Word: crimean
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When Shevket Osmanov moved to his family homeland in 1987 after spending all his life in Uzbekistan, the welcome he received was less than effusive. "People were terrified of us," says Osmanov, who was part of the first wave of Crimean Tatars to return to the Crimean peninsula on Ukraine's Black Sea coast during perestroika in the late 1980s. "Ten days before Eid al-Adha [the Muslim Festival of the Sacrifice], they closed all the schools because there were stories that we were going to sacrifice children...
...Falsely accused by Stalin of mass collaboration with the Nazi German invaders, the entire Crimean Tatar population was loaded onto trains and deported to Central Asia over a period of just three days in May 1944. Almost half would die over the following year. Twenty years since they first began to return, there are over 250,000 Tatars in Crimea, around 13% of the population. (See pictures of Europeans marking the defeat of Nazi Germany...
...Only babies don't know that Crimean parliamentary deputies are criminals," Hennady Moskal, the Ukrainian president's former representative in Crimea, once remarked. Violent clashes between local law enforcement bodies and Tatar settlers have occurred in the past. Tensions over Yani Qirim threatened to boil over in January, when inhabitants say they got word of a police decision to storm the settlement, and 3,000 Tatars set up camp for several days to offer protection. "We will defend our homes and families," says Khalilov. And not only from the police. In 2007, Ukranian media reported that representatives of the developer...
Tymoshenko's posture toward Moscow has lately been quite different from Yushchenko's, calling for "balance" in relations with Ukraine's more powerful neighbor and criticizing the President for antagonizing the Russians with his stance on issues such as the Russian naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Observers in Ukraine believe her priority in dealing with Moscow right now is to secure lower prices for the natural-gas imports on which the country depends, and given Russia's inclination to use energy for geopolitical leverage, that requires a more cooperative relationship. While avoiding being seen as choosing sides...
...though it was David Cameron, the Conservative opposition leader, who raced to Tbilisi in mid-August to blast the Russians while Brown vacationed uncomfortably in Scotland. British Foreign Minister David Miliband took the baton and traveled to Ukraine, another country deeply worried about Moscow's expansionist ambitions. Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, inhabited mostly by ethnic Russians and home to the Russian Black Sea fleet, is one of several areas with allure for Russian irredentists. (It was only in 1954 that Ukrainian-born Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev shifted administrative control over the Crimea from Moscow to Kiev...