The Putin Paradox

 

1948 marked the Nakba, the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes by the new Israeli state, driving them into the small wedge of land that is Gaza, where the population is now 2,200,000 - half of them children. It has been under blockade for 20 years and now there are fears that the Netanyahu government's objective is to expel the Palestinians completely.

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin waded into the appalling carnage visited by the IDF on Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon, supposedly promoting peace. His hypocrisy however sadly matches Biden's and Netanyahu's.   

Putin of course is currently waging his own bloody war, including bombing Ukrainian hospitals, partly over the Crimean peninsula. He has put about a myth that this historically is a Russian land. But it is not. 

Just four years before the Palestinian Nakba, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered the Sürgünlik - the deportation of the entire population of the Crimean Tatars. This was a Muslim community that had lived on the peninsula for several centuries before the Russian Empire conquered it in 1773, annexing it a decade later. Stalin falsely claimed that the entire population were Nazis (sound familiar?), but in truth this was one of several forced mass deportations to make way for the Russification of the Soviet Republics. 

As well as the Tatars, around 40,000 Estonians, the vast majority of them women and children, were moved to Siberia in 1941 and 1949, with other big forced transfers of Latvians, Lithuanians, Turkomens, ethnic Germans and Armenians around the same time. In all cases, large numbers of Russian settlers replaced the deportees.

And so, pictured above, in May 1944 up to 423,000 Tatar people - literally the entire population - were deported from their historical homeland of Crimea and sent to Central Asia and Siberia. Uzbekistan was the main destination.

According to the files of the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB, around 10% of the deportees died in transit or in forced labour camps over the next five years.  Meanwhile, as the Tatars were removed, in 1944 alone, 51,000 Russians moved into collective farms vacated by deportees. More than a quarter of a million acres of land was forcibly transferred.

This was how Russian settlers achieved an overall majority in the population of the peninsula. 

Yet while Stalin's successors condemned the policy, they did not allow the Muslim Tatar deportees to return home and those who tried were quickly removed again. 

It wasn't until 1989 that the ban was lifted by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russo-Ukrainian who was the final leader of the Soviet Union. The Supreme Soviet declared the deportations illegal. Initially a small number of Tatars finally made the journey back to the Crimea but faced violent riots against their return by Russian nationalists, particularly in Yalta where the Soviet army had to intervene to stop escalation. 

In 1954, the peninsula had been brought under the Ukrainian Republic within the Soviet Union. Although on a low turnout, in spite of the Russian majority, 54% of Crimean voters backed Ukrainian independence in the 1991 referendum.  

In 1999, the small Tatar population was accorded a level of self-governing status via the Mejlis, an elected council, by the independent Ukrainian constitution, which also granted automatic Ukrainian citizenship to around 150,000 exiled Tatars across the former USSR. Over 100,000 gradually returned to the Crimea - not without some bureaucratic opposition from Ukrainian officials - and by 2004, they had regrown to around an eighth of the population of the peninsula.

However, the Mejlis was turned into an appointed body by pro-Russian President of the Ukraine Viktor Yanukovitch in 2010 and following the Russian occupation of the Crimea in 2014, many Tatars complained about renewed persecution. According to the UN Human Rights agency they have often faced harassment and disproportionate levels of arrest. Most of the 10,000 people who left the Crimea in the subsequent year after the Russian occupation were Tatars. 

Putin's slaughter of some 8,000 Muslim civilians in Grozny at the turn of the millennium and his fostering of Russian Christian nationalism doubtless did little to reassure them. Similarly, the approving description of him as "the key to white survival" by former KKK leader David Duke and other supportive white supremacists inside and outside Russia may not have helped.

The Russian authorities banned the Mejlis in 2016, declaring it an extremist organisation.

One of the Tatars elected leaders, Rustem Umierov, is now Ukrainian Minister of Defence, organising resistance to the imperialist Islamophobe Putin, a man who should be in the dock in the Hague. 

He should of course be there alongside, among others, fellow pseudo-Middle East "peace envoy" Tony Blair and his criminal confederate George Bush. As the old anarchist saying goes - neither Washington nor Moscow.

The Sürgünlik,1944