(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Western politicians have condemned what they refer to as an unlawful Russian occupation of Crimea, and introduced punitive measures against Russia. People who have visited Crimea, however, will be able to tell that the overwhelming majority of the people on the peninsula support reunification with Russia in 2014. The Russian takeover of Crimean control probably prevented a bloody armed conflict.
In the fall of 2015, I took a study trip to Crimea where I interviewed the historian and director of Taurida State Museum Andrej V. Malgin. In addition, I spoke to the leader of the Crimean Communist Party, a local journalist, a Tatar human rights defender and members of the Crimean Literary Academy, who had invited me. My interview subjects had different opinions on many issues, but what they all agreed on was that it was good that Crimea had again become Russian.
Feels Russian. Andrej V. Malgin, acting as a reflective and analytical person, stressed that if Russian authorities had not taken control of Crimea, Ukrainian nationalists would have come to the peninsula and provoked a civil war like in eastern Ukraine, and that Russia would then have been forced to intervene in far worse conditions. He was also pleased that Crimea had been incorporated into the Russian Federation. For the population, it was far better than the peninsula to become an area of unclear legal status, such as Abkhazia. The journalist stated that West Ukrainian extremists had crossed a border by overthrowing Ukraine's legally elected President Viktor Yanukovych with arms power, and that after that it was inconceivable that Crimea should remain associated with Ukraine.
The detachment of the Crimean people from Ukraine was a realization of the UN Charter's principle of peoples' right to self-determination.
The fact that almost everyone in Crimea supports reunification with Russia is confirmed by opinion polls conducted by reputable polling institutes. In a poll conducted by the US Pew Research Center in Crimea in May 2014, 91 percent declared that the referendum on secession from Ukraine in March of the same year had been free and fair, and 88 percent stated that the government in Kiev should respect the outcome of the referendum. These figures coincide with the official outcome of the referendum on secession, which means that 96,7 percent (95,6 percent in Sevastopol) must have voted for secession with an attendance of 83,1 percent.
Historically, Crimea – which has been inhabited by a multitude of peoples, including Tatars who established a khanate on the peninsula in the 1400th century – has never had any connection to Ukraine. At the end of the 1700th century, Crimea and the area north of the Black Sea were conquered by Catherine the Great and incorporated into the Russian Empire. To populate her newly acquired provinces, the New Russia, the Empress summoned not only Russians and Little Russians (Ukrainians), but also Serbs, Greeks, Germans and more. The non-Russian immigrants were soon Russified, and the area became part of the Russian cultural area.
In 1954, to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the union between Russia and Ukraine in 1654, Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. But this was a gesture that meant nothing to the people who considered themselves 100 percent Russian.
Self-determination. Boris Yeltsin could undoubtedly have forced the return of Crimea to Russia upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the only thing he cared about was humiliating Gorbachev by hastening the Soviet Union's end. In the 1990s, there were strong separatist currents in the Crimea, which manifested themselves in the election of a separate president for the peninsula in 1994. But Yeltsin's Russia, which was divided and weakened, did little to come to the rescue of the Crimean people.
The Crimean people's secession from Ukraine in the 2014 referendum was a realization of the UN Charter's principle of the people's right to self-determination. It was a complete parallel to the Norwegian secession from Sweden in 1905 and the secession of various colonial peoples from their European masters in the decades after World War II. And the Western countries themselves had set a precedent for Crimea's secession by recognizing Kosovo as an independent state. The difference between Kosovo and Crimea is that while Kosovo's secession from Serbia took place in a bombing war that killed thousands of people, resulting in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Crimea's secession from Ukraine was completely bloodless and not associated with ethnic cleansing.
The Taters positive. What about the Crimean Tatars, the descendants of Crimean rulers until the 1700th-century Russian conquest, which Stalin accused in 1944 of collaborating with the Germans and exiled to Central Asia? How is your situation?
According to the Tatar human rights activist Vasvi Abduraimov, whom I interviewed, most Tatars were positive about Crimea's reunification with Russia. He stressed that the Tatars and other oppressed peoples in the late 1980s were in the process of regaining their rights, but that the collapse of the Soviet Union and Crimea's connection to independent Ukraine in 1991 interrupted these processes. After 1991, the Ukrainian authorities had done nothing to improve the situation of the Tatars. On the contrary, they had tried to provoke conflicts between slaves and Tatars in Crimea. Abduraimov further said that hardly any Tatars trusted the Tatar exile leaders who had sought refuge in Ukraine, after they had initiated an economic blockade of Crimea.
The Tatars looked forward to the future after Crimea became part of Russia, Abduraimov assured. The reason was that Russia, unlike Ukraine, was a multinational state, and that the Russian leadership had to treat Tatars and other non-slaves in a good way in order to realize its integration efforts vis-à-vis the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
During my stay in the Crimea, I visited large parts of the peninsula, including areas inhabited by many Tatars. I did not notice any ethnic friction. Everyone I spoke to also stated that there were almost no conflicts between different ethnic groups in Crimea.
Everyone I spoke to stated that there were almost no conflicts between different ethnic groups in Crimea.
Politicians and cultural figures from many European countries have visited Crimea since 2014 to form an independent opinion on the peninsula's reunification with Russia. Norwegian politicians and ordinary citizens should do as they do. They should go to the Crimea, travel around the peninsula and talk to ordinary people. I am convinced that those who signed up will find that almost everyone in Crimea, including the Crimean Tatars, supports reunification with Russia, and that people are optimistic about the future.
Also read: "Seven days in the Crimea"
http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2014/05/Pew-Global-Attitudes-Ukraine-Russia-Report-FINAL-May-8-2014.pdf
