Can we hope together: Crimean Tatar and Palestinian liberations

Palestine and Crimea's fates keep intertwining the more one looks for connections. Did you know they also say that the Russian Empire claimed to have made the desert bloom when it first annexed Crimea in 1789? According to the Russian colonial narrative, Empress Ekaterina took the fruitless desert from the “uncivilized Tatars” and turned it into a bountiful garden. I have heard that story too many times. 

Russia’s claims of making the desert bloom would be familiar to any Palestinian. Russian nobility took Crimean Tatar land, often without contacting the legal owners of the lands at all, and built palaces and manors on it. They cut down tree groves, gardens and vineyards, destroyed old cemeteries, and decimated carefully planned systems of melioration that Crimean Tatars were famous for. Ironically, Russia turned lands full of fruit trees into deserts. Where once luscious pears and cherries bloomed, only dry land remained, because the settlers didn't know how to care for it. They still don't know: the manmade drought Crimea is currently suffering is a direct consequence of their indifference.

The goals of the Soviet regime in Crimea didn't stop at the 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars. Instead of assimilation and extraction, it turned to extermination. Having committed the mass murder of Crimean Tatars on the way to their exile, the Soviets attempted to clear the Crimean landscape of any signs that would remind anyone of its previous inhabitants. Names of Crimean cities, regions, rivers, mountains and other locations were changed to Russian. Old mosques, Crimean Tatar books and records were destroyed, and the very usage of the name "Crimean Tatars" in books and official records was banned and replaced with "Tatars who previously lived in Crimea".

I will not list all of the atrocities enacted by the Soviets on my people, because the list is not only long and tiring, but also identical among most indigenous nations, and I bet we all know it by heart. Settler colonial violence is the same across borders. But for the ones I name, I do so for a reason:  Russia has always been good at playing the liberator, and I would like for the similarities to be glaringly obvious both for those who still fall for its deception and for those who never did. It is within the basis of a settler colonial regime to deny the indigenous people their right to the land, to imply with their rhetoric that the “savages” couldn't care for it properly and at the same time were never a part of it anyway.

My solidarity with Palestinian resistance was born out of the recognition of shared grief and injustice. In 1944, when Slavic settlers moved into Crimea, newly emptied of its Crimean Tatar population, they occupied Crimean Tatar houses and took their possessions. Over decades, a settler who had never seen Crimea before had more rights to live in a house than a Crimean Tatar born in that very house. A popular saying reflects this time: "A Tatar in Crimea won't even find a couple of meters of land for a grave". The ones who were lucky enough to visit would bring back small sacks of Crimean soil to be passed on between families and generations like something sacred. When I first heard similar stories about Palestinians, even before I understood the scope of Israeli violence, I no longer needed additional context to know who had the truth on their side. In their stories of loss and struggle, I hear our own.

Another unexpected connection between the two lands lies in the history of Zionist visions of a promised land. Soviets considered Crimea as an alternative to Palestine for establishing  Jewish autonomy. The idea was accepted by the Politburo in 1923 and then abandoned, but from 1924 until 1938, collective Jewish settlements were established in Crimea with the financial support of Jewish American philanthropists. To normalise the occupation of Crimean Tatar land, the USSR released propaganda films. The 1927 documentary “The Jews in the Land” depicted Jewish settlers in the “abandoned” lands of Crimea and the Northern Black Sea region. 

“Moving to the Land” is presented as an escape from the toils and hopelessness of the Civil War-torn Jewish mestechko. Northern Crimea is presented as deserted, its empty landscape overgrown with weeds, but the hard work of settlers remakes it into abundant fields as the colony (a term which the film itself uses in the titre cards) is established. The film featured poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the propaganda darling of the Soviet regime, as the main screenwriter – a fair indication of how significant it was to land the film’s message. 

In February 1944, a few months after the deportation of Crimean Tatars, representatives of the Soviet Jewish Antifascist Committee met with the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and discussed establishing Jewish autonomy in Crimea. Stalin would later retaliate by executing most of the Committee's members. Perhaps the Crimean settler population would've been different if either of the two plans had gone through.

When Yuri Osmanov was asked how old he was when he learned about the National Movement of Crimean Tatars, he replied: "Strictly speaking, every Crimean Tatar joins the Movement while still in the womb, for from that time, he is an object of national discrimination, robbery, and grave abuse". I believe that the same is true for Palestinians. Being born a Crimean Tatar and a Palestinian is a political experience; one realizes this in early childhood. My father discovered it one morning after the first KGB search in his parents’ apartment when he went outside and saw that his entire Crimean Tatar neighbourhood was raided. That was the moment, as he told me, when he "realized he had a nationality", a national status distinctly different from those, who were not labeled as  "the nation of enemies". Since the beginning of the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, over 15 Crimean Tatar children have been born after their fathers’ arrests, as the cycle continues.

For many of us, death doesn't mark the end of this political experience, either. In 1983 Mustafa Jemilev, Crimean Tatar activist and political prisoner, was arrested for trying to enter Crimea

After the deportation and until the 1990s, Crimean Tatars could not enter Crimea without proof of registration, which was made impossible to obtain from the Crimean municipalities – naturally, on purpose.

to bury his father in his native land. All of the planted witnesses at his trial insisted Mustafa was "screaming anti-Soviet statements" during his detention. The statement they all recalled was: "Crimea is the second Palestine". In a way, the phrase was in its nature indeed anti-Soviet, as it revealed the truth beneath the illusion of leadership in the anti-colonial struggle that the Soviet Union was crafting. Just as it was anti-Soviet for prisoners to insist they were Crimean Tatars from the Crimean Soviet Republic, enraging the so-called judges, and just as the mere existence of Palestinians threatens Israel's entire machine of lies today. To exist as ourselves is to defy the machine, to sing our songs is to spit at its maws.

It is getting harder to build our solidarity on shared hopes alone. But powerful as it is, shared grief is an unstable foundation for long-standing and productive actions of solidarity. I wish to see our connections beyond just the abuse we suffer, and if not share the same hope of borders and walls falling, then at least look for more ways to connect, to share our knowledge and experience. I know there was a whole Crimean Tatar neighbourhood in Jerusalem once. Our people knew each other and lived together. In these darkening days, can we fight together? Can we hope together?