Paul Goble
Staunton,
August 30 – Today as they have done every August 30, the International Day for
Remembering Those Who Have Disappeared, Crimean activists assembled in front of
the Russian embassy in Kyiv to call attention to the 44 people who have been “disappeared”
as a result of Moscow’s hybrid deportation of the Crimean Tatars.
These
are people seized by masked men and taken away to unknown destinations. Six have
subsequently been found dead, and others are thought to be in Russian
prisons. Today, Tamila Tasheva of the Crimea-SOS
volunteer project, says they are focusing on 15 documented as victims of
forcible kidnappings (belsat.eu/ru/programs/v-krymu-idet-gibridnaya-deportatsiya-tatar/).
One of the participants
at the demonstration, Mariya Kvitsynskaya, says that she come to the Russian
embassy every month “to remind Ukrainian society about the disappeared because the
media constantly talk about political prisoners but unfortunately rarely mention
the disappeared, because “there is no news,” something the occupiers work hard
to ensure.
“We understand that such actions
alongside the embassy of the aggressor country will not influence the behavior
of the criminals sitting in the Kremlin, Refat Chubarov, the head of the
Crimean Tatar Mejlis. “But we conduct them and will continue to do so because
it is very important to awaken Ukrainian society.”
According to the
Mejlis, since the Anschluss, no less than ten percent of the Crimean Tatars
have been expelled. “This is the result of arrests, aggressive propaganda and
raider seizures of land by representatives of the new authorities” – actions
Belsat journalists Yaroslav Steshik and Adelya Dubavets say, “the Crimean
Tatars call ‘hybrid deportation.’”
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