Don't let down the Crimean Tatars!

"The German federal government must not let down the approximately 300,000 Crimean Tatars of the Crimean peninsula," said Tilman Zülch, Secretary-General of the Society for Threatened Peoples, in Göttingen on Thursday. "Russia is trying to win over the Russian majority in Crimea. Putin has called the Russian troops in the west of the Russian Federation to alert and reportedly already distributed Russian passports, while the Crimean Tatars fear for the multicultural coexistence on the peninsula. From the outset, they had supported the democratic pro-European protests on the Maidan in Kiev," said Zülch.

Since this morning, the parliament building and the Council of Ministers of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea are blocked with barricades and guarded by illegally armed forces. The police have cordoned off the city centre and all the public institutions are closed. The STP therefore urges German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier to try and advocate for a peaceful solution for the Crimea.

On May 18, 1944, Josef Stalin ordered all Crimean Tatars to be loaded on cattle cars to deport them to Central Asia. Up to 44 percent of the deportees died. This genocide is one of the worst crimes in recent European history, together with further deportations of other minority groups from the Soviet Union. Considerate efforts were made to obliterate all traces of the Crimean Tatars. Their houses were torn down, their gardens were left to grow wild and their cemeteries were dug up to remove the remains of the people's ancestors. Everything that was written in the Crimean Tatar language was burned. The Crimean Tatars repeatedly sent appeals to the various Soviet governments from their exiles in Central Asia. They intensified their attempts to be able to return after an appeal signed by more than 120,000 Crimean Tatars was ignored and after the initiators had been sent to labour camps. 4,000 representatives visited Moscow – and the people were finally able to return to their homeland in the late 1980s. Mustafa Dschemilew, who survived being deported when he was a child, was the central figure of the return movement. He spent 15 years in Soviet prison camps and was not released before the fall of the Eastern Bloc. In 1991, he was elected President of the Crimean Tatar Parliament and committed himself to fighting for Ukrainian independence. The STP honoured Dschemilew with the Victor Gollancz Human Rights Prize for his commitment to try and arrange the return of the Crimean Tatars (put into effect in 2005) since the early 1970s.

Their return is still not completed. There are still more than 150,000 Crimean Tatars living in Central Asia, making up about 13 percent of the Crimean population. The hostility against the Crimean Tatars has increased again since the inauguration of former President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010.