Vladimir Putin signs decree to rehabilitate Crimean Tatars

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday he had signed a decree rehabilitating Crimea’s Tatars, native inhabitants of the peninsula who were deported under Stalin over accusations of Nazi collaboration and who fiercely oppose the region’s new Moscow-backed authorities.

“I have signed a decree to rehabilitate the Crimean Tatar population of Crimea, the Armenian population, Germans, Greeks, all those who suffered during Stalin’s purges,” Putin told a government meeting.

Crimea’s 300,000 Tatars, who make up around 12 per cent of the peninsula’s population, largely boycotted a disputed referendum last month in which nearly 97 per cent of voters chose to split from Ukraine and join Russia.

The decree calls for “historical justice [and] a political, social and spiritual revival” for the Crimean Tatars and other groups deported under Stalin.

It is seen as an overture but will likely fail to satisfy Tatars, who eye the Kremlin with distrust and have recently said they will consider holding a plebescite on broader autonomy.

The chairman of the Tatars’ assembly, the Mejlis, declined immediate comment but one of his deputies expressed scepticism that the decree would lead to any real changes for the long-suffering people.

“We’ve been waiting for this decree,” Nariman Jelial told AFP. “But it would be a fantasy to say that the Mejlis and the Crimean Tatars as a whole have welcomed it with joy and enthusiasm.”

He dismissed the decree as a “standard set of wishes and directives which were repeatedly voiced by the Ukrainian authorities” who ruled the peninsula before Russia annexed it.

“There is another problem,” he added. “The people who have stood in the way of all the good Ukrainian initiatives towards the Crimean Tatars remain in power in Crimea.”

Ukrainian flag taken down 

In a sign of the continuing tensions in Crimea, a group of 30 men in fatigues took down a Ukrainian flag from the Mejlis building in Simferopol, the peninsula’s main city, on Monday.

The men, believed to be members of the peninsula’s self-defence units, replaced it with Crimea’s regional flag despite the protests of three women in the building at the time.

Mejlis spokeswoman Lilia Muslimova, who was at the building, said the men insulted them and threatened them with arrest.

Following the March 16 secession referendum, the Mejlis had taken down the Ukrainian flag so as not to provoke confrontation with the new local authorities.

But it had recently re-hoisted the flag at the request of the spiritual leader of the Crimean Tatars, Mustafa Dzhemilev, who is also a Ukrainian lawmaker and is currently in Simferopol.

After the men in camouflage left, one of the women replaced the Crimean flag with the national banner of the Crimean Tatars.

Under Stalin, the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group, were accused of collaborating with Nazi Germany and deported to Central Asia in 1944.

Nearly half of them died of starvation and disease.

They began returning to Crimea under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and were granted Ukrainian citizenship after Kiev won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

At a closed-door session of the UN Security Council last month, Dzhemilev said his people were extremely worried for the future and that some 5,000 Tatars had already fled the peninsula.

Many Tatars have said the sight of armed Russian soldiers and armoured personnel carriers stirred painful memories among the older generation and some expressed fears they could again be deported.