Back in 1944, under Joseph Stalin, Ukraine’s Muslim minority Crimean Tatars were evicted from homes and deported to Central Asian socialist republics. After the fall of the Soviet Union, CIS countries agreed to restore the rights of deported group and encouraged them to return to Crimea. However, a majority of Crimean Tatars were excluded from the process of privatization of State and municipal property because before 1999 they could not obtain Ukrainian citizenship and had no record of service in State enterprises of Ukraine due to the decades spent in the places of deportation.
250,000 Crimean Tatars (12% of the Crimean population) lived in the peninsula before the referendum in 2014. The Crimean diaspora estimates that, unofficially, between 50,000 to 60,000 people have fled from Crimea. Since 2014, Russian authorities have targeted Crimean Tatars. The number of human rights violations, including kidnappings and disappearances reported by CrimeaSOS estimates 300. The violations of the rights to life, security, liberty, and physical integrity are alarming. Peaceful remembrance gatherings were banned and labeled as mass-provocation.
Watch the final minutes of ATR, the only TV channel on the peninsula that broadcast in Crimean Tatar, on March 31, 2015. The Russian authorities in annexed Crimea refused to give ATR a broadcasting license despite numerous requests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh43Mgd0f0U
[Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.]