Tartars still seek return to Crimea

Press, 11 July 1979, Page 19

Tartars still seek return to Crimea

By

PETER LANG

The Tartars of Crimea exiled in their hundreds of thousands to Soviet Central Asia 35 years ago for alleged collaboration with the Nazis, are still dreaming of a return to their southern Russian homeland, in spite of a “pardon” by the Soviet authorities 12 years ago.

Some of them back their dreams with desperate action. Last summer, Musa Mahmud burned himself to death as police came to arrest him for “illegal residence” in the Crimea. About 800 Tartars were reported to have attended the funeral and there were shouts of: “Let the Tartars return to the Crimea.”

Then, in early February, a leading Crimean Tartar spokesman, Mustafa Dzhemilev, who has spent years in Soviet labour camps, renounced his citizenship and applied to emigrate, claiming that his life had been made intolerable by police harassment. In 1944, almost all the estimated 300.000 Tartars living in the Crimea were deported, apparently in conditions of great brutality, to remote areas of central Asia. Thousands of men, women and children, Crimean Tartar spokesmen have always claimed, died in the enforced exodus.

The Kremlin justified the exile by accusing the whole population of being Nazi collaborators.

But despite all official discouragement, small numbers of Tartars have managed to return to the Crimea, their homeland from the 13 th Century, since a 1967 “pardon” which lifted the guilt of collaboration from the

shoulders of the entire Crimean Tartar population. A Soviet Government decree noted: “Indiscriminate accusations against all citizens of Tartar nationality resident in the Crimea ought to be lifted.” The way seemed clear, in principle at least, for a Tartar return to the Crimea. Yet this has not hap-

pened, even though the Tartars scattered around in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia and Tadzhikstan (with smaller numbers even further east on the Russian Pacific coast) still apparently pine for the Crimea.

Little-known regulations prevent a widespread return, while most of those who do go back to the Crimea report that they are unable to work there and thus have to leave, or that they are evicted and their homes are destroyed.

“A Chronicle of Current Events,” the journal of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union, reported the case of a Crimean Tartar, Riza Seitveliev, who bought a house in a village in the Crimea in 1976, but has not been able to get permission to live in it, despite an appeal to the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, for help.

A well-known Soviet dissident, Andrei Sakharov, the physicist, believes that one reason why the Tartars are not being allowed to return is that the Crimea — inhabited now by

Russians and Ukrainians — is the holiday playground of the Soviet leaders, and that “they don’t want to have a rest among people of an unwanted nation.” Although the Crimea is now part of the Ukraine, dissident Tartars call for the restoration of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The Tartars are Muslims and are believed to be

descended from the Mongol “Golden Horde” which erupted across Russia in the 13th Century and held the land for 250 years before Ivan the Terrible crushed their power. Traditionally pastoralists and craftsmen, they have a rich cultural heritage, in which modern Tartar writers have revived interest.

As a group, the Tartars make up some of the largest non-Slavic people in the Soviet Union and the Tartar language is spoken by around six million people, mostly in Russia, but with local dialects in Rumania, Bulgaria, Turkey and China. One of the largest Tartar groups is the Kazan Tartars in the oil-rich Tartar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in the valley of the River Volga. Here the population is predominantly Tartar, and Tartars have risen to high levels in the Soviet state administration. So have Crimean Tartars in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Officials in Tashkent, where there are thought to be around 30,000 Crimean Tartars in a population of around 1,5

million, say that Tartars are free to return to the Crimea and that about 8000 families have done so. Russian human rights campaigners say that the number is much smaller than that, nearer 2000. They allege that of the 6000 or so Tartars who arrived in the Crimea in the three months after the 1967 pardon, only two families and three single men were given permission to stay there. Some others returned two or three times, to be deported each time.

In February 1977, some concessions were made to Crimean Tartars seeking residence permits, and it is believed that these concessions were linked to the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution, possibly to forestall any collective protests by Tartars during the anniversary celebrations. Crimean Tartars who have been before the Soviet courts for human rights activity have described the ordeal suffered by their people during and after the 1944 deportation. At a trial in 1969, Yusuf Suleimenov said: “They took us and unloaded us like cattle for slaughter. Nobody paid any attention to us. We were hungry, dirty and ill. People became even more ill and began swelling from hunger and started to die. Of seven households of my relatives, not one remained.”

For more than 10 years from the late 19505, the Crimean Tartars were the Soviet Union’s most vocal minority group, demanding a return to their homeland. That voice is quieter today, but not silenced.