Tuesday, May 17, 2016

18 May 1944

Tomorrow is the 72nd anniversary of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars from their ancestral homeland to Uzbekistan and the Urals. This year the 18th of May comes just a few short days after Jamala's victory for Ukraine in the Eurovision song contest with her song 1944 about the event. In many ways the Soviet treatment of the Crimean Tatars and the Crimean peninsula resembled better known cases of settler colonialism in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East. You can find my article, "The Deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the Context of Settler Colonialism," International Crimes and History, 2015, Issue: 16, here. Feel free to leave any comments about the article here.

1 comment:

derRach said...

I think that the Soviet Union and its successor states should be judged by an International Tribunal where the jury is composed of survivors of these multiple incidents of genocide against such peoples as the Crimean Tartars, ..., Germans, ..., you know, all of them. It's a long list of ethnic groups as composed by Otto in his writings.

Could we conclude then that the Russians, and Georgians in charge of the Soviet Union, were racist in the darkest sense imaginable?

Without justice, we are left in a world where right is decided by might, where history is written solely by the Victors (most gun barrels) and the laughingstock of justice is the shabby rags of Victor's justice.

Instead of the world praising Stalin today, we should join ranks with the despoiled nations (ethnic groups) deported en masse by Stalin and his followers. Make it a day to shame their memory and their successors today until real justice is served, and I suggest that it would be more than pennies on the dollar, but real substantial return of the dispossessed.