Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 26 – Tatar
organizations in the Middle Volga have nominated Mustafa Cemilev, the longtime
leader of the Crimean Tatar national movement, for the Nobel Peace Prize, a
step that calls attention to Cemilev’s efforts to defend his land against Russian aggression and growing ties
between the Tatars of Crimea and the Tatars of the Middle Volga.
Some 20 nationalist and human rights
groups in Tatarstan said that Cemilev deserves the prize because “over the
course of more than half a century,” he has engaged in an unceasing struggle “for
human rights ... and the democratic path of development” (tatar-centr.blogspot.ru/2014/04/blog-post_24.html and
Thanks to Cemilev’s efforts, the
open letter declared, “the Crimean Tatars have become an integrated part of
Ukrainian society and the political nation.” They “actively participate in the
state-political construction of contemporary Ukraine” because they are “the
indigenous people of Crimea.”
Cemilev himself has actively opposed
the annexation of Crimea by Russia. He has called the Moscow-orchestrated
referendum “illegal and absurd,” and he has urged the Crimean Tatars “to ignore
the voting in Sevastopol.” He has not
been dissuaded either by a telephone call from Putin or a Russian decision to
prevent him from returning to Crimea for five years.
Instead, he has done everything he
can to highlight the mistreatment of the Crimean Tatars by the Russian occupation
forces and pointed out that already “approximately 5,000” of his nation have
felt compelled to leave Crimea and resettle elsewhere in Ukraine, a kind of “soft”
deportation that gives no sign of letting up.
This is not the first time Cemilev
has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2011, the Association for the
Defense of Repressed Peoples in Germany did so.
But Moscow’s aggression and the looming threats of new tribulations for
a nation Stalin deported to Central Asia in 1944 make the case for him more compelling.
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