79 years ago, on May 18, 1944, by the decision of the leadership of the USSR, the Crimean Tatar people was subjected to forcible and total deportation from their historical homeland – Crimea and exiled to remote regions of the Soviet Union.
The inhuman conditions of the commandant’s regime, which lasted from 1944 to 1956 – hunger, epidemics, repressions and imprisonment in places of special settlements – became a prerequisite for the mass death of the Crimean Tatars, the bulk of whom were old people, women and children. According to the National Movement of the Crimean Tatars, which conducted a census of the Crimean Tatar people in the mid-1960s, a total of 238,500 people were deported from Crimea, and the death toll in the first years was 46.2% of all those deported.
Unfortunately, the world did not condemn this terrible crime in time. And impunity gave birth to a new tragedy. Now the Russian Federation is committing genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Daily massacres, kidnappings, forced transfer of thousands of people from the civilian population of Ukraine to the territory of the Russian Federation – all these are the realities of the present. So far, it is known that more than 1.9 million citizens of Ukraine have been taken to the territory of the Russian Federation. And almost 14 million Ukrainians went abroad.
The Russian authorities have been trying for years to destroy Ukraine and its people:
- Holodomor 1921-1923, 1932-1933, 1946-1947
- Deportation of the Crimean Tatar people 1944
- Occupation of Crimea and Donbas 2014
- Full-scale war in Ukraine 2022
So far, the deportation of the Crimean Tatars has been officially recognized as genocide by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on November 12, 2015, as well as by the parliaments of Latvia and Lithuania in 2019, Canada in 2022. It is important that this crime is condemned by the whole world so that such tragedies do not happen again.
We must stop this!