“You are nobody here.” How Crimean Tatars are deprived of housing and what does Aksenov’s relatives have to do with it

“Within the timeframe established by law, Rustem Useinov appealed to the Court of Appeal of the Republic of Crimea, filed an appeal, it was registered,” Zair Smedlya, Head of the CEC of the Kurultay of the Crimean Tatar people, told The Insider. – In fact, once the appeal has been registered, the decision of the first instance court does not enter into force until the final decision of the appellate court. Rustem Useinov’s house was demolished by a court verdict that had no effect. This is arbitrariness, arbitrariness and abuse of power. Apparently, someone really liked this site for some kind of business or something else. “

According to Useinov’s colleague Edem Ismailov, a witness to the arrival of the security forces, before the demolition, the court producer, having heard about the appeal, called someone. Having received an answer, he gave the go-ahead to pick the locks. When they arrived to demolish the house, Useinov felt bad, he was urgently hospitalized. Shortly before that, he suffered from a coronavirus infection and bilateral pneumonia. In the absence of the owner, the utilities loaded all the things from the house into a Gazel and took them away in an unknown direction, Ismailov said. The house was demolished in about an hour and a half. Thus, human rights activist Rustem Useinov was left homeless in winter. He told The Insider that he will continue to fight for his site and, after being discharged, plans to return to the site of the destroyed house, going to live in a tent. His associates organized a fundraiser.

Crimean Tatar “squatters”. USSR and Ukraine

The land problems of the Crimean Tatars go back to 1944, when, by the decision of the State Defense Committee, signed by Stalin, the NKVD completely “cleared” the peninsula of the Crimean Tatar population in half a month. Officially, the deportation of a significant part of the population (19.4% of the total number according to data for 1939) was explained by the cooperation of the Crimean Tatars with the Nazi occupiers of Crimea during the Great Patriotic War.

11 peoples of the former USSR became victims of total deportations (Germans, Poles, Kalmyks, Karachais, Balkars, Ingush, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Koreans, Greeks, Finns), 48 peoples were partially evicted. According to Memorial, only the Crimean Tatars in 1944 were deported, according to various estimates, from 182,000 to 238,500 people. At the same time, the number of Crimean Tatars who collaborated with the Nazis also differs depending on the sources, most often the figure is called – 10%.

The Crimean Tatars themselves insist that the extension of collective responsibility to the entire people is genocide, according to this logic, all Ukrainians and Russians can be called collaborators for the participation of the former in the Galicia division, and the latter in the Russian Liberation Army.

All Crimean Tatars were deported from Crimea, including relatives of the twice hero of the Soviet Union, the ace pilot Sultan Amet-Khan, after whom the Simferopol airport was named before Russia came to Crimea. Amet-Khan has repeatedly appealed to the Soviet authorities with requests for the return of the Crimean Tatars to their homeland. This was dangerous, since in 1956 the policy of denying the existence of the Crimean Tatar people as such began – both he and the Crimean Tatar language were excluded from the Soviet registers. A ban was imposed on the mention of the language in specialized reference and encyclopedic publications, textbooks, data on the Crimean Tatars were excluded from the post-war population censuses. For violation of the taboo on the Crimean Tatar issue, the Soviet authorities considered twice the hero of the USSR Sultan Amet-Khan “an unreliable person.” In the 1960s, he was not allowed into France, where the pilot was invited to the anniversary of the fighter aviation regiment.

Rehabilitation of victims of political repression began slowly after Nikita Khrushchev’s speech at the XX Congress of the CPSU in February 1956, exposing the personality cult of Stalin. On September 5, 1967, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued Decree No. 493 “On Citizens of Tatar Nationality Living in Crimea”, in which it recognized that “after the liberation of Crimea from Nazi occupation in 1944, the facts of active cooperation with the German invaders of a certain part of the Tatars living in Crimea were unreasonably attributed to the entire Tatar population of Crimea. ” In November 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR recognized the deportation of the Crimean Tatars as illegal and criminal.

At the same time, the Crimean Tatars began to return to the post-perestroika Crimea, but their houses, of course, were already occupied. Not all of the rehabilitated even received permission to return, and no restitution was envisaged. The people did not receive back neither the confiscated housing nor the confiscated property. The only thing some of the returnees could count on were housing registration benefits and faster housing, worse and less.

As Rinat Shaimardanov, director of the Crimean Institute for Strategic Studies, director of the Crimean Institute for Strategic Studies, explained to The Insider, the majority of people occupied vacant lands, where they are least likely to be driven away. An active struggle for compensation for the deprived housing began in Crimea already under independent Ukraine, at the same time the Crimean Tatars began to organize themselves into “protest glades”. “When people started returning, none of the Crimean Tatars began to demand their homes back,” Shaimardanov said. – People already lived in these houses, and demanding return would mean that they would be on the street. They said: “Give us just empty land, and we will build ourselves. There is no need to expel people who were settled there not by their will ”. There were no legal conditions for restitution – the corresponding laws were not adopted, one of the bills was personally vetoed by the then President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma. Many managed to obtain the rights to land plots “in manual mode”, but this lasted for years.

“After 1991, when independent Ukraine was formed, everything was the same, nothing has changed in relation to the Crimean Tatars, and two large waves of protest have formed,” says Rinat Shaimardanov. – People had nowhere to live, they went out into an open field, fenced off the plots themselves, began to build and lived there, and then legalized. The first “glades of protest” were legalized by almost everyone. Most of it is located around Simferopol. 20 years have passed since then, a new generation of Crimean Tatars has grown up, they returned to the lands from where their families were evicted. Most people did not have the opportunity to buy “plots”, so in 2005-2006, someone organized themselves independently, someone, under the leadership of the leaders of the first “glades” of the 90s, went to the plots and occupied them. This time people occupied the territory, but they were not built as before, but tried to officially legitimize them – they wrote letters, petitions, went to officials, proved their right to receive land. It went on for years. “

According to the activist, the case moved when Vasily Dzharty became the Prime Minister of Crimea. He created a special land commission under the Council of Ministers of the Republic, which dealt with the registration of property rights for the “squatters” for the Crimean Tatars. The land plots themselves and the names of the people to whom these plots were assigned were entered into special registers. “Some of these people were weeded out because they had already received land plots earlier or they already had some kind of housing, and 12 thousand people confirmed their right to receive this land. This commission, after all the preliminary work, began to legitimize the “glades”. In 2013, out of 12 thousand plots, 3.5 thousand were legalized, and in 2014 all the rest were to be legalized. The roadmap was painted, there were dates and terms, responsible persons. Those people who managed to get land under Ukraine legalized plots during the transition of Crimea to Russia. Those people who also stood in these “glades of protest”, but did not have time to formalize them in Ukraine – not one of them received land. There was such a “clearing of protest” in Petrovsky Heights, where 900 people managed to get “documents on ownership” in Ukraine, and 200 did not have time. None of these 200 received anything under Russia, and the lands on these plots were simply distributed to anyone except the Crimean Tatars. “

At the same time, the Ukrainian authorities never brought the bill guaranteeing compensation for restitution claims to the final readings on time. A full-fledged law “On the restoration of the rights of persons deported on ethnic grounds” was adopted by Ukraine only in April 2014 – immediately after the annexation of Crimea by Russia.

After annexation

In the spring of 2014, party functionaries and businessmen of the Ukrainian era began to “flirt” with the Crimean Tatars, who later headed all power structures in the Crimea captured by Russia. In early March, before the referendum on the annexation of the peninsula, they began to make statements that all areas of the Crimean Tatars would be legalized. Thus, it was planned to win over the undecided electorate to their side and calm down the protest-minded part of the Crimean Tatars, which opposed joining at a rally on February 27 in front of the Supreme Soviet. During the protest, two people were killed and several dozen were injured.

“The Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people was a clear and open enemy of Russia, opposed by all means Russia’s coming to Crimea,” Shaimardanov says. – The Mejlis was supported by about 25-30% of the Crimean Tatars. There was also another part of the Crimean Tatars who supported the side of Russia, they were also 25-30%. This is the social movement “Sebat”, consisting of participants in the “fields of protest”, and the more political organization “Milli Firka”. And there remained a large “doubting” part of the people, half. Russia had every opportunity to win them over to its side. All that was needed was to fulfill the promises made then by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. Then they promised to legalize the “Mejlis”, give out the land, ensure the representation of the Crimean Tatars in the government at least 25%, that is, by quotas, national schools and so on, there were about 20 points. Naturally, as soon as Russia came here, everyone forgot about these promises. “

After the appointment of Sergei Aksenov to the position of interim head of Crimea, the situation of the Crimean Tatars worsened . According to Rinat Shaimardanov, while in Ukraine, when he was the head of the Russian Unity movement, Aksenov personally took part in the demolition of houses in the “glades of protest.” “This is the man who, with the Cossacks, broke the Tatar makeshift huts that stood there in the“ protest glades, ”the activist says. – From the very beginning, this person is a categorical opponent of the Crimean Tatars. When he was appointed head of Crimea, it became clear that this issue would not be resolved the way it should. “