the Crimea within the Russian SFSR was abolished in 1944 and only revived in
1991 in the Ukrainian SSR to which the Crimea was transferred in 1954.

The USSR unleashed ideological tirades against Ukrainian, Baltic and Crimean
Tatar nationalist diasporas by equating "nazi collaborationism" with
"(separatist) bourgeois nationalism." This linkage escaped the anti-communist
Russian diaspora as it, like the majority of Russian dissidents, never supported
the secession of the Russian SFSR from the USSR. Russian nationalists and the
majority of Russian democratic dissidents either supported the transformation of
the USSR into a "Russian (or eastern Slavic) state" or the USSR's
democratization, not its dissolution. In 1967 the Soviet government dropped all
charges of "Nazi collaboration." But, Tatars only began to return to the Crimea
in the late 1980's, where they now number 300,000 (12 percent of the
population). The ethnic Russian majority is in decline from 65 (1989) to 58
(2001) percent. Approximately 100,000 Crimean Tatars continue to live in
Uzbekistan.

Under Vladimir Putin the positive steps taken in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras
in overcoming Soviet stereotypes and false criminal charges have been reversed.
President Dmitry Medvedev's creation of a "historical commission" coincides with
a bill "opposing the rehabilitation of Nazism, Nazi criminals and their
accomplices" in the former USSR. The "falsification of history" is better
applied to Russian leaders who have ordered school textbooks to portray Stalin
as an "effective manager," and his mass crimes against humanity explained away
as the only manner in which to overcome the USSR's economic and security
challenges. However, as the Moscow-based political analyst Yevgeny Kiselyov,
recently observed: "The worst `falsifier' of history, of course, has been the
Kremlin" (Moscow Times, June 3). Stalin came in third place in the "Name of
Russia" nationwide television contest held in November 2008.

Ukraine's strategy of declassifying KGB documents pertaining to Soviet crimes
against humanity began in the 1990's, and was speeded up under Yushchenko. The
policy is diametrically at odds with Russia under Putin, which continues to
block access to archives. Soviet documents on the 1933 Ukrainian famine and
other Soviet crimes are being declassified in Ukraine, while they remain a
"state secret" in Russia (Moscow Times, June 9).
<- Back to: The Jamestown Foundation

Crimean Tatars Threaten to `Block Ukraine's Path to Europe
June 10, 2009
Paul Goble

Declaring that Kyiv's neglect of their rights leaves them no choice, a group of
Crimean Tatar activists said this week that they will "block Ukraine's path to
the European Union" by providing information to "every Council of Europe
mission" about "the genocide [against the Crimean Tatars] that is taking place
in our days.

Yesterday, Rinat Shaymardanov of the Avdet Social Organization, which has
organized a Crimean Tatar hunger strike in front of the Ukrainian council of
ministers building, handed out a declaration saying that if Kyiv continues to
treat them as an "unimportant" issue, the Crimean Tatars will act to ensure that
their situation becomes "the main problem" of Ukraine.

In its effort to join the European Union, he said, "Ukraine presents itself as a
legal democratic state." But the experience of the Crimean Tatars over the last
18 years, during which they still do not have "land, homes or the status of
repatriates," shows that Ukraine is just as anti-democratic and totalitarian a
state as the Stalinist Soviet Union" (www.ia-centr.ru/expert/4920/).

Because of that and because the Ukrainian authorities have not responded to
their latest protests, Shaymardanov continued, they have no choice but to do
everything they can "in order that the world will find out about the true face
of the Ukrainian powers that be," a country with "an anti-democratic government"
that "crudely violates the rights of indigenous peoples."

Such a country, the Crimean Tatar activist said, "has no place in the civilized
world community and no place among the legal democratic governments of the
European Union.

Participants in the hunger strike have been carrying signs which underscore
Shaymardanov's declarations: "1944-2009 � the Genocide of Crimean Tatars
Continues!" "15,000 Families Have No Houses Because of the Council of
Ministers!" and "Ukraine + Genocide = Euro-integration???"

While the primary motivating factor behind the protest and the latest
declaration its participants released appears to be the land question � tens of
thousands of Crimean Tatars who have returned to their homeland from Central
Asia have not recovered their property � the underlying cause is both deeper and
at present more dangerous.

Since the end of Soviet times, the Ukrainian authorities by actions of omission
and commission have outraged many Crimean Tatars. On the one hand, Kyiv failed
to extend citizenship to Crimean Tatars who were forcibly deported from their
homeland even though the Ukrainian government did extend citizenship to
Ukrainians the Soviets had forced out.

And on the other, the Ukrainian government often has failed to back up the
Crimean Tatars against the ethnic Russian community in Crimea, leaving the
Russian arrivals in possession of land and other property that the Crimean
Tatars are fully convinced is rightfully theirs and should be returned.

While the issues involved are complicated by the historical reality that until
1954, Crimea was part of the RSFSR, the Soviet republic which became the Russian
Republic, rather than the Ukrainian SSR, which became the Ukrainian Republic,
anger among Crimean Tatars about the actions of the Ukrainian authorities is
creating an increasingly serious problem.

Despite the statements of the protesters this week, statements which reflect
despair more than anything else, Crimean Tatars overwhelmingly are loyal to
Ukraine and seek only Kyiv's recognition of them as full-fledged citizens of
Ukraine and the restoration of their rights within that republic.

Indeed, in the first years following the end of the Soviet Union, the leaders of
the Crimean Tatars made it clear that they wanted to be Ukraine's allies against
those ethnic Russian activists in Crimea and their supporters in Moscow,
including not unimportantly Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who wanted Crimea
returned to the Russian Republic.

The vast majority of Crimean Tatars still feel that way, but enough of them have
been alienated by Ukraine's policies that at least a few are prepared to speak
out in the way Shaymardanov has, something Russian groups interested in
restoring Moscow's control of Crimea will exploit
(news.km.ru/krym_zadumalsya_o_vyxode_iz_ukra).

There is still time for the Ukrainian government to recover its positions in
Crimea and with the Crimean Tatars, but because of recent Russian actions, there
is far less than ever before. And tragically, in this situation, statements like
the ones the Crimean Tatars have made this week will make it more difficult for
Kyiv to act even as they highlight the reasons why it must.

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March 30, 2009
Crimean Tatars Demonstrate On Land Issue
SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine -- About two thousand Crimean Tatar activists demonstrated
in front of the building of Crimea's Council of Ministers, demanding that the
government take concrete steps to provide land for Tatar repatriates, RFE/RL's
Ukrainian Service reports.

A leader of the Crimean Tatar community, Daniyal Ametov, told journalists that
future protests will be held in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

Ametov said the government of Ukraine has not implemented all the chapters of
the presidential decree on creating a commission to solve the land issue for the
Crimean Tatar repatriates.

The Crimean Tatars were deported to Central Asia by the regime of Josef Stalin
in the 1940s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they returned to the
Crimean peninsula, where about 265,000 of them now live. Some 10,000 Crimean
Tatars are struggling to acquire land to live on.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty � 2009 RFE/RL, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Crimean Tatars Ask Council Of Europe To Settle Dispute

Window on Eurasia: The Crimean Tatars Finally Have Their Own 'Anne Frank'



Paul Goble



             Vienna, January 7 � More than most people suspect,
memoirs, novels and films about a nation's struggles often play a
defining, even revolutionary role not only in uniting its members to
achieve their common goal but also and perhaps even more important in
presenting their case to the broader world more forcefully and
effectively than any academic or legal study could.

             No one Jewish or not can think about the Holocaust without
remembering The Diary of Anne Frank. No one Armenian or not can think
about 1915 without recalling the story of that terrible year as told
in The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. And no one Ukrainian or not can think
about the Terror Famine of the 1930s without recollecting The Yellow
Prince.

             But if many nations would benefit from having such a work,
few do.  Consequently, it is always an occasion for wonder and
excitement when a book of this kind appears.  That has now happened
for the Crimean Tatars, and with the publication of Lily Hyde's Dream
Land,* that hard-pressed people now have their very own "Diary of Anne
Frank."

             Lily Hyde, a British freelance journalist based in
Ukraine, tells the story of the return of the Crimean Tatars to their
homeland in the early 1990s from the perspective of Safi, a
12-year-old girl who comes back with her parents, brother, and
grandfather to her family's now destroyed village in Crimea from their
exile in Uzbekistan.

             While Safi's grandfather provides background on the
tragedies the Crimean Tatars have suffered over the last century,
including Stalin's deportation of the entire nation to Central Asia on
May 18, 1944, this novel is especially powerful because it considers
their situation now through the eyes of a girl who must wrestle with
the question of where is her real home is.

             Like most young people, Safi is more focused on the
challenges posed by her immediate surroundings than on larger
political questions.  Will she be able to make friends in a new place?
Why do her new neighbors dislike her family so much? What possessed
her parents to move from their sunny and large house in Samarkand to
what is little more than a hovel in Crimea?

             Over the course of the book, she does make new friends,
not only among other Crimean Tatars but also among Ukrainians and
Russians. She discovers that none of these communities has had an easy
time of it in the last century.  And she watches as her father and
mother build a house and open a teahouse to earn money to finish it.

             After school � and going to school is so important for her
that she misleads her parents as to why the Russian bus driver won't
drop her off where he is supposed to � Safi wanders in the mountains
where she discovers both places of beauty that remind her of what
Crimea could be and a Karaim cemetery that undercuts her conviction
that the Tatars were in Crimea first.

             Each of her experiences is set off by a story from her
beloved grandfather, who was among those deported by Stalin more than
half a century earlier.  He tells her both about the heroes and
victims among the Crimean Tatars and also about those among that
nation who were taken in by the Nazis or the Soviets and behaved badly.

             One of Safi's grandfather's most disturbing stories
concerns the decision of the Soviet secret police to drown the
residents of several Crimean Tatars they had originally missed when
carrying out Stalin's plan to exile all the Crimean Tatars from their
homeland lest the Kremlin dictator find out about this mistake and
exile or execute the NKVD men.

             Hyde says in an afterward that she learned of this and
other details from conversations with Crimean Tatars and that there is
no documentation about the drowning.  In fact, that is not quite so.
The Munich Institute for the Study of the USSR reported it in 1958,
and in 1992, the Moscow Institute of Ethnography documented it in a
volume on the Crimean Tatar movement.

             In the course of the novel, tensions build between the
Crimean Tatars who are building houses without permits from the
Ukrainian authorities, on the one hand, and Ukrainian and Russian
residents of the peninsula who resent the return of these hardworking
and totally committed competitors, on the other.

             Finally, in the climactic scene, an unruly mob brings up a
bulldozer to destroy the house Safi's family has built.  She throws
herself in front of the bulldozer, not in time to save the house or to
prevent herself from being seriously injured, but in a manner that
forces the local authorities to decide that they must give her family
at least permission to remain and build.

             Safi thus becomes a hero, although she does not
immediately understand why that should be so, and she feels about
herself, as she sometimes feels about her grandfather and his stories,
that they are "telling him" rather than he is "telling them," a gain
in self-knowledge that both recognize is an indication that she and
her people are growing up.

             In the course of the book, her grandfather begins each of
his stories about the past of the Crimean Tatar nation with the words,
"Bir zamanda bar eken, bir zamanda yoke ken" � in English, "Sometime
it was and sometime it wasn't at all." But at the end, he tells Safi
she must not focus on his stories of the past, however important, but
must write her own for the future.

Safi's life as recounted in Lily Hyde's remarkable novel beyond any
question means that the Crimean Tatars now are becoming more conscious
of the complexities of their own past and present and thus well on
their way to making her Dream Land ever more real for her, her people,
and for us.



*Lily Hyde, Dream Land: One Girl's Struggle to Find Her True Home
(London: Walker Books, 2008, ISBN: 978-1-4063-0765-8).

Hello Yanki,

Yes, you are correct. When I first read the following paragraph, it was
not clear what side he was supporting:

"Today, Mustafa Dzhemilyev, who is both the leader of the Crimean
Tatars and a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament, said that he is
convinced that the large number of Crimeans who have dual citizenship
with Russia by itself points to a possible South Ossetian scenario for
that peninsula."

Rick

It is interesting to me that in this article the author states that
Crimean Tatars would support Russia even after the violent deportation
of all the Tatars under Soviet control centered in Russia. Either: 1)
the statement is incorrect 2) Tatars have a short memory or 3)The
Tatars seem to think there will be an advantage to them under Russian
government.

Hi luis,

Where did you study in Crimea? when did you study here? I never heard
of someone from Peru in Crimea! It's very interesting!

Rick

--- In crimea@yahoogroups.com, lualgubo40 <no_reply@...> wrote:
>
> Hi frieend:
> I also have to establish contact eith someone in Semferopol.
> I love very much that city. I know it very good, because i studied
> there.
> I am peruvian, my name is luis
> My E - mail es   ; amigo247@...  also
> Sincerely
> luis
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
>

Hi frieend:
I also have to establish contact eith someone in Semferopol.
I love very much that city. I know it very good, because i studied
there.
I am peruvian, my name is luis
My E - mail es   ; amigo247@...  also
Sincerely
luis











--

Hello my Friends!

I have a new weblog about Simferopol, Ukraine and Crimea in the
English Language! I have free music there which I wrote while I lived
in Ukraine. Check it out! Also there are many cool photos!

It's here: www.xanga.com/templestream

Sincerely,
Rick Warden
Simferopol, Ukraine