Latest News

Three Salzburg Global Fellows speak about Crimea’s history of Russian persecution and what Ukraine can learn from the past

“I really long for home [Crimea] and it’s very painful for me that we have to flee our homes again due to the actions of the same aggressor [Russia],” said Elzara Halimova.

Halimova is one of the many Crimean Tatars — a small indigenous minority of Ukrainian Muslims — who is fighting her latest struggle for freedom following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

Hailing from Simferopol, Crimea, where her family and friends reside, Halimova works as a Partnerships Manager for The Voices of Children Foundation in Ukraine. Her organization provides psychological, psychosocial, and humanitarian support to children who witness the war.

Crimean Tatars are Turkic-speaking Muslims indigenous to the Crimean Peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea. They have faced persecution at the hands of Russian authorities for almost 300 years.

In March 2014, Tatars faced renewed aggression when Russia invaded and occupied Crimea after a disputed referendum.

“War began for Crimean Tatars in 2014 after Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine. After that, we faced occupation, expulsion, internal displacement and hybrid warfare by Russia,” Sevgil Musaieva-Borovyk said. She is a Ukrainian journalist from Crimea and has been serving as the Chief Editor of the online newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda, which translates as “Ukrainian Truth,” for the last eight years.

Human rights activist Zarema Bariieva echoes the same sentiments. She said that the “sad story” started for Tatars eight years ago, not on 24 February 2022. “That's why many Tatars still live on the peninsula despite persecution, as they don’t want to flee and leave their motherland,” she told Salzburg Global.

Bariieva is a representative of the indigenous Crimean Tatar people and an activist of the International Movement for the De-occupation of Crimea, which aims to liberate Crimea and restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine using non-violent methods of struggle.

All three women attended the Salzburg Global program Connecting and Supporting Ukrainian Civil Society in Time of War in July to discuss how to support Ukrainian civil society in the face of an uncertain and complicated future.

Charles Ehrlich, program director at Salzburg Global Seminar, explained the importance of including the Crimean Tatar community in this session:

“The Crimean Tatars are often forgotten in western discourse about the status of their homeland, as a result of much Russian disinformation. If Russia claims Crimea based on the peninsula’s supposed “historic” Russian identity, then it intentionally ignores the indigenous population and its wishes. Ever since Russia first occupied the Crimea in the 18th century, it often subjected the Crimean Tatars to harsh persecution, culminating in 1944 with the deportation to Central Asia in freight trains of the entire surviving population. In inhumane conditions, nearly half the deportees perished. Returning to Crimea after Ukraine became independent, the Crimean Tatars have been particular victims of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and renewed persecution, since the Russian re-occupation the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

"Salzburg Global Seminar was founded in the ruins and destruction of post-War Europe. Throughout our 75 year history, our institution has maintained a strong commitment to peace, reconciliation, and pluralist society, embodied among other ways in our Holocaust Education and Genocide Prevention initiative, which has included Fellows from over 50 countries with difficult histories of mass violence, extremism, persecution, and genocide. We felt it was incumbent on us to ensure that the tragedy afflicting the Crimean Tatars is not forgotten.”

Halimova told Salzburg Global that it is inspiring to hear stories about the work other people are doing. “It’s important to feel that we are in this together and are working towards one goal, that is to see Ukraine flourish again,” she said.

Bariieva said that she came to Salzburg to highlight the work of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center related to monitoring the violations of individual and collective rights of the Tatars by the Russian regime. In 2015, because of persecution in Russia-occupied Crimea, Bariieva fled the peninsula to Kyiv, where together with other activists, she founded the center.

Following Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Crimean Tatars settled throughout different Ukrainian cities — mainly Lviv, Kyiv, Odesa and Kherson — now face a renewed threat of occupation from the same aggressor.

Before the military offensive, 1.46 million internally displaced people were registered by the Ukrainian authorities, of which approximately 49,000 people are registered as coming from Crimea.

For Musaieva, the rebuilding process will be challenging but would require “efforts and involvement of different people in the decision-making process; be it the army, authorities, local governments, volunteers and citizens.”

Bariieva believes that Ukraine should be rebuilt in a different frame: “I think we should reconstruct buildings in a way that we totally get rid of our Soviet past and move towards fulfilling our wish to join the European family.”

Halimova hopes the “world will not get desensitized to the war and scroll past ‘blurred photos’ on social media platforms depicting people’s suffering” and that “the Ukrainian government with the support of the international community will take necessary steps for people to return to Ukraine and live in their own country.”

The Fellows of this session have drafted a Salzburg Statement, in which they set out the priorities and recommendations from Ukrainian civil society identified at this meeting.

To read the Salzburg Statement, click here.