Deportation Day, 65 Years

Over dinner in Simferopol with my adopted Crimean Tatar family last week, Ayder, a veteran of the Crimean Tatar human rights war against the USSR, used the term "genocide" to describe the present Ukrainian non-policy towards Crimean Tatars. He cited the attacks by militia groups on Crimean Tatar businesses and homes over the last twenty years, the inadequate implementation of protections for the indigenous people and the minority population, the alarmist attitude towards their Muslim minority group, framed without cause for extremism and denied land permits to build a new sobornaya mechet’, and so on. In my cautious academic way, I suggested that genocide was perhaps too strong a term: as careless and irresponsible as the Ukrainian government has been towards the Crimean Tatars, an indigenous people of Crimea, genocide implies a systematic, violent destruction of an entire ethnic group. It is more sinister than the bumbling indifference of the Ukrainian state. No, he asserted: "we are uncomprehending witnesses to a subtler form of genocide. The Crimean Tatars are being choked out of existence."

No one will dispute that Ukrainians, ethnic or not, face an Augean stable's worth of dirty and seemingly insurmountable problems in their country. Perhaps the struggle of the Crimean Tatars seems marginal. Emphasis goes to the geo-political rifts that have widened again between East and West, Russia and Europe: Westerners stereotyped as rabid Ukrainian nationalists are weary of Easterners depicted as Russian chauvinists. Crimean Tatars - remarkably loyal to the Ukrainian state since they were allowed to return to their ancestral homeland after 50 years in Central Asian exile – are nowhere in the debate. It would do Ukraine well to act in solidarity with the Crimean Tatars. To the essentialists, solidarity with others smells of capitulation, when it is actually a source of strength and communion.

Contrary to the simpleminded slogans of some factions of the Ukrainian right, Ukraine never had a simple purely Slavic story of ethnogenesis. Just like every other nation, it never had only one language, one religion, one monolithic culture. Ukraine is and has always been multi-ethnic. Retrograde policies of essentialist nationalism that exclude precisely the groups that are trying to contribute to and build the Ukrainian state are, sooner or later, going to embitter the excluded. A multi-ethnic Ukraine must exist, and its ideal should not be for stalemate, a platitudinous tolerance; Ukraine must seek a deep acceptance and respect for its diverse minority and indigenous groups. A propos to the Crimean Tatar situation, the Ukrainian government should finally approve a law to grant the indigenous people of the Crimean peninsula rights and protections as a threatened, indigenous people of their ancestral homeland: land rights, education in the native language, an end to religious discrimination, and ultimately, a right to self-determination within the territory of Ukraine.

We can learn from a Hutsul musician who I spoke to a few weeks ago, during the Easter holidays. We sat in his ancient Volga as he played me old cassette tapes and told me his deportation story. His family had been deported to Siberia during the war and not allowed to resettle in the Ivano-Frankivsk oblast until the 1970s. Reading about the Crimean Tatar non-violent resistance of the 20th century, their fierce support of the Orange revolution in 2004, and their annual celebration of Taras Shevchenko's birthday, he asked me for a recording of a Crimean Tatar violinist from whom he could learn some traditional melodies. I asked him why, and he said, "to show my respect, as they’ve been showing it to us." In place of fear, respect. In place of dim hostility, a desire to understand. In place of ignorance, education.

The policies of the Soviet Union brutally uprooted and ended countless human lives across the map of the former USSR. To his credit, Yushchenko has worked to promote awareness of the Holodomor against the grain of Soviet (and some post-Soviet) accounts of Stalinist history. But, in the 20th century, there were other genocides on the territory of contemporary Ukraine. Today, let us not be witnesses to other, albeit more casual, acts of destruction.

Today, May 18th, Crimean Tatars from all over the world will gather in Lenin Square in Simferopol on the 65th anniversary of their day of their deportation. They will mark their darkest day with somber music and a call for no more genocide. Tomorrow, they will commence the first World Congress of Crimean Tatars - the first meeting in history to bring the massive and diverse Crimean Tatar diasporas and the Crimean population together – at the Khan’s Palace in Bakhchisaray. They will make a renewed commitment to persevere, and a call - to the Ukrainian government, the UN, the Council of Europe, and the international human rights community - for support and assistance as they struggle to build back their community in Crimea.



Last night, the candelight vigil organized by the Crimean Tatar Youth Center spelled out the words: No Genocide - in lights. I think we can all easily agree on this slogan, but we must also sharpen our awareness to other more insidious forms that annihilation can manifest in, and battle and battle against it.