Marco Levytsky, NP-UN National Affairs Desk.
As Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians have been brought into Crimea since its annexation by Russia in 2014. According to official Russian statistics, some 247,000 Russians have moved to Crimea since annexation. At the same time, about 140,000 people have left, mostly Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars who moved to the Ukrainian mainland.
Ukrainian officials, however, say the real numbers are much greater — by hundreds of thousands. The population of the peninsula according to the Ukrainian census of 2001 was 2.4 million, of which about 60 percent were ethnic Russians, 24 percent were Ukrainians, and 10 percent were Crimean Tatars. A Russian census in 2014 put the population at 2.285 million, with 65 percent identifying as Russian, 15 percent as Ukrainian, and 12 percent as Crimean Tatar.
Now the Russia proportion will be even greater, completing the process of ethnic cleansing begun by the Tsars, and continued through the genocide of Joseph Stalin’s 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars. And yes, it was a genocide. The Tatars consider this to be a genocide. Soviet dissidents Ilya Gabay and Petro Hryhorenko both classified it as such. In December, 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a resolution recognizing this event as genocide and established May 18 as the “Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide.”
In Canada, a Private Member’s Bill introduced by Edmonton Griesbach MP Kerry Diotte to establish this as a genocide failed to pass by a vote of 160-137 on Second Reading in the House of Commons on December 13, 2016. It was supported by all Opposition MPs but opposed by most of the governing Liberals. Five Liberals broke party ranks to support the bill — Etobicoke-Centre MP and Chair of the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Friendship Group (CUPFG) Borys Wrzesnewskyj, as well as CUPFG Vice Chairs James Maloney (Etobicoke-Centre) and Arif Virani (Parkdale High Park) and CUPFG Members Peter Fonseca (Mississauga East-Cooksville) and Robert-Falcon Ouellette (Winnipeg-Centre). Among the Liberals who weren’t present for the vote were then International Trade, now Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, and CUPFG Director Don Rusnak. Wrzesnewskyj stated that the Tatar deportation fits the definition of genocide as determined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who coined the term which was enshrined in the passage of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on January 12, 1951, as it was “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
In 1944, all 240,000 Crimean Tatars were deported en masse. Nearly 8,000 Crimean Tatars died during the deportation, while tens of thousands perished as a result of the harsh exile conditions in subsequent years. Stalin sought to eradicate all traces of the Crimean Tatars and in subsequent censuses forbade any mention of the ethnic group. In 1956, new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev condemned the deportation, but did not lift the directive forbidding the return of the Crimean Tatars. They were thus forced to remain in Central Asia for several decades and it was not until the late 1980s and subsequent independence of Ukraine, that 260,000 Tatars were permitted to return to Crimea.
Now Stalin’s successor in body and mind, Vladimir Putin is reviving that genocide. The intention, of course is to cement the Russian occupation of Crimea in such a way that should the peninsula ever be returned to Ukraine, it will contain a huge fifth column which will be opposed to any Ukrainian government.
This whole process is very similar to the Holodomor by which Stalin attempted to eradicate Ukrainians as an ethnic entity. Those millions of Ukrainians who were starved to death were replaced by ethnic Russians. And those millions of Ukrainians who survived, but were forbidden even to speak about it, became so traumatized, they buried their culture and their national identity deep in the ground strewn with the bones of their relatives, friends and ancestors. Many of their descendants became russified. They became “Russian speakers”. And it is the “defence” of “Russian speakers” that Stalin’s successor in mind, spirit and deed – Vladimir Putin – claims as an excuse to justify his brutal aggression against Ukraine. The genocide of the 1930’s has led to the invasion of today.
The 1932-33 Holodomor, the 1944 deportation, and the 2014 annexation of Crimea which has led to the current ethnic cleansing of the peninsula is all part of an historic and deliberate Russian process of mass murder and expulsion, followed by the incursion of countless colonizers on foreign territory, which is designed to enlarge and consolidate the Russian Empire. It violates all accepted international principles of human rights and sovereignty of nations. Very often these actions get minimum attention from the international community and are largely ignored.
But it is critical to understand all of these historical events in their proper context and how they constitute part of a very ruthless, deliberate – and consistent policy of Russia’s leaders.
What Putin is doing in Crimea today, is simply putting the finishing touches on the genocide started by Stalin in 1944.
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