Ukraine commemorates victims of deportation of Crimean Tatars

Today, Ukraine commemorates victims of deportation of the Crimean Tatar people.

On this day in 1944, the Soviet authorities began to deport the indigenous people of Crimea to the Central Asia. May 18, the first special train with the Crimean Tatars was sent. At least 180,000 people were deported.

The official reason for the deportation was the cooperation of some Crimean Tatars with the Nazi Germany during the World War II.

People were given a half an hour or even few minutes to collect belongings, and then were delivered to the railway station by trucks. From there, the trains were sent to the places of exile. According to eyewitnesses, those, who resisted or could not go, were often shot dead. On the road, the deported were fed rarely and often with salty food, provoking thirst. In some trains, the exiled got food in the second week of the way the first and last time. The dead were buried in a hurry near the railroad tracks or were not buried at all.

According to the official data, at least 191 people died on the road, but the eyewitnesses say several thousand people died, mostly from thirst and typhoid fever. The last train came to final destination on June 8, 1944. The Tatars were mostly delivered to Uzbekistan (151,136 people) and the adjacent areas of Kazakhstan (4,286 people) and Tajikistan. Small groups were sent to the Mari ASSR (8,597 people), the Urals and Kostroma region.

A significant number of the displaced persons, exhausted by three years of life in the German occupation, died from hunger and diseases in the places of deportation in 1944-45. The estimates of the number of the deceased in this period ranges between 15-25%, according to the estimates of various Soviet authorities, up to 46%, according to the data of the Crimean Tatar activists who collected information about those killed in 1960s.

Unlike some other deported peoples who returned home in late 1950s, the Crimean Tatars were deprived of this right formally until 1974, actually – until 1989. The mass return of the people to Crimea began only in 1989.

In 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR recognized the deportation as illegal and criminal. November 12, 2015, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine recognized the deportation from Crimea in 1944 as the genocide of the Crimean Tatar people and proclaimed May 18 as the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Genocide of the Crimean Tatar People.