From Euromaiden Press: May 18 – Day of Remembrance of the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

On this day in 1944, on the order of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars were deported from the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine to various regions of the Soviet Union with close to half perishing either during the journey or within a year of being exiled. In 2015, the Parliament of Ukraine declared May 18 as the annual Day of Remembrance of the victims of the genocide of the Crimean Tatar people.

On May 18, 1944 the terror began throughout Crimea when a 32,000-strong NKVD special force unit rounded up Crimean Tatars for deportation. They were loaded onto truck convoys, taken to Simferopol and Bakhchysaray and then reloaded onto cattle cars for transport to the Central Asian steppes. Crimean Tatars who lived in mountainous regions inaccessible to NKVD trucks were eventually found and shot. The inhabitants of the Arabat Spit, a group of inaccessible fishing villages, were herded onto a barge which was then sailed into the Azov Sea and scuttled. A nearby boat with Soviet machine gunners made sure that no one survived.

Within three days, there were no more Crimean Tatars, or as Communist officials in Moscow stated, they had “created a new Crimea according to Russian order”. Crimean Tatar books were burned. All Crimean Tatar towns and villages were given Russian names, Muslim cemeteries and mosques razed. Even The Great Soviet Encyclopedia removed and erased the Crimean Tatars from history.

It was not until Perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascent to power in the late 1980s that things started to change. The surviving Crimean Tatar families gradually returned and have lived peacefully on the peninsula since their return in 1987 until the illegal occupation of Crimea by Russian forces in February 2014.

As of 2014 and to this day, history is being repeated as the Crimean Tatar people continue to face persecution, and the curtailment of human rights and fundamental freedoms by the Russian occupying forces.

Sürgünlik (Crimean Tatar Deportation) should never disappear from the annals of history.

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