On Saturday, December 9, the world community celebrates the Day of Remembrance for the victims of the crime of genocide, honoring their dignity and preventing this crime. It was on this day in 1948 that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted.
Incidents of genocide have occurred throughout human history. Only on the territory of Ukraine over the last century, 3 such crimes have been committed: the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and the Deportation of the Crimean Tatar people. However, in the modern world, signs of genocide can be traced in different countries, including those that were forced to face in the Russian-occupied Crimea, as well as in other occupied territories of Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war.
Unfortunately, the deportation of the Crimean Tatar people, which began in 1944, is a long process. Representatives of the indigenous people are forced to leave their homeland because of their civic position and because of their “inconvenience.”
The Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent systemic repressions, detentions, interrogations, searches and arrests, illegal transfers to Russian prisons, forced abductions and murders became the cause of a new mass migration of indigenous people, and in fact their hybrid deportation.
Active population replacement is underway in Crimea.
The indigenous people are purposefully squeezed out of the peninsula as a population disloyal to Russia. An image of an enemy people is created for the Crimean Tatars, criminal proceedings are opened in the so-called Hizb-ut-Tahrir cases, people are accused of terrorism, possession of weapons, and calls for a coup.
The occupation has already entered its 10th year and the number of victims of the occupation authorities on the peninsula is increasing. Mostly Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians are kept in the dungeons of the FSB. According to the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, during the entire period of occupation the number of political prisoners reached 305, 205 of which were representatives of the indigenous Crimean Tatar people.
The Crimean Tatar Resource Center actively works with countries around the world so that they recognize the Deportation of the Crimean Tatar people in 1944 as genocide. Today, in addition to Ukraine, 3 more countries have recognized the Deportation as an act of genocide (Lithuania, Latvia and Canada), and work is underway with another 40 countries in this direction.
We call on the international community to increase pressure on the Russian Federation to stop racial discrimination in occupied Crimea, as well as in other occupied territories of Ukraine, and to stop the ongoing genocide of the indigenous Crimean Tatar people.
The whole world must condemn the Deportation of the Crimean Tatar people in 1944, because, as we see, not condemned yesterday – is being repeated today…