69th Anniversary of Crimean Tatar Deportations: Memory and Politics in Crimea

Global Voices Online
Tuesday, May 21, 2013

On May 18, some 30,000 people gathered at a rally in Crimea's capital Simferopol to honor the memory of the victims of the 1944 Crimean Tatar deportations and to demand the immediate resignation of Anatoly Mogilev, the former Ukrainian Interior Minister who is now the chairman of Crimea's Council of Ministers.

J. Otto Pohl wrote briefly [en] about the deportation that took place 69 years ago:

This Saturday is the 69th anniversary of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars from their peninsular homeland on the Black Sea to the deserts of Uzbekistan and the wet forests of the Urals. The NKVD rounded up almost the entire population and took them to rail stations where they were stuffed like cattle into box cars. In three days over 180,000 people had been expelled from their homes and sent on a long and arduous journey eastward. The official reason for the deportation was the false charges of treason brought against the whole population by the Stalin regime. However, the number of Crimean Tatars that fought with the Germans, about 10,000, was quite small compared to a number of other nationalities that were not subject to wholesale deportation. Upon arriving in Uzbekistan and the Urals the Crimean Tatars were placed under special settlement restrictions. On 26 November 1948, the Soviet government decreed the deportations and special settlement restrictions to be forever. The death of Stalin on 5 March 1953 brought about an eventual end of the special settlement regime and on 28 April 1956 the Soviet government freed the Crimean Tatars from these restrictions. They, however, were not allowed to return to Crimea in any significant numbers until 1987 near the very end of the Soviet regime. Even today they still face obstacles to resettling in their homeland and nearly 100,000 still remain in Uzbekistan.

A Crimean Tatar woman at the May 18 commemoration of the 1944 Crimean Tatar deportations. Photo by Andy Ignatov (used with permission).

On Facebook, Oleksandr Starish also wrote [ru] about the tragic events of 1944:

[...] Despite the fact that the Crimean Tatars were fighting in the ranks of the Red Army and participated in the guerilla movement, the basis for their deportations was an accusation of collaboration with the Third Reich.

Deportations began early in the morning of May 18 and ended on May 20, 1944. Over 32,000 NKVD troops were employed in the operation. [...]

Those Crimean Tatars who were fighting in the Red Army units, were also deported upon demobilization: in 1945-46, 8,995 Crimean Tatar war veterans were exiled [...].

[...]

Assessments of the numbers of those who died in this period vary: according to the Soviet official data, 15-25 percent died, and according to the activists of the Crimean Tatar movement, who were gathering the information about the victims in the 1960s, the figure is up to 46 percent... [...]

Starish ended his post with these words in three languages - Russian, Turkish (which is related to Crimean Tatar) and Ukrainian:

[...] I don't know if one can repent someone else's sins... But every person must bow to the memory of the innocents who were murdered... Regardless of one's ethnicity or religion... [...]

Idil P. Izmirli explained the political component of the May 18 rally in this Jamestown Foundation article [en]:

[...] Crimea differs from the rest of Ukraine because it is the only autonomous republic with its own unicameral parliament (with 100 members) and Council of Ministers, thus having a similar institutional structure to that of the Ukrainian state. Under all previous presidents of Ukraine, the planning of this May 18 Crimean Tatar Remembrance Day of Victims of the Deportation event had received considerable support from both the Crimean and the Ukrainian authorities. In fact, during these commemorative gatherings, alongside the Mejlis officials and the mufti (religious authority) of Crimea, a representative of the Ukrainian president, the head of the Crimean parliament, and the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP) participated in the ceremonies. In 2013, however, under Anatoli Mogilev, the chairman of the Council of Ministers in Crimea, the governmental attitude to the Day of Remembrance has changed drastically. Mogilev was appointed by President Viktor Yanukovych in November, 2011. Insisting that he was ill, he opted out of the May 18 gatherings in 2012, marking the first time a Crimean leader did not participate in this event. Even before his appointment, Mogilev was well-known in Crimea for his anti-Tatar sentiments, his brutal order of police units (BERKUT) to attack peacefully protesting Crimean Tatar business owners in the Ai Petri hills in 2007 while he was a police chief, and his subsequent Krymskaya Pravda article (2008) in which he praised the Joseph Stalin–era deportation of the Crimean Tatars (http://www.unpo.org/article/10968).

On February 25, 2013, under Mogilev’s leadership, the Crimean authorities announced that the May 18 event needed to be approved by the Crimean Council of Ministers. Consequently, the Simferopol City Council declared that they were going to ban the annual May 18 gathering that has been organized by the Crimean Tatar Mejlis since the early 1990s. This decision of the Crimean authorities was not received well by [Mustafa Cemilev], the head of the Mejlis, who stated that Crimean Tatars will come to the Central Square in Simferopol as a large collective regardless of the ban, and if they are not allowed to hold their remembrance day, then they will block the roads, paralyze traffic, and take their protests to other regions of Crimea [...]. [...]

The May 18 commemoration of the 1944 Crimean Tatar deportations. Photo by Andy Ignatov (used with permission).

Simferopol-based journalist Zair Akadyrov wrote [ru]:

Today at the rally in Simferopol, every 100th Crimea resident has pointed Mogilev to the exit. And now imagine if every 100th Ukrainian did the same at Maidan [Independence Square] in [Ukraine's capital] Kyiv, no less... [...]

Kyiv was having its own political rallies on May 18, and even though the turnout at the opposition's event was rather high, it could still hardly match the Crimean Tatar one in genuineness and determination. Kyiv-based journalist Victor Tregubov shared a photo of the Simferopol crowd and wrote this [ru]

[...] They say, there were 35-40 thousand people, and, looking at this photo, I tend to believe this. According to various assessments, there are 270 to 340 thousand Crimean Tatars living in Crimea. It means that every 8th [Crimean Tatar] is present at this rally.

When I saw this photo, I stopped worrying about the [Crimean Tatars'] future. What can some gang [the regime] do to a nation whose every 8th representative voluntarily attends a rally devoted to national solidarity and national revival? A nation like this will overcome any kind of trouble.

As for the Ukrainians' future, I still worry about it.

***

More photos of the Crimean Tatar May 18 rally - by Andy Ignatov, Volodymyr Prytula, and Smail Tantana.

Ukraine's Freedom Party Crusades Against LGBT and "Liberal Fascism"

Global Voices Online
Monday, May 13, 2013

On May 25, Ukraine will once again attempt to hold its first gay pride parade ever. The previous attempt failed in May 2012, when the event was cancelled shortly before it was to begin and one of its organizers, Svyatoslav Sheremet [ru], was beaten by a group of masked men. Judging from the online reactions that began to appear as soon as the upcoming Equality March was announced [uk] in the Ukrainian media at the end of April, things may not go very smoothly this year as well.

On Facebook, the pro-Equality March event [uk, ru], created on April 30, has slightly over 120 users who have signed up to attend, whereas one of the anti-March events [uk, ru], created on May 10 by a member of one of the parliamentary opposition parties, already has 195 potential attendees.





The latter event - "Let's Stop 'Gay Propaganda'!" - is the initiative of Oleksandr Aronets, a Kyiv-based member of VO Svoboda (which, ironically, translates as the All-Ukrainian Union "Freedom"). This far-right party won over 10 percent of the vote in the Oct. 28 election, becoming the fourth largest political force represented in the Ukrainian Parliament, with 37 seats (a GV text about it here).

On April 30, Aronets began his anti-Equality March campaign with this Facebook post [uk]:

"The equality march in defense of the gays" will not take place in Kyiv! Very soon, Ukrainians will start preparing to resist the attempts to impose these perversions on us! Resistance will take place on all fronts, physical as well as intellectual! Politicians as well as public figures, writers, the clergy and ordinary Ukrainians will stand up against it, arriving from all over [Ukraine] to Kyiv to defend the traditional family values! Liberal fascism shall not pass! [...]

Nearly two weeks later, the discussion of Aronets' post still continues. There are now over 700 comments, and while many of them are about the upcoming Equality March, there are plenty of those that address VO Svoboda's aggressively paternalist stance as well. Below is a small selection of these comments.

Ivan Spryn wrote [uk]:

[...] Aren't you sick and tired of shouting slogans left and right? "Shall not pass!", "liberal fascism!" [...] These constant cliches and slogans aren't doing you any good, but are instead equating you to the communists who never did anything but yell, "let's fulfill the five-year plan in three years!" It's time to outgrow demagoguery and start doing your job quietly.

Igor Nezgodnyj mentions [uk] VO Svoboda's recent legislative initiative to ban abortions in Ukraine (GV text is here):

I've noticed one thing: the worse the situation in the country is, the more [VO Svoboda] is attacking women - proposing to send them to jail for seven years for abortions - as well as gays and lesbians and others - those who aren't as scary and dangerous as [President Viktor Yanukovych]. [...]

Andrew Gizhko wrote [uk]:

One should defend family values in one's own family. If they are endangered by a peaceful gay rally, then they are not values, but an imitation [of values].

Olena Skripka wrote [uk]:

And why aren't you saving Ukrainians from drug addiction and alcoholism? Are gays really Ukraine's biggest problem?! And in general, are they a problem to anyone? Maybe it would be better if you set up sports facilities [in Kyiv's districts of Troyeshchyna and Borshchahivka]? Or you could at least come over [to these districts] to see how many young people are ruining their lives. [Instead], you act like thugs.

Viktoriya Kozlova wrote [uk]:

[...] Don't you feel you're wasting the trust of those people who voted for you in the last election? There are enough real problems in the country, but you, just like the Russian government, are re-orienting the public attention to gays... [...]

Timur HappyBoy Levchuk wrote [uk]:

Looking at the comments, I have only one question: doesn't [...] VO Svoboda realize that most voters expect truly high-quality and useful actions from them [...], not some pathetic populism?

Nataliia Mamitko wrote [uk]:

Ukraine faces many problems in various areas (medicine, economy, education), corruption and chaos are everywhere, and yet VO Svoboda has decided to fight the country's greatest evil - the gays... You didn't have to go to Parliament for that, let alone the fact that it's a violation of human rights.

Aronets chose to reply this [uk] to Mamitko:

[...] Propaganda of various perversions is a violation of human rights!

Viktoriya Kozlova attempted to reason [uk] with Aronets, reminding him that he was making statements on behalf of the political party that many Ukrainians put their trust in last fall, and Aronets, in his turn, reminded her [uk] that VO Svoboda had never been a gay-friendly force in the past:

Viktoriya, where were you one, two or three years ago? Every year we put up resistance to perverts, and we aren't making a secret of it! So don't tell me that "some people put their trust in us"...

Journalist Kateryna Avramchuk wrote this [uk] about VO Svoboda's choice of opponents:

Don't you think that the real perversion is when people like [President Yanukovych, First Vice PM Serhiy Arbuzov and PM Mykola Azarov] are in power, and not homosexuality? You'd be better off if you paid a visit to [Yanukovych at his Mezhyhirya residence] and "put up resistance on all fronts" to that pervert who is hiding behind the fence there... [...]

Aronets replied [uk] to Avramchuk, rehearsing the points he later elaborated on in the lengthy manifesto [uk] posted on the anti-Equality March event page:

First, they'll "just take a walk," the way it was in Europe, too..., then they'd like us to give them the right to get married, then the right to adopt children, then they'll be setting churches on fire! (the way it was in Norway), and then they'll be filing criminal lawsuits, the way it happened with one priest who was reading the Bible... I don't know what will happen next, but I don't want them to "just take a walk" in Ukraine...

Aronets' comments sound almost tolerant compared to some of what people write on the anti-Equality March event page. But since it's an open venue, peaceful voices are heard there as well every now and then. Olha Chayko wrote this [uk], for example:

Why beat anyone? I've always suspected that overly aggressive people, who condemn something [theatrically], definitely have something shameful about themselves to conceal... [And those tools that can be turned into improvised weapons would serve much better at summer houses in the countryside.]

Ukraine's Language Issue: Voices From the Ground

Global Voices Online
April 13, 2013

Ukraine's politicians rarely perform well outside the seemingly endless and rather populist pre-election stretches of the political racing circuit. Language politics is just one of the areas where their initiatives are often detached from reality and cause controversy, and where failures outnumber successes.

In 2007, shortly before the parliamentary election, the Party of Regions was pushing for a referendum on granting Russian the status of a national language, alongside Ukrainian. The referendum never took place, but five years later, in 2012, just in time for the next parliamentary vote, the Party of Regions' MPs Vadym Kolesnichenko and Serhiy Kivalov authored the language law that would give Russian and other minority languages the status of regional languages in areas where 10 percent of the population or more spoke those languages.


A violent scuffle erupted in Ukraine's parliament over a bill that would allow the use of the Russian language in courts, hospitals and other institutions in the Russian-speaking regions of the country. Photo by Sergei Svetlitsky, copyright © Demotix (24/05/12).

The adoption of the law was preceded by a spectacular fight in the Parliament [video] in May 2012 - and was followed by street protests and hunger strikes in July. In early August, the language law entered into force, and very soon afterwards the Donetsk Regional Council declared Russian a regional language in the region, with a number of others doing the same later.

Ukrainian politicians' views on the language issue are well-known. There is also some scholarly research and expert opinion available out there (e.g., Tadeusz Olszański's May 2012 research paper [.pdf], published by the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW); a 2010 comparison of the situation in Ukraine and Québec, Canada, by Dominique Arel, of the University of Ottawa's Chair of Ukrainian Studies; an article by David Marples, of the University of Alberta, shared by Current Politics in Ukraine blog, in which the author argued that, more than anything else, the language law was "a ploy to distract voters").

But what do ordinary Ukrainian citizens think of the language situation in their country? And what is the impact of the language issue on the lives of those who reside in the predominantly Russian-speaking areas like Donetsk region - those who are the target audience of the politicians who, in 2012, voted in favor of the language law?


At the protest rally against the language law in Kyiv, one of the protesters held a banner that read: "I ♥ [Ukrainian] language. Don't break my ♥." Photo by Tomasz Grzyb, copyright © Demotix (04/07/12).

On April 11, Pavel Kolesnik, a Donetsk-based blogger known as LJ user pauluskp, asked his readers [ru] whether the Ukrainian language was causing them any problems. He addressed this question primarily to Donbas region residents, on behalf of Piotr Pogorzelski, a Polish journalist who is writing a book about contemporary Ukraine. People from other Ukrainian regions have responded as well, and the discussion in the post's comments section has generated over 350 comments.

Below is a very small selection of these "voices from the ground."

Zaporizhzhya-based LJ user raddan wrote [ru]:

[...] Once, a woman at the post office got angry at me for a form that I had filled in in Ukrainian, because she didn't understand it (even though the form itself was in Ukrainian), and since the [computer] program into which she had to enter the data from my form was in Russian, she had to translate everything. [...]

An anonymous user from Donetsk region wrote [ru]:

[...] I have no problems with the Ukrainian language - I'd say it's my second mother tongue, because I learned it at school and read lots of works of fiction in Ukrainian. Moreover, my parents and close relatives, who had moved here from Russia and did not know Ukrainian at all, understand everything perfectly now thanks to television, even though they wouldn't speak the language - they feel self-conscious because of their funny pronunciation (similar to [PM Mykola Azarov's]). In general, I think this issue [is being exploited] by politicians. I think there has to be some basic mutual politeness between people - everyone should speak the language they are more comfortable speaking and should not act aggressively if their interlocutors speak the other language. And everyone understands both Ukrainian and Russian perfectly well. [...] When at work we were ordered to do our paperwork in Ukrainian, someone brought a dictionary, and those who needed it, consulted it. [...] If someone is having problems with Ukrainian, it means that they are just unwilling to make an effort and switch their brains on, although the elderly people shouldn't be blamed for that.

Kharkiv-based LJ user opium86, who grew up in the city of Severodonetsk in Luhansk region, wrote [ru]:

[...] From what I've observed (and I, of course, may be wrong), people aged 25 and less have no difficulties with Ukrainian. This is a problem of the older generation [...] - but it all depends on whether [one is willing to learn or not]. [...]

Moscow-based LJ user barber_34, who lived in Donetsk until 2001, wrote [ru]:

[...] My brother lives in Kharkiv - and ever since movie theaters stopped showing films in Russian, he stopped going there. And I know he's not the only one. [...]

A Donetsk-based school teacher, LJ user bold_, wrote [ru]:

As I teacher born in the USSR, I do have problems [with Ukrainian] )))

The language itself cannot really cause problems. What does are the idiotic ways in which it is being imposed.

I've spent 14 years working at school. Six of them - at a [school with Ukrainian, not Russian, as the language of instruction]. When the school received its [Ukrainian-language] status, we were all ordered a) to teach lessons in Ukrainian, b) to do paperwork in Ukrainian. Imagine all those who studied Ukrainian at school and haven't used it in years, and how they suddenly start speaking and writing in it [...]. Its similarity with Russian does not mean we can speak it better than [PM Mykola Azarov] [...] So I teach lessons in Russian, in order not to traumatize children [...]. [...]

LJ user vvvik79 wrote [ru]:

I have problems with the Japanese language, while Ukrainian is the easiest of all the languages that I happened to study. [...] Ukrainian language in Ukraine cannot cause problems, by definition )))

Kyiv-based LJ user dbmann wrote [ru]:

I have no problems with Ukrainian. Sometimes, on the internet, I have problems with those who have problems [with Ukrainian]. [...]

Donetsk-based LJ user squirrel_sv wrote [ru]:

I have no problems with Ukrainian. When I watch movies dubbed in Ukrainian, I do not notice it at all - later, I cannot recall what language the movie was in.

[Slight panic] occurs when suddenly I have to fill in some forms or read something serious - because all that I learned at school has been forgotten, and there is no way to practice the language. And no matter how many movies you watch in Ukrainian, they don't add to your knowledge of terminology. This [slight panic] is unpleasant, but I think of it as a warmup for my brains, not as something horrible.

Kyiv-based LJ user i_am_crying wrote [ru]:

In everyday life I communicate exclusively in Ukrainian. My job is in Russian [...]. On the web - it's Russian because I have many "friends" from the Russian Federation.

IMHO: I think that the language problem simply does not exist in Ukraine (in everyday life). There are people who speak Russian, and those who speak Ukrainian, but at the same time, 99 percent easily understand both languages, and no less than 70 percent can speak both languages fluently (this is not survey data but my own observations - I've traveled all around Ukraine). [...]

Kyiv-based LJ user slotava wrote [ru]:

I have problems with Draconian laws and taxes, corrupt bureaucrats, broken roads, [corrupt] traffic cops, "expired" food at the stores, overpriced counterfeit medicinal drugs at the pharmacies... but the Ukrainian language doesn't cause me any problems. [...]

Ivano-Frankivsk-based LJ user auregleen wrote [uk]:

[...] I've been to Kyiv, Donetsk, Mariupol, Crimea. [...] I speak Ukrainian everywhere. People reply in Russian to me. We NEVER discussed which language each of us was talking in. We were just discussing our business, each in his/her own language. [...] I have relatives in Russia. I speak Russian fluently with them. I don't have any problems with it.

[...]

[...] We should just ignore this issue, because it is being forcefully imposed on us - in order to brainwash us, and not because it is important. Eventually, when there is no reaction, the [language] issue will disappear by itself.

Because I, too, am more worried about [the absence of the asphalt on the roads], and not about the language of the bastard [...] who stole the money meant for this asphalt. [...]