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About 70 people in the Crimean capital have defied official warnings to commemorate the victims of Stalin’s mass deportation of the Tatars in 1944.
They defied heavy rain and the risk of retaliation for attending a memorial service at a plaque near the Simferopol railway station, carrying flags and, in some cases, the Ukrainian colors in the form of a bracelet or punching pin.
Half of the Crimean Tatars, a Sunni Muslim people, are believed to have died during their forced removal to remote parts of the Soviet Union; their descendants speak of the expulsion as genocide.
But for the past eight years, since Russia annexed Crimea, they have been denied permission to celebrate the terror.
Kharkiv Human Rights Group, which investigates abuses throughout Ukraine, says that this year Tatar activists received warnings from Russian officials in Crimea about the “illegality of extremist activities”.
But the event continued, with the seniors making up the majority of the participants.
A young man who participated said that before the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, as many as 50,000 people would gather on the main square in Simferopol to pay attention to the anniversary.
Many of them had returned to their homeland after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Tatar community flourished again.
CNN does not name the man for his own safety.
“It was forbidden to do such demonstrations in recent years,” he told CNN, and gradually the numbers that showed up had decreased.
“People go in small groups to the mosques, cemeteries and memorials,” he said.
But he had wanted to come to the event in Simferopol, to “gather in a crowd with our flags, pray together and celebrate this tragedy, for it touches the soul.”
About 200 Tatars gathered in Büyük Onlar (named Oktyabrskoe by the Soviets) where a prayer was said in the rain and children read poems.
The anniversary was also marked by the Ukrainian government, which drew parallels with Russia’s ongoing invasion.
President Volodymyr Zelensky signed legislation “for the protection of all ordinary peaceful civilians who were oppressed by the occupiers and captured by them.”
Tamila Tasheva, Zelensky’s representative in Crimea, said: “We can not help but draw parallels to 1944. Current crimes have a long history … Crimean Tatars are no longer put in freight cars and taken out by force, but [the Russians] create the conditions for us to leave our historic homeland. “
The Tatars who protest or promote the Crimean identity often end up in court.
According to the Crimea SOS human rights group, almost 100 Tatars are victims of politically motivated prosecutions; many of them serve long prison sentences.
Eskender Bariiev, a leading Crimean Tatar activist, says that the historical parallels from 1944 to today are unmistakable.
“The Crimean Tatars were accused of collaborating with the Nazis and [Stalin] carried out a special operation and thus deported Crimean Tatars from the Crimea, “Bariiev said this week.
“Now under the slogans of denazification and demilitarization, the occupiers launched a so-called special operation, and in fact the genocide of the Ukrainian people.”
Bariiev said that just as the Crimean Tatars had been deported, so the Russians were now forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, mostly to remote parts of Russia.