Helicopters Try to Disrupt Crimea Remembrance

Military aircraft attempted to disrupt the  70th anniversary commemorations  of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars by Stalin.

As relatives gathered  to honour the memory of those deported by Stalin‘s murder gangs, two assault helicopters began circling the crowd, trying to drown out the speakers.

However, the people on the ground countered with chants of  their leader’s name, “Mustafa“, and shouts of;

The head of the Bakhchisaray region, Mejlis Akhtem ?ijgoz urged people not to succumb to provocation and join a rally in Simferopol nearby.

The Tartars used to be the largest of Crimea’s ethnic groups settling there from the 14th century onwards. Originally part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, it had a dark place in history as a slave trade centre with estimates of as many as 2 million Ukrainians and Russians being captured between the 15th and 18th centuries in what was known the harvest of the Steppe.

After Russia annexed the Crimea in 1783 two thirds of the Tartars‘ 300,000 population emigrated to nearby Muslim lands. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Crimeans tried to declare an Islamic People’s Republic but were crushed under the Soviet monster with many of their leaders imprisoned and executed.

The misery of communism brought widespread famine resulting in Crimea losing half of its population between 1917 and 1933 which is similar in numbers to the Medieval Black Death.

On 18 May 1944 the entire Tartar population was deported on Stalin’s orders as a collective punishment. Many of the victims were worked to death as slaves in the Soviet Gulags.

From the 1980’s onwards with the advent of perestroika Tartars were allowed to return and today around 250,000 live in the Crimea once again.