An entire ethnicity uprooted and forced to march across
hundreds of miles of rough terrain.
Possibly 46% of the total population dies along the way to their new “homeland.” While this sounds like the United States’
relocation of the Native American nations in the 1830s, it is actually the
story of the Crimean Tatars from the Crimean Peninsula as the USSR orchestrated
its own Trail of Tears in 1944.
The buildup to deportation included a decades-long pattern
of [Russian] government induced starvation of the regional population, but the
final excuse for removal came after the Second World War. The Tatars were collectively blamed for
collaborating with Nazi Germany and relocated into camps and then dispersed to other
Russian controlled territories to the east such as Uzbekistan for their alleged
treason.
But the purge went beyond deportation. A massive effort was made to completely erase
them from the history of the region.[1] Everything written or translated to their
language was burnt and grave markers were destroyed. Even Tatars who fought in the Russian army
during WWII were deported upon their return home while others who had been
captured as POWs by the Nazis rarely escaped work camps or execution at the
hand of those who should have been their liberators.
Be it their Islamic roots, their history of antagonism towards
Russia and Europe over centuries of raiding and capturing slaves, or the Nazi
collaboration of a few, Soviet leaders were happy to be rid of the entire
population and quickly bequeathed the entire peninsula to their trusted Soviet
Socialist member state: Ukraine in 1954. It would be over 30 years before
significant efforts were made to bring this people group back to their
homeland. Today, the Crimean Tatars
struggle to champion civil rights and the interests of their people in the
region and to reestablish their history, brutally erased in the name of ethnic
cleansing.
No comments:
Post a Comment