Voice of Ukraine

From: Maia Mikhaluk (815th day)

May 18th is Remembrance Day for the victims of the genocide of Crimean Tatars.

Eighty years ago, over three days from May 18 to May 20, 1944, Soviet security forces rounded up at least 200,000 Crimean Tatars on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and brutally sent them into exile in Soviet Uzbekistan and other remote places in the Soviet Union.

The first deportees started arriving in the Uzbek SSR on 29 May 1944 and most had arrived by 8 June 1944. The records show that at least 7,889 Crimean Tatars died during this long journey, amounting to about 4% of their entire ethnicity. They were transported by railroad cars; NKVD loaded many people into each railroad car. One witness claimed that 133 people were in her wagon. They had only one hole in the floor of the wagon which was used as a toilet. Some pregnant women were forced to give birth inside these sealed-off railroad cars. The conditions in the overcrowded train wagons were exacerbated by a lack of hygiene, leading to cases of typhus. Since the trains only stopped to open the doors on rare occasions during the trip, the sick inevitably contaminated others in the train cars.

The consequent mortality rate remains disputed; the NKVD kept incomplete records of the death rate among the resettled ethnicities living in exile. Like the other deported peoples, the Crimean Tatars were placed under the regime of special settlements. Many of those deported performed forced labor: their tasks included working in coal mines and construction battalions. Deserters were executed. Special settlers routinely worked eleven to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Accommodations were insufficient; some were forced to live in mud huts where “there were no doors or windows, nothing, just reeds” on the floor to sleep on.

After it deported the Crimean Tatars, the Soviet government launched an intense detatarization campaign in an attempt to erase the remaining traces of Crimean Tatar existence. By the end of the deportation, not a single Crimean Tatar lived in Crimea. Tatars were not allowed to return to Crimea during the following 45 years. Only in the late 80s it became possible. On 14 November 1989, the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union declared that the deportations had been a crime, and it also declared that the ban on their return to Crimea was officially null and void. The Soviet authorities had not assisted Tatars during their return to Crimea nor had it compensated them for the land which they had lost during the deportation.

And 80 years later, the Kremlin continues its hateful policy. Searches, arrests, and disappearances of Crimean Tatars have become the norm since the occupation of Crimea in 2014.