On Friday, September 1, the Crimean Tatar Resource Center congratulates everyone on the beginning of the school year and expresses support to all children who, due to a full-scale war in Ukraine, are forced to celebrate this day in another city, country or under occupation.
Unfortunately, the Russian Federation has already ruined the lives of tens of thousands of children, because the occupation of Crimea equally affected the fate of both adults and children. The Crimean Tatar Resource Center has spoken about this more than once and dedicated the film Give Me Back My Dad to this topic, which tells the story of children whose parents were imprisoned or forcibly abducted after the occupation of the peninsula.
But in fact, there are much more categories of children who suffered as a result of the occupation of Crimea:
— 15 children died tragically;
— 1 infant was separated from the mother;
— dozens of children suffered due to the murder and forced disappearance of their fathers;
— tens of thousands of children are deprived of the right to study their native (Crimean Tatar or Ukrainian) languages in occupied Crimea;
— tens of thousands of children suffered from ecocide in occupied Crimea;
— hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children from mainland Ukraine are deprived of the right to health improvement and medical rehabilitation in
children’s health centers and specialized children’s sanatoriums in Crimea;
— thousands of children became forced migrants, thus deprived of the right to live in their homeland in the national community;
— tens of thousands of children have become victims of the militarization of the educational process, in violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the
Child and Article 51 of the IV Geneva Convention, which prohibits the promotion of service in the army of the occupying state among the civilian population. Russia forms in the minds of Crimean children the cult of war, service in the Russian army, the cult of violence and hatred;
— thousands of children become victims of inciting ethnic hatred and racial intolerance;
— thousands of children from orphanages are deprived of the right to obtain Ukrainian citizenship and move to mainland Ukraine;
— tens of thousands of children are limited in their right to receive education in higher educational institutions of Ukraine.
And since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the number of affected children has increased significantly. Thus, as a result of Russia’s armed aggression, 508 children have already died and more than 1,138 have been injured. Millions of Ukrainian children have crossed the borders of neighboring countries as refugees, and the same number of children are now internally displaced within Ukraine.
The Russian Federation took away the childhood of millions of children.
The Crimean Tatar Resource Center believes that the Ukrainian and international communities should join forces to protect the rights of children affected by the occupation of Crimea and the armed aggression of the Russian Federation in the near future. The Crimean Tatar Resource Center, for its part, will make every effort so that as many people in the world as possible can learn about children who have suffered as a result of Russian crimes.
We continue to work further.
Children should live, not die.