On Tuesday, December 21, in Vinnytsia, in the hub Misto zmistiv, the Crimean Tatar Resource Center presented an exclusive documentary film Give Me Back My Dad!
The event was attended by team members who worked on the production of the film, MPs, activists, volunteers, public figures, journalists and others.
“For several years our team had a dream and set itself the task of making a film about children whose parents are in places of detention, arrested by the occupation regime. And children, whose parents have been forcibly disappeared or have gone missing and there is still no information about them”,- said Eskender Bariiev, Head of the Board of the CTRC.
Bariiev noted that this picture reflects the problem of violations of the rights of only two categories of children: children whose fathers are in places of detention and children whose parents were forcibly kidnapped and are considered missing. But in fact, there are much more such categories.
“15 children died tragically, 1 infant was separated from its mother, tens of thousands of children were deprived of the right to study their native (Crimean Tatar or Ukrainian) languages in the occupied Crimea, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children from mainland Ukraine were deprived of the right to health improvement and medical rehabilitation in children's health centers and children's specialized sanatoriums of Crimea, thousands of children became internally displaced persons, thus deprived of the right to live in their homeland in the national community”, – he explained.
The Head of the Board of the CTRC believes that the Ukrainian and international communities should unite their efforts to protect the rights of children affected by the occupation of Crimea in the near future. Precisely in order for as many people in the world as possible to learn about the children affected by the occupation of Crimea, the film Give Me Back My Dad! was prepared, which is available in seven languages: Ukrainian, Arabic, German, English, Turkish, Italian and Spanish.
The head of the charitable organization Peace and Co Foundation, one of the filmmakers, Myroslav Hai, emphasized the importance of this topic and spoke about the peculiarities of the filming process.
“There was no script. Children talked about their reality. With this film we tried to make everyone feel this problem, to see it through the eyes of ordinary children who never in their lives thought that they would be in such trouble. I am sure that this film will cause an active worldwide reaction”,- Myroslav noted.
Speaking about how to help political prisoners and their families, Eskender Bariiev recalled the campaign MP, Help the Prisoners of the Kremlin! launched by the International Movement for the De-occupation of Crimea and Solidarity with the Crimean Tatar People #LIBERATECRIMEA. As part of this initiative, Ukrainian and European MPs can take patronage over Crimeans who have been arrested or persecuted by the Russian occupants.
“It is important that at least one MP took under the patronage of one political prisoner and began to work systematically in this direction. We hope that in Vinnytsia there will be local MPs who will take care of the families of political prisoners in order to help these children”,- he stressed.
Thanks to the hard work and continuous work of our team, we immediately received feedback. Three MPs from Vinnytsia have joined the campaign MP, Help the Prisoners of the Kremlin!:
Deputy of the Vinnytsia city council Olena Verlan-Kulshenko took under the patronage a political prisoner Teymur Abdullaev;
Deputy of the Vinnytsia regional council Natalia Kravchuk took under the patronage a political prisoner Muslim Aliev;
Deputy of the Vinnytsia regional council Viktor Shmyhel took under the patronage a political prisoner Nina Malakhova.