March 2014: Crimean Tatar community mourns death of tortured activist Reshat Ametov. Photo: Yaghobzadeh Rafael/ABACA/PA Images. All rights reserved.On the eve of this year’s presidential election, Vladimir Putin attended a rally in Sevastopol in Crimea. Though he appeared to the flag-waving crowd for less than a minute, the message was clear and triumphalist: this is the president of Russia, in a city that belongs to Russia, in a peninsula that is part of Russia.
For Crimean Tatars, a Muslim ethnic minority indigenous to the Crimean peninsula, history is not simply learnt from books – it is witnessed daily. The eldest of the Tatars can still remember the 1944 deportation of their population under Stalin, when over 200,000 Crimean Tatars were forcibly removed from their homeland and dispersed across the Soviet Union.
Now, children and grandchildren of the deported are defending their neighbourhoods from Russian soldiers who occupy their once-peaceful peninsula. There are constant reports of systematic house searches and unlawful detentions; a startling similarity to the prelude to deportation used over 70 years ago.
