Crimean Tatars in Ukraine commemorate 68th anniversary of deportation
The soviet government deported the tatar community to Siberia and Central Asia for its alleged collaboration with Nazi Germany. As of 1980s, Crimean Tatars were prevented from returning to their homeland. Settled in the barracks, in the deserted regions about 130,000 families hung between life and death. Thousands of people died along the journey.
Tamila like many other tatars was born in Kazachstan and at the age of five she first saw her native country. However, she said the return was not as sweet as her parents imagined. Crimean tatars found their houses ruined and their land occupied, while Russian population of the peninsula, north of the Black Sea, didn’t treat the returnees well. 20 years later, much of these problems are still there.
Crimean Tatars still have to go through many difficulties, trying to get their lands back on the southern coast, which is a posh resort, mostly controlled by Russian businesses. They also called for the official recognition of the deportation as an act of Genocide. According to the researchers, during only the first years of exile in Central Asia, almost half of the Crimean nation was lost. In 1967, the charges of treason against the Crimean Tatar nation were dropped by the Soviet government.
Now in Ukraine the Crimean Tatars make up 12% of the peninsula population. As a number of exiles still have not returned to the native land the main dream, the tatars claim is to reunite all its people in Crimea.