Manager of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center Zarema Bariieva during the online conference UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: How to Protect Children’s Rights in Crimea? talked about the difficulties that the smallest citizens of Ukraine on the Crimean peninsula have to cope with.
Bariieva noted that after the occupation of Crimea, the children of the missing, the deceased, as well as the children of political prisoners of Crimea suffered to a greater extent. Repressions, persecutions, arrests are the current realities in which not only adults, but also children, who find themselves present in front of their parents, who are being searched, arrested, and detained by the occupants.
“Each time the number of people prosecuted in criminal cases increases, the number of children who are deprived of proper parental care and become orphans with living parents increases proportionally. According to the CTRC, today in Crimea, 197 minors are deprived of paternal care and have become small hostages of the Kremlin. Of these, 90 are girls and 107 are boys”,- she said.
The manager of the CTRC noted that 36 families in which the dads are in the FSB dungeons are large. 12 children were born after the arrest of their fathers and have never seen them. The adult children of political prisoners also suffer from all events related to the illegal persecution of parents, and there are 18 of them.
Bariieva cited as an example several cases of infringement of the rights of children on the peninsula, which shocked the entire civilized world:
FSB officers came to the school to the son of political prisoner Emir-Huseyn Kuku – Bekir Kuku in order to talk to him and justify their illegal actions. The interview was conducted in the absence of the child's mother.
In 2020, the tragic death of Musa Suleymanov, the son of political prisoner Ruslan Suleymanov, took place. After the unlawful arrest of the father and, accordingly, the absence, in this regard, of proper parental care, the child, living in unfinished construction, died in unfortunate circumstances. The pinnacle of cynicism was that the occupation authorities tried to pin all responsibility for the accident on the mother of the child. The father was not allowed to attend the funeral of his 3-year-old kid.
The case of Nina Malakhova, a resident of Feodosiia, illegally arrested in May 2021 and sentenced to 4.5 years in a maximum security colony is another outrageous example. She was separated from her baby, who was not even 1 year old. The child was placed under the care of relatives.
In May 2021, after Aiub Rakhimov, a native of Uzbekistan, was killed under unknown circumstances, his wife Sokhiba was sent to a temporary detention center for citizens, and, thus, separated her from her minor children.
A large number of our political prisoners have been illegally taken far beyond the borders of Crimea, and children are limited in their ability to meet with their fathers at least briefly at court sessions.
“There have been numerous cases when wives were not allowed to have children at court sessions, explaining that this could have a bad effect on the psyche of children. At the same time, FSB officers do not worry about the psyche of children, when they regularly carry out searches in the houses of Crimean Tatars, being armed to the teeth, breaking down doors, breaking glass in front of children. Many children are afraid that after the arrest of their fathers, they will come for their mothers, the children withdraw into themselves, they are afraid to go to school, they are afraid of the reactions of classmates and teachers, they often cry, wake up and fall asleep with photographs of their fathers and the daily question on their lips: When will my dad come back? To which the mothers of these children have no answer”,- she added.
Zarema Bariieva also spoke about the militarization of the educational process. After all, the occupants are trying to form in the minds of Crimean children a cult of war, service in the Russian army, a cult of violence and hatred towards the Western world and Ukraine.
Also, speaking about education, the representative of the CTRC noted that the right to education in the native language of Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian children is systematically violated by representatives of the occupation authorities of Crimea.
“Before the occupation in Crimea, there were 15 schools and 384 classrooms with the Crimean Tatar language of instruction. At the moment, there are 7 schools with the Crimean Tatar language of instruction, 3 – with the Russian and Crimean Tatar languages of instruction, and 6 have received the status of general education schools. Education in the Crimean Tatar language is allowed only up to grade 9 and at the request of the parents. The situation with the only Ukrainian school looks even sadder”,- explained the manager of the CTRC.
Moreover, the administrations of educational institutions, under various pretexts, create obstacles in applying for education in the Crimean Tatar language: In Crimea, the only native language is Russian, lack of classrooms, lack of teaching staff, lack of textbooks, as well as gross cases of refusals: forcing parents to refuse to study in the Crimean Tatar language or reducing the number of hours for studying the Crimean Tatar language and literature.
“I hope that the existing mechanisms for the protection of children's rights will help us to protect the rights of the little Kremlin hostages living in the occupied Crimea”,- concluded Bariieva.