62nd Anniversary of the Crimean Tatar Deportation “Protest Meeting” in Simferopol, Crimea Went By Peacefully

On May 18, 2006, 30,000 Crimean Tatars gathered in Simferopol to commemorate the 62nd anniversary of their ancestor's deportation from Crimea by Stalin's orders.

The general meeting of the "Day of Trauma" started at 10 am in the morning when five different groups of people from five different locations in Simferopol started to walk in five rows collectively towards the central Lenin Square where the general meeting was going to be held at 1 pm. Approximately 5,000 people participated in these five columns and they later joined the other Crimean Tatars who arrived from different parts of the Crimea on busses to commemorate this day of trauma with their compatriots.

The 62nd anniversary of the Crimean Tatar deportation meeting started at 1 pm in front of the Crimean Verhovnaya (Upper) Rada building in Lenin Square. After the Crimean Tatar national hymn Ant Etkemen followed by the Ukrainian national hymn, the meeting started with a prayer by the Crimean Tatar muftu
Emir Ali Abdlayev for the lost lives during and after the deportation.

The first speaker of the day was the newly elected (March 26, 2006) Anatoli Gritsenko, the chair of the Verhovna Rada of the Autonomous Crimean Republic (ARC), member of Party of Regions. The second speaker was Viktor Pavlyuk, a representative of Viktor Yushchenko, who read a letter addressed to the
Crimean Tatar returnees by Yuschenko.

Consequently, Sergei Rudik, the first deputy chief of the Republican Committee on Nationalities and Deported Citizens of the Council of Ministers of ARC (Kiev), and two members of the Diaspora, Celal Icten and Saladdin Acalay from the Crimean Tatar centers from Turkey and Romania respectively addressed the crowd.

When Leonid Pilunsky, the head of the Crimean National Rukh party came to the microphone, he started his speech in Crimean Tatar language. The crowd clapped him for a few minutes for they welcomed his words in their own Crimean Tatar native language. Consequently, Aziz Abdullayev (deputy prime
minister of Crimean Autonomous Republic who was elected at the March 26, 2006 elections), and Gennadi Udavenko (leader of the National Rukh Party) followed by the newly elected mayor Gennadi Babenko came to the stage.

Among the other speakers were Abdurahman Egiz, the head of the Our Crimea Crimean Tatar youth group, Vladimir Orneli, the head of the Crimean Qaraims, the Crimean Tatar historian Gulnara Bekirova; and the Ukrainian Patriarch (Kiev) Bishop Klimenko.

After these speeches, the head of the National Mejlis of the Crimean Tatars and the deputy of the Ukrainian Verhovna Rada (from the National Rukh party) Mustafa Cemilev addressed the crowd. In his speech, he stated that the politics of assimilation still continued in Crimea and that the outside
forces were trying to break up the unity within the Crimean Tatar returnees.

During the March 26, 2006 elections, a political group that call themselves the Crimean Tatar Block (under the leadership of Edip Gaffarov) worked against the Rukh party and supported the Soyuz party. As a result, they won 3% of the votes taking votes from the National Rukh Party, and indirectly
taking from the Crimean Tatars.

If they did separate from the Rukh party, today in the Crimean parliament there could have been more than 10 Crimean Tatar deputies instead of the current 8 deputies who were elected during the March 26 elections.

After Cemilev's speech, the Crimean Tatar and the Ukrainian hymns were played again through the megaphones and the meeting ended quietly as it started. The commemoration meeting lasted for 2 hours (1-3 pm). During the hours of the meeting, most of the Simferopol streets were closed to the
public. Approximately 30,000 Crimean Tatars, and 4,000 Ukrainian military officers participated in this meeting.

The entire population of the Crimean Tatars was deported from Crimea on May 18, 1944. The deportation, carried out at gunpoint, was well organized and supervised by the 5,000 agents of the Soviet state security services, supported by 20,000 interior ministry troops (NKVD) and thousands of regular army soldiers.

During the Crimean Tatar mass deportation on guarded and sealed cattle-trains without food, water, and inferior sanitary conditions, 46.2 percent of the total Crimean Tatar population perished. According to the
orders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (KPSS), Crimean Tatars were "to live in exile forever with no right to return to the former residence."

Thus, immediately after their deportation the Soviet authorities took steps to wipe all signs of previous Tatar settlements out in Crimea; Tatar monuments, mosques, cemeteries, and cultural facilities were all destroyed.

Crimean Tatar place names (toponyms) were replaced by instantly constructed Soviet alternatives. While these rapid changes were taking place in Crimea, the survivors of the 1944 mass deportation were confined to highly regimented and strict special settlement camps (spetsposolonets) in their
various places of exile until 1956, when the Soviet state dismantled the special settlement regime.

A special [unpublished] decree issued on April 28, 1956 the Presidium of Supreme Soviet (Ukaz 136/142) officially released the remaining Crimean Tatars from special settlement restrictions. Through the same decree, most of the exiled ethnic groups were granted permission to return to their homelands except the Volga Germans, Meshketian (Ahiska) Turks and Crimean Tatars.

Thus, while Crimean Tatars were not the only deported group of the Stalinist era, but they were one of the few who were not allowed to return to their homeland during Khrushchev's "thaw."

Throughout the exile years, Crimean Tatars started a unique national movement, which was peaceful and democratic in character and followed a conflict strategy of nonviolence. In fact, during the Soviet era, the
Crimean Tatars were the first ethnic group who staged a sit-in in Moscow's Red Square, demanding justice and repatriation.

As their leader Mustafa Cemilev often emphasizes, the Crimean Tatars who were only to able to return to Crimea after the collapse of the Soviet Union, still adhere to principles of nonviolence.
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FOOTNOTE: Idil P. Izmirli is in Crimea for 6 months with IREX IARO grant. Izmirli is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia) and the founder of the ICC (International Committee for Crimea), [email protected].