I don't know if you guys have watched the Eurovision song contest finals, A Crimean Tatar lady name Jamala ( Cemile ) has won the title with the song " 1944 " which tells the genocide of Crimean Tatars by the Soviet Russia.
This is the song;
The Story
The forcible
deportation of the Crimean Tatars from
Crimea was ordered by
Joseph Stalin as a form of
collective punishment for alleged collaboration with the Nazi occupation regime in
Taurida Subdistrict during 1942-1943. The state-organized removal is known as the
Sürgünlik in
Crimean Tatar. A total of more than 230,000 people were deported, mostly to the
Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. This included the entire ethnic Crimean Tatar population, at the time about a fifth of the total population of the Crimean Peninsula, as well as smaller numbers of ethnic
Greeks and Bulgarians. A large number of deportees (more than 100,000 according to a 1960s survey by Crimean Tatar activists) died from starvation or disease as a direct result of deportation. It is considered to be a case of
ethnic cleansing.
[1][2][3] For a long time Crimean Tatars and
Soviet dissidents called for recognition of the
genocide of Crimean Tatars. On November 12, 2015
parliament of Ukraine adopted a resolution recognizing the event as a genocide and declared 18 May as a Day of Remembrance for the victims of Crimean Tatar genocide.
[4]
During
destalinization the deportation was denounced by the Soviet government; nevertheless, the Crimean Tatars were denied the right of return up until late
perestroika times.
A total of 238,500 people were deported, compared to a recorded total of 9,225 Crimean Tatars who had served in anti-Soviet
Tatar Legions and other
German-formed battalions.
[13]
The deportation began on 18 May 1944 early morning in all Crimean-inhabited localities and lasted until 16:00 on 20 May 1944.
[14] More than 32,000
NKVD troops participated in this action.
[14] The forced deportees were given only 30 minutes to gather personal belongings, after which they were loaded onto cattle trains and moved out of Crimea.
[11][15] A deportee recalled the knocking of their door at 3 am on 18 May and being given 15 minutes to get ready.
[16] Despite the fact that the decree allowed the deportees to take their "personal items, clothing, household objects, dishes and utensils, and up to 500 kilograms of food per family" with them,
[12] some deportees did not take anything with them as the events were reminiscent of
the Holocaust, and they expected to be killed soon.
[16] The deportees were brought to central gathering stations in
Simferopol and
Bakhchysarai, and after a short waiting period, loaded on trains.
[17]
183,155
[14] - 193,865 Crimean Tatars were deported, 151,136 of them to
Uzbek SSR, 8,597 to
Mari ASSR, 4,286 to
Kazakh SSR, the rest 29,846 to the various
oblasts of
Russian SFSR.
[14] According to NKVD records, 2,444 Crimean Tatar families were separated during the deportation.
[18] This was considered to be intentional by the Crimean Tatars, as they believed that the aim of the Soviet government was to achieve their deaths by any means; if not physically, then through grief and loneliness.
[17] At the same moment, most of the Crimean Tatar men who were fighting in the ranks of the Red Army were demobilized and sent into forced labor camps in Siberia and in the Ural mountain region.
[11]
Cultural destruction[edit]
The Soviet government planned the ethnic assimilation of the Crimean Tatar community into the Central Asian population.
[34] It destroyed Tatar cultural assets; this included the destruction of Tatar monuments and burning of Tatar manuscripts and books,
[2] including those by
Lenin and
Marx. Tatar mosques were converted into cinemas and warehouses, gravestones of Tatars were used as building material. Exiled Crimean Tatars were banned from speaking of Crimea and official Soviet texts, including the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, erased all references to them. When applying for internal passports, "Crimean Tatar" was not accepted as an existing ethnic group and those that designated themselves as "Crimean Tatars" were automatically denied passports.
[35] The traditional production methods of the Crimean Tatars were destroyed through the force labor imposed on them.
[31]
The Soviet Union engaged in a policy of "toponymic repression" against Crimean Tatars. This commenced with a decree from the Party Committee of the Crimean Oblast on 20 October 1944, ordering the renaming of all Tatar, Greek and German-language place names (including mountains and rivers), and was followed by a decree of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet Presidium on 14 December, stipulating the renaming of all districts and district centers to Russian-language names. Two more decrees followed on 21 August 1945 and 18 May 1948, resulting in the renaming of 1389 more Crimean Tatar towns and villages.
[36]
Soviet propaganda[edit]
The Soviet government of the time denied the nature of the deportation by claiming that it was voluntary and reflecting it in this light to the domestic and international media. At the time of the deportations, the term "resettlement" was used by the NKVD instead of "deportation".
[34]
A revisionist approach was adopted in the historical presentation of Crimean Tatars, where they were represented as bandits and thieves that had no developmental contributions. In some Soviet spy novels, they were vilified as evil Nazi agents and traitors.
[2]
On 28 April 1956, by the decree of the Supreme Soviet Presidium of the USSR, the Crimean Tatars were released from special settlement, accompanied by a restoration of their civil rights. In the same year, the Crimean Tatars started a petition to allow their repatriation to Crimea. They held mass protests in October 1966, but these were violently quelled by the Soviet military. On 21 June 1967, the first meeting of the Soviet government, represented by the
KGB Chairman, the Minister of the Internal Affairs and the Secretary of the USSR Supreme Soviet with a Crimean Tatar delegation took place. Prompt rehabilitation of Crimean Tatars were promised, but never fulfilled. On 27 August and 2 September 1967, thousands of Crimean Tatars took to the streets to protest in
Tashkent. The protests were cracked down upon, but prompted official Soviet response.
[37]
Although a decree of the Supreme Soviet Presidium issued on 5 September 1967 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. Crimean Tatars, having a definite tradition of non-communist political dissent, succeeded in creating a truly independent network of activists, values and political experience.
[38] In 1968, 300 families were allowed to return, but this was only for propaganda purposes.
[39]Crimean Tatars, led by the
Crimean Tatar National Movement Organization,
[40] were not allowed to return to Crimea from exile until the beginning of the
Perestroika in the mid-1980s.
[41]
The 1991 RSFSR law
On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples addressed
rehabilitation of all ethnicities repressed in the Soviet Union. However the law had various deficiencies, including unclear legal status of a number of peoples, such as Crimean Tatars moved across the borders of Soviet republics, after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union.
[42] After the
annexation of Crimea by Russia, on April 21, 2014
Vladimir Putin signed the decree No 268 "О мерах по реабилитации армянского, болгарского, греческого, крымско-татарского и немецкого народов и государственной поддержке их возрождения и развития". ("On the Measures for the Rehabilitation of Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, Crimean Tatar and German Peoples and the State Support of Their Revival and Development"),
[43] amended by Decree no. 458 of September 12, 2015.
[44]The decree addressed the status of the mentioned peoples which resided in
Crimean ASSR and were deported from there.
After the annexation of Crimea by Russia, the Crimean parliament recognized the 20th century history of Crimean Tatars as a "tragic fate."
[45]
Crimean activists were calling for the recognition of the Sürgünlik as
genocide.
[46] This was also supported by
Soviet dissidents.
[47][48] Greta Lynn Uehling, in her book
Beyond Memory: The Crimean Tatars' Deportation and Return, wrote that the deportation of the Crimean Tatars satisfied the definition of genocide according to the UN
Genocide Convention, as despite the fact that not all Crimean Tatars were exterminated, the genocidal intent of destroying a particular ethnic group and implementing calculated policies to achieve this was present.
[17] On November 12, 2015
Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted a resolution on recognition of Crimean Tatars' genocide.
[49] On May 11, 2016, it appealed to the international community, particularly the
United Nations,
OSCE,
European Parliament and
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to recognize the deportation as genocide.
[50]
Genocide has destroyed half of the Crimean Tatars.
