But with Crimea annexed and parts of Ukraine invaded, Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars turned to each other again. Of course, I believe that if the West had acted against Putin in 2014, or in 2008 when his troops entered Georgia, there would have been no war in Ukraine.
And it was for precisely this reason that Putin wanted to put a stop to the further westernization of the region by annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine. Together Crimea and Ukraine were ready to thrust forward as one European, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multilingual country. In the small window of peace before Russia invaded again in 2014, this resilient Sunni Muslim nation, which became part of Ukraine after its declaration of independence in 1991 and is one of its indigenous peoples, helped shape the region’s sense of self. It is only in the last 10 years that the deportation has been formally recognized as a genocide by Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Canada. Of the 240,000 Crimean Tatars who were exiled, it is estimated that around half died either during transportation or within the first year, due to the brutal conditions of the labor camps where they were forced to live and work, as well as the appalling, unsanitary living conditions.īut they received no help, no compensation and no apology from Russia. The bodies of those who had died in transit were tossed out onto the tracks by guards. When they arrived in Uzbekistan, some were forced to travel for several more days to Central Asia. On the overcrowded cattle wagons, they died in thousands due to insufficient food and water, disease and vicious treatment by Stalin’s secret police, called NKVD. Their crime? Collaboration with Nazi Germany - a charge that made a mockery of the suffering they endured under occupation and their service to the world in the fight against fascism. They returned to find their families had been transported 2,000 miles to remote Uzbekistan, in conditions that served as a chilling echo of what Hitler had done to millions of European Jews. Many husbands, fathers and sons were still abroad, having fought with the Red Army and received heroes’ medals in the Second World War.
Over three days in May 1944, Stalin’s secret police forced women, children and the elderly at gunpoint onto locked cattle trains. That is a line we cannot afford to cross. The fact is that we risk allowing this atrocity to happen again, in 21st-century Europe. It is necessary to revisit the horrific events of May 1944 to understand what many have called a genocide of Crimean Tatars, and why Crimea is key to any Ukrainian peace deal. They are swallowing us still, by brutally invading our homeland and trying to wipe our people off the map.
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