Bohdan Nahaylo: The Crimean Tatar factor

[EC]

Hat Tip to Tarek Fatah for linking it.

Via Kyiv Post: http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/op-ed/bohdan-nahaylo-the-crimean-tatar-factor-338861.html

With moves to detach Crimea from Ukraine and place it under Russian jurisdiction now accelerated, and frantic diplomatic efforts continuing to deescalate the crisis over Russia's occupation of the peninsula, considerable attention has been rightly focused on the courage and restraint shown by Ukrainian troops there who have found themselves under virtual siege.  But there is a much bigger group of people under threat in Crimea from Russian aggression whose predicament needs to be properly appreciated addressed - the Crimean Tatars, who settled there centuries before the arrival of the Russians.

While working for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as

a senior policy adviser I was involved in the 1990s in the
multilateral efforts to bring the Crimean Tatars back to Crimea from
former Central Asia to which they had been deported en masse by Stalin
in May 1944.  At that time, together with the CSCE High Commissioner
for National Minorities and the Council of Europe we had to persuade
the authorities of the newly independent Ukrainian state that the
Crimean Tatars would not be a potential source of Islamist extremism
and separatism, as the Russian media often claimed, that their
acquisition of Ukrainian citizenship should be expedited, and that
they be helped to integrate.

Fortunately, these efforts were successful for official Kyiv
ultimately proved receptive.  Some 250,000 Crimean Tatars returned in
the mid-1990s, mainly from Uzbekistan.  Many of them if not most of
them had been born in exile.   Despite the hostility of the
pro-Russian authorities in Crimea and efforts to keep them politically
and economically disenfranchised, the Crimean Tatars persevered and
quickly re-established themselves socially and as a political factor
on the peninsula.  Despite severe provocations, they did this
peacefully. In 1998,  in recognition of this their leader Mustafa
Dzhemilev, who had been imprisoned several times by the Soviet
authorities for campaigning for the right of his people to return to
Crimea,  was awarded the prestigious annual Nansen prize by UNHCR.

More at link.

[PzLdr]

The Krim Tartars have been in Crimea since at least the 1240s. They rode in with the Golden Horde under Batu Quan.