Russia is at war with the Crimean Tatars because of their desire for freedom, Oleksandra Romantsova

In addition to the war with Ukraine, the Russian authorities have been waging a kind of “small war” against the Crimean Tatars on the peninsula occupied in 2014 for eight years. Oleksandra Romantsova, executive director of the Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), stated this during the side event “Prisoners of Putin and Lukashenko: political prisoners in Russia, Belarus and the OSCE region”, held on the sidelines of the Warsaw Conference on the Human Dimension (Warsaw Human Dimension Conference).

“Crimea is the place where the war against Ukraine began in 2014. Since that moment, the Russian authorities have, in fact, unleashed a “small war” against the Crimean Tatars,” she said.

According to the human rights defender, Russia has been using the practice of political persecution in the temporarily occupied Crimea for many years.

“Only now there is information about 159 people who have been politically persecuted by the Russian authorities since the occupation of the peninsula. Most of them are native Crimean Tatars who have always lived in Crimea,” Oleksandra Romantsova stressed. She also reminded the audience that only Stalin decided in his time that these people should be taken out of their native places and brought to Central Asia, where they lived for half a century.

Oleksandra Romantsova also reminded, the Tatars returned home at the end of the 20th century. That is why they are strong, “they have strong self-organization and that is why they believe in the institution of democracy. Tatars have their own forms of parliament and government – Kurultai and Mejlis. First of all, the Russian Federation does not like these self-governing organizations of the Crimean Tatars.”

“During the previous eight years of the occupation of Crimea, we can talk about various kinds of political persecution of the Crimean Tatars. The Russian authorities do not just arrest innocent people, they pursue a consistent policy of discrimination against the entire nation. The authorities of the Russian Federation clearly demonstrate that they simply do not want to see 250,000 people who are the indigenous population of the peninsula in Crimea. Crimean Tatars are not even singled out as a separate ethnic community according to the Russian classification,” continued the executive director of the Center for Social Security.

The human rights activist also emphasized that after the beginning of the large-scale aggression on February 24, the policy of the Russian authorities has not changed. “Now, for example, during a new wave of mobilization, the local occupation authorities handed 1,500 summonses specifically to the Crimean Tatars. This is the largest proportion among all ethnic groups, another attempt to physically reduce their presence in Crimea,” she said.

Oleksandra Romantsova emphasized that the Crimean Tatars, with a strong tradition of democracy, were able to resist Russian aggression for eight years, despite the fact that the Mejlis is persecuted as a terrorist organization. “During this time, five settlements of compact Crimean Tatars were destroyed in Crimea – 15,000 people were left without a home,” the human rights activist added.

“The entire territory of Ukraine must be liberated, and the Crimean peninsula is part of Ukraine. We must liberate Crimea, which the Russian Federation has turned into a prison for Crimean Tatars. The Russian Federation always wants to destroy the values of democracy in all the territories it controls. Therefore, the threat to the Crimean Tatars is also a threat to democratic values. OSCE member countries should be proactive and offer to create a mechanism that will ensure justice for such people and support them. One of these mechanisms can be a special tribunal against Russian aggression, which should judge the Russian Federation not only for war crimes, crimes against humanity but also for crimes of aggression against Ukraine,” Oleksandra Romantsova concluded.

We previously reported that within the framework of the Warsaw Conference on the Human Dimension, which lasted from September 26 to October 7, 2022, a delegation of Ukrainian human rights defenders, lawyers, and journalists told diplomats of various OSCE member states about the problems caused by Russian armed aggression against Ukraine.