Planned unveiling of a Stalin statue is a slap in the face of the Crimean Tatars

According to the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), it is "another slap in the face of the Crimean Tatars" that – on occasion of 70th anniversary of the Yalta Conference on February 5 – the Russian government is planning to unveil a statue that shows Joseph Stalin together with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in front of the Livadia Palace, the place where the conference took place. "The Yalta Conference took place in May 1944, only a few months after Stalin had ordered the Red Army to deport the Crimean Tatars. About 44 percent of the deportees had died. Today, their descendants (who were often born in exile in Uzbekistan) are the ones who suffer the most from systematic harassment and discrimination on the Crimea," says Sarah Reinke, the STP's expert on questions regarding the CIS-states. A speaker of the Majlis, the self-governing body of the Crimean Tatars, sharply criticized the authorities' attitude towards Stalinism and stated that it is no coincidence that a statue of Stalin is to be unveiled at the same time that important Crimean Tatars are being deported from their homeland again.

In Yalta, 70 years ago, Stalin had managed to press through most of his plans for the territorial division of Europe and had achieved an expansion of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence. "Today, the conference should serve as a reminder that the present rulers in the Kremlin cannot be appeased by territorial concessions such as concerning the Crimea," warned the STP.

Especially in the past few weeks, there had been a new wave of repression against the Crimean Tatars: On January 26, Sinaver Kadyrov was expelled from Crimea. He is a well known Tatar civil rights activist who founded the organization "Crimean Tatar Rights Committee" together with two partners in November 2014. In the first ten days of its existence alone, the Committee had received more than 300 calls with complaints about violations of the law. The first conference of the organization (on January 17) was disturbed by Pro-Russian provocateurs who threatened, interrupted and bullied the participants. On January 26, the only Crimean Tatar television channel, ATR, was searched by Russian special forces. All computers were checked and the channel's archives and further material were confiscated. In addition, the authorities repeatedly threatened to close ATR.

Akhtem Chiigoz, the Vice President of the Mejlis, was arrested on January 29 – and his house was searched the next day. He was accused of having organized "mass chaos" on February 26, 2014, for which he is now facing up to ten years in prison. The President of the Mejlis, Refat Chubarov is not allowed to travel to Crimea for five years. A travel ban also applies to Mustafa Dzhemilev, the most important Crimean Tatar civil rights advocate, soviet dissident and currently the only Crimean Tatar representative in the Ukrainian parliament.