Return of the Native
May 18, Memorial Day for the Victims of Deportation, is a date that fills one with very sad memories. Stalin’s nationalities policy, several years after the 1944 deportation, resulted in the death of 42% of the Crimean Tatars. This time the mournful occasion was marked by a series of memorial events. Law enforcement authorities took additional precautions. On the eve of the date tent cities appeared in a number of populated areas, pickets were staged, demanding a speedy solution to the Tatar accommodation problem. A group of Tatars blocked the railroad near the town of Nizhnehorsky. The Adalet (Justice) Party, still to be registered, held a rally on May 16 by the Crimean government building, demanding land for the Crimean Tatars and solutions to other problems.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect about repatriation is securing fair integration into Ukrainian society for the many returning home. This integration process must be regarded by all not as assimilation or obliteration of ethnic distinctions, but as a way to supply the ethnic cultural, historical, and spiritual needs of a whole people. Much is being done to this end. The Crimean Tatar Theater has been restored, along with the Gasprinsky National Library, mosques are being returned to the faithful, but there are not enough schools, jobs, hospitals, and transport. Infrastructures in certain populated areas are overloaded. The Tatars are not sufficiently represented in bodies of authority. Without doubt, much has been accomplished, but even more is still to be done.
Numerous Crimean Tatars, on returning to their native towns and villages, see that their old homes are still there but inhabited by other people. The Milushevs are probably the only Tatar family (at least I haven’t seen or heard of any other) living in Simferopol came with all the documents attesting to their property and found their home in an excellent condition. The Soviets are known to have “forgotten” to confiscate the deportees’ property, so everything they left in the Crimea is legally still in their possession.
And so Maginiur Milusheva lives now in a brand-new home, but not her own, built by her son- in-law Valekh Orudzhev, husband of her daughter Diliara who, back in May 1944, was a 3-year-old girl. Maginiur is 86, a war and labor veteran. She is in a poor physical condition, and her eyesight is failing. Her brother Kerim still works as reporter-photographer with a local Crimean Tatar newspaper. Before World War II he and their father built a home, but Maginiur practically did not live there, because on May 20, 1944, or thereabouts, an NKVD officer moved in. The old woman has been to all the judicial authorities, all the way from bottom to top, and all court rulings have been the same: her claim for the house illegally confiscated in 1944 cannot be granted, because this issue is not regulated by Ukrainian law. In the end, she addressed the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and awaiting its decision.
INCIDENTALLY
Interfax Ukraine reports that the President of Ukraine, proceeding from the findings of the Council of Crimean Tatar Representatives, has instructed the Cabinet to complete work on the Concept of the State Ethno-National Policy of Ukraine. Under his instructions opportunities will be studied and measures worked out to provide former deportees living in the Crimean countryside with farming plots. The appropriate government agencies will finance programs and projects to receive and accommodate Crimean Tatar deportees and persons of other ethnic origin within the limit and in amounts stipulated by the current national budget program.
The 2001 budget bill will have a separate expense item providing for capital investments for housing construction for deportees who have returned to the Crimea, along with soft credits for individual housing construction projects. The President’s directives further stipulate special banking services to Crimean Tatar businesses. The Ministry of Education was instructed to secure annual targeted enrollment programs for deportees’ children. The first sitting of the Council of Crimean Tatar Representatives under the President of Ukraine, formed almost a year ago, was held last week.
