Indigenous People

The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, an advisory body to ECOSOC, is in the closing days of its seventh session in New York City. Crimean Tatars are acknowledged as an indigenous people in Ukraine by the international community and have sent representatives. But Ukraine has dragged its feet for almost 18 years on passing a law designating the Crimean Tatars as an indigenous people of Ukraine and awarding them the rights that come with that designation according to international guidelines.

There are a lot of ways to speculate about why this law has failed to be passed in Ukraine and in Crimea. If you read the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, you might get some ideas. (Land reparations is a big one.) Also, Natalya Belitser has written some excellent articles that summarize the "history of the political debate" over Crimean Tatar indigenous status. As of a few weeks ago, there were rumors that the law was going to be coming up in the Verkhovna Rada again soon, though I have also heard criticisms about the various ways in which the law has been defanged and made empty through the drawn out parliamentary process. 

Nadir Bekir, the head of an organization called the Foundation for the Research and Support of the Indigenous People of Crimea (which includes Crimean Tatars, Karaimy, and Krymchaky), shared the following appeal from a member of his organization. I don't think it expresses the voice of all Crimean Tatars, but it's one loud voice among many. What follows is Mr. Muybeyyin Batu Altan's presentation to the UNPFII in New York, which ends with the plea to "Don't let Crimea become Ukraine's Tibet!" Strong words.

THE CRIMEAN TATARS’ STATEMENT

Madam chairperson, esteemed delegates and observers!

I would like to express my thanks and appreciation to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues for giving our organization this opportunity to report on the ongoing human rights violations perpetrated against the Crimean Tatars, one of the indigenous peoples of Crimea.

It was our sincere hope that we would report some positive developments on the status of Crimean Tatars’ human rights issues in Crimea. We are saddened to report, madam chairperson, that the human rights violations against the indigenous people of Crimea, the Crimean Tatars has significantly increased. Since our last report to this honorable forum, not only our people were attacked and beaten, but our cemeteries were also vandalized and desecrated.

On November 1, 2007, a large group of Russian paramilitary group called “Sevastopol Cossacks” armed with clubs and other weapons, attacked Crimean Tatars on Balaklava Street in Simferopol, Crimea. There were 200 “Berkut” special forces present, but no arrest was made during or after the attack.

On November 6, 2007, a 600 strong “Berkut” special militia forces attacked and destroyed small Crimean Tatar business establishments in Ai-Petri, Yalta. Crimean Tatar businessmen and their supporters were severely beaten by “Berkut” forces, four of them needed hospitalization.

Madam chairperson, barely three months had elapsed since the “Berkut”, the special Ukrainian militia forces attacked and brutally beat Crimean Tatars in November of 2007 Ai-Petri, near Yalta, and destroyed their small business establishments. The same militia forces were on site during the Balaklava Street attack on Crimean Tatars by the Sevastopol Cossacks on November 1, 2007.

While Crimean Tatars were yet to recover from the shock of the aforementioned attacks, in early hours on February 10, 2008 in town of Seitler (Nzynyohirsky) in Crimea, a group of vandals broke into the Crimean Tatar Muslim cemetery, killed the watchdog and then ransacked and desecrated 270 Crimean Tatar headstones.

The ink on our last “Appeal to World Public” and to Ukrainian government in particular, to stop the violent attacks on Crimean Tatars and their sacred places had not dried yet when we received reports and photographs of yet another vicious attack on Crimean Tatar Muslim cemetery in Chistenkoe, near Simferopol on April 11, 2008. This news came just a day after 1000 Ukrainian “Berkut “ special militia forces forcibly evicted 16 Crimean Tatar families who after almost ten years of waiting had no other choice but occupy the building and lived in that unfinished building on Yubileynaya Street in Alushta.

One photograph of the Chistenkoe attack, among several sent to us instantaneously by Nadir Bekir, president of Foundation of Research and Support of Indigenous Peoples of Crimea stands out as it conveys the dangerous and critical ethnic situation in Crimea. Right behind the vandalized and destroyed Muslim headstones, on the wall one sees a graffiti written in red ink that reads as follows:

“TATARI VON IS KRIMA!- TATARS GET OUT OF CRIMEA!”. Next to this ultimatum a hanging noose and next to it the Crimean Tatar national symbol “Tarak Tamga” is crossed off. As we stated in our previous appeal to world public, this vicious attack is just a continuation of series of well planned attacks on the indigenous people of Crimea, the Crimean Tatars, by the chauvinist forces who are determined to destabilize the peaceful Crimean peninsula. As always, the authorities expressed their sadness and act as if they are shocked by these barbaric

desecrations of Crimean Tatar cemeteries, yet so far the perpetrators are not arrested and have not brought to justice. We are puzzled to see thousands of “Berkut” special militia forces marching in to evict 16 innocent Crimean Tatar families, but our cemeteries after numerous attacks still remain unprotected. What are the authorities waiting for? Are they waiting for these hoodlums to attack the Crimean Tatar homes?

These vicious attacks are just continuation of series of attacks on the indigenous people of Crimea, Crimean Tatars, by the chauvinist forces who are determined to destabilize the peaceful Crimean peninsula.

We are afraid that Crimean Tatars’ patient is running thin, and after this latest attack on their cemetery they began to ask their leaders about taking the safety and protection of their families and properties into their own hands. Once again the Crimean Tatar leaders advised against it and asked Crimean Tatars to remain calm and patient. The Crimean Tatar leaders again asked their people to “turn the other cheek” to avoid bloodshed. But how long can they keep “turning the other cheek?” Crimean Tatars’ patience is running out. The peaceful cry of the Crimean Tatars always has been “We have no other homeland, but Crimea” They have no other place to go, they are in their ancestral homeland to stay, and their goal is to coexist there peacefully with all other nationalities as a people and a nation.

Madam chairperson, we apologize if these are repetitious, we have no choice but repeat our demand year after year as the human rights conditions have not changed significantly in the past sixteen years. We, therefore, once again appeal to the United Nations Organization and world public for support of the Crimean Tatars’ always peaceful national struggle for their human and national rights. We also ask the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to join us in our appeal to the Ukrainian National government for an immediate:

Restoration of the human and national rights of the Crimean Tatar people!
Recognition of the Crimean Tatars as indigenous people of the Crimea!
Recognition of the Crimean Tatar National Mejlis as the de Jure representative of the Crimean Tatar people!
Recognition of the Crimean Tatar language as one of the official languages of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea!
Redress all the Crimean Tatar losses including land, homes and other properties!
Return of all Crimean Tatars [living in exile] to their ancestral homeland under government sponsorship, and help them resettle in Crimea, their ancestral homeland!
Protection and Safety of our sacred places, our cemeteries so our deceased may rest in peace!

CRIMEAN TATARS HAVE NO OTHER HOMELAND, BUT CRIMEA! DON’T LET CRIMEA BECOME UKRAINE’S TIBET! HELP US MAKE CRIMEA OUR PEACEFUL HOMELAND AGAIN!

Thank you, madam chairperson!

Mubeyyin Batu Altan

Research and Support of Indigenous Peoples of Crimea Foundation

batu@prodigy.net

April 21, 2008

Field Report

Well, I have solidified my relationship with the fruit-stand-lady. The fruit-stand-lady-by-the-Salgir-river has decided to trust the foreigner-running-in-a-bright-red-Canadian-hoodie. My casual waves upon arriving and leaving the Salgir river have led up to this responsibility: I am entrusted to guard the fruit stand while the lady makes a dash for the loo. My reward upon her return? A banana.

One could not ask for a more mutually agreeable relationship. I get potassium. She gets some relief. 

More importantly, I can say that the last week has been positively fruitful (sorry) from the standpoint of fieldwork. I have met some fascinating people, heard many incredible stories, and recorded some beautiful music.

Last week, I interviewed DJ Bebek, a prominent Crimean Tatar electronic musician whose debut album Deportacia piqued my interest in my first weeks in Simferopol. I also interviewed Enver Seit-Abdulov, an accomplished Crimean Tatar classical bayan player who comes from a line of Tatar musicians. His mother was recorded on this LP, a compilation of Crimean Tatar music recorded in Uzbekistan after Khrushchev's secret apologies for Stalin loosened things up a little bit.

I sat in with the Crimean Tatar student orchestra at KIPU, which is just getting off the ground.

Yesterday was big: I interviewed Fevzi Aliev at his home in Kamianka, one of the first Tatar settlements outside of Simferopol. 

He is a towering figure in Crimean Tatar folk and popular music, a composer and performer, and the author of an impressive Anthology of Crimean Tatar Folk Music. He is also incredibly lively and funny, and even played a Ukrainian song that he wrote last year for me at his piano. Here he is demonstrating how it was back in the day when you appeared on Soviet television. (No dancing around like the kids today do.)

Then, I met up with Milara-odzha and we traveled to the Tatar settlement in Maryna outside of Simferopol. Here's a photo of the corner store and the mosque being built.

We went to Maryna to record the story of Nariman Umerov, an octogenarian whose life of hardships is impossible to comprehend when face to face with his humor and charm. (Milara-odzha wanted to write his story up for an upcoming issue of the Avdet newspaper, since the Day of Deportation is coming up on May 18th. It was only after an hour of listening that we learned he was an accordion player. That's his photo at the top.)

Conscripted as a Nazi Ostarbeiter at the age of 14, escaped from the camp outside of Berlin in 1944, subsequently and suddenly handed a gun and integrated into the Red Army (where he eventually became a decorated hero), then exiled to Uzbekistan in the 1950s, reunited with his sisters (who survived the deportation). He told us of how he made his living as a musician (an accordion accompanist in schools and orphanages in Uzbekistan) through complete luck. We heard all the way up to the house that he, his wife and their sons built with their own hands in Maryna in the 1990s. Here are some of his awards and medals.

Today, I had the great honor to meet Mustafa Dzhemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatar political movement, a Soviet Gulag survivor, and an eminent advocate for human and indigenous rights. One of the most surprising things to come of our meeting was his offer to make me a CD of Crimean Tatar music. I am supposed to pick it up tomorrow. 

I continue to be astounded by the generosity and hospitality of people at every turn.

There are pages just screaming to be written about each name I've just dropped, but it is too late in the day and there are too many field notes that need to get jotted down before they fly out of my head to do that just yet. Oh, but one day... 

Your Worldview Gets Me Down

I wrote a new song and finally found the time and will to record it today with Milara-odzha's younger brother's old Soviet accordion.

It's part ode to Stringbean (whose signature line: "Lord, I feel so unnecessary" was inspiration), part ode to optimism, and also a passive comment on all of the disagreements I have with people's worldviews in general. The hero who enters at the end actually exists in real life, which is something to be optimistic about.

You can listen to it here.

Ukraine is Not Dead Yet

Ladies and Gentleman, Verka Serduchka. 

I've got to give Verka, Ukraine's beloved cross-

dressing pop star, credit for the winning song of the night, a clever play on the strangely uninspiring sentiment that is the title and refrain of the Ukrainian national anthem: "Ukraine is not dead yet." Doesn't that just make you want to get up and fight? 

Not dead yet, everyone! 

False alarm. 

So Verka adds, "Ukraine is Not Dead Yet if we can DANCE like this." Um tzah um tzah um tzah tzah. Young and old - at the birthday party that I just got home from - everyone could agree to get up and shake it to that.

All this talk about Verka just makes me excited for Eurovision. It's coming up so soon!

Ok, one more. Here Verka accuses you of getting "drunk as a pig." 

Ladies and gentlemen, it seems Ukraine's not quite dead yet.  

Dialogue of Cultures

Last week, a conference titled "Dialogue of Cultures" took place at KIPU, my host institution.

I was informed about the conference the day before it started and then eagerly included in the proceedings. It was all very sudden.

Maya, a young teacher in the English department, offered to translate my talk (which I literally threw together in one hour) into Russian and read it for me on the panel. Good practice, she said. I tried to weed out jargon, but she still had a tough job. There's no easy way around post-colonial language. 

The episode was chaotic from frenzied start to finish: on the morning of the conference, I was shuffled between three lunches, encouraged to drink wine copiously, photographed, and then hastily introduced as a last minute addition to a (mostly Russian) literature panel, of all things.

My talk - which was basically my dissertation prospectus distilled - was not received very well. If I had to judge solely by the two women sitting in the front row who kept smacking their foreheads and sneering, I would say that it was received very poorly, in fact. Unfortunately everyone blamed this on Maya's translation (which was actually pretty close) and exempted the author, the Amerikanka, from any culpability, even though I interrupted whenever the translation seemed imprecise, encouraged questions (I was denied), and mentioned to anyone who would listen that it was not the (Crimean Tatar) translator's conspiracy to make me seem critical of Soviet, Russian, or other dominant group's nationalist agendas. I am critical.

I felt stupid for not thinking better about who my audience was going to be - and more awful that Maya unfairly bore the brunt of their attacks. In the end, I thanked my victimized translator for her work and apologized for the misunderstanding. Then I listened to my No. 1 heckler give a paper on the mystery of acronyms borrowed from English and adopted into Russian ("we say SMS - but what does it mean? ATM - does anybody know?"), and then I vowed to be more vapid next time. Or learn post-colonial theory in Russian so I can say it all myself.

Dialogue of Cultures.

If you're looking for a strange way to spend 16 or 17 minutes, my friend Max Fass recently posted video footage from a 2005 trip that we took to Космач in the Carpathians, in which we literally collided with a Hutsul wedding party (first scene) and then spent the next day following around the musicians, crashing the wedding. This coming weekend, Kosmach - a village that was at the end of a long squiggly line on my roadmap of Ukraine in 2005 - is hosting its second annual international music festival. For the times, they are a-changin'. 

Albeit in fits and starts. 

 

A Story about Music and Deportation

Late last Saturday night in a garden in Bakhchisaray, after we'd finished the shashlik, spicy carrots, garden tomatoes, pickled cabbage; after an impromptu drum circle began and ended; after we wished Anna well after her 2 years of Peace Corps service; after I played my Crimean Tatar repertoire through on a borrowed accordion and realized that the only "American" songs I actually know the words and chords to are obscure country tunes (which stifled the sing-along with other English-speakers & Peace Corp volunteers); after a taciturn man who used to practice the accordion for 3 or 4 hours a day in Uzbekistan but hadn't touched it in years finally picked it back up and we sang what we could; after we had cleared the tables and started goodbyeing, this same man told me a story about music and deportation:

When the night of the deportation came, a group of musicians from one particular neighborhood in Bakhchisaray were herded onto the same cattle car and transported to Uzbekistan. They all survived the journey, and their instruments survived too. Miracle. When they arrived in Uzbekistan, fatigued, starving, shaking, the local people - who had been led to believe by Soviet propaganda that the  Tatars had horns and were cannibals! - were understandably weary of the "special resettlers." But, despite their fatigue and their hunger, the musicians rallied and began to play a къайтарма, a typical Crimean Tatar dance. And, in the storyteller's words, "the people immediately understood what kind of people these were and greeted them with bread and water." 

In the years that followed, he said, "music became a way to keep our culture alive."

There is so much more to say about this. Crimean Tatars, having been erased as a nationality, wiped clean of the history books, faced with restricted mobility until Khrushchev's de-Stalinization period, used music as a mnemonic for more than lyrics, melodies, modes; music became a mnemonic for home.  

There is so much more to say about this and about everything, really. I have lapsed in my blogging. And while I want to apologize for this, in truth it's mostly a positive development, because I have been busy learning and talking and meeting people, so much so that by the time I get home I am often too exhausted to update the blog. But one day, it will all get written up in the dissertation, Inshallah.

Some highlights of late - including that wonderful farewell party in Bakhchisaray, which was more romantic than my description allowed (imagine stars and firelight and that early spring air) - include my first Crimean Tatar wedding and a visit to a small village to see a small Crimean Tatar children's ensemble. The latest setback - my computer erased its memory mysteriously two days ago, so I've been trying to inventory and mourn the damage.

But hey, this is exciting! Alison Cartwright, my old old friend and a great photographer, is coming out to Simferopol on May 2nd and we will commence our 3-week photo documentation and ethnography project on Crimean Tatar concepts of "home" 20 years after the right of return - and culminating on the Day of Deportation, May 18th. I imagine we will be busy, but there will also be a lot to report.... 

I can't live in that place

Another Crimean Tatar cemetery was desecrated yesterday outside of Simferopol. The International Herald Tribune has a little article about it, but it was at the heart of very big discussions on the ground today. 

The mood this evening was a little heavy in Milara-odzha's home - lots of visitors - but we took breaks from talking politics to sing. 

I thought it might be fun for you to listen to me trying to learn this song, which is called  "Эй, Гузель Къырым" or "Oh, My Beautiful Crimea," so I posted this sketchy "field" recording - complete with meandering piano solos! - here.

The last time we left the table for the piano, after dinner and tea and talk and more tea, my teacher, who told me earlier in the day that her heart was heavy from the news, said that while singing hadn't changed anything, it had made her heart a little bit lighter. 

This song was written after the deportation, and was popular among Crimean Tatars living in Uzbekistan. My loose (functional, but not poetic) translation of the chorus is:

I can't live in that place

I can't see those places

I miss my homeland 

Oh, my beautiful Crimea

I hope it's not too stark to pose this against the glaring instruction by vandals today for Tatars to Get Out of Crimea. 

Oh, Simferopol

I can't help but feel hopeful.

This was the line I came up with on my first jet-lagged afternoon in late January when I sat down to plink out my low-fi ode to heimweh and to celebrate my new temporary home. With almost two weeks of travel behind me, I've returned to Simferopol with fresh eyes and more patience than I had when the draggy end of winter seemed to put everyone - even strangers on the marshrutka - into combat mode. Now that the willows by the river have bloomed and the sun doesn't set til 7, things seem a little friendlier. 

This afternoon, I finally had the chance to meet with an exceptional young Crimean Tatar woman, a student at the University, and the secretary of Bizim Qirim, an international youth organization oriented towards supporting the Crimean Tatar political cause. I'm eager to find out more about their work, but it's inspiring - makes me feel hopeful, even - to see savvy energetic people reaching out and making things move a little. 

In case you were wondering, my paper at BASEES went off just fine for the tiny audience that attended our panel despite its enticing title. ("Music, Memory, and Politics in an Age of Revolution" - irresistible, no?) I talked about Ruslana's entanglements with various social and political causes on the eve of her Amazonka CD release in Ukraine, which I snapped up in Kyiv on Monday. I'm beginning to see a dissertation chapter or more in this, which is also hopeful.