Exhibition “Mustafa Dzhemilev and the Ukrainian Sixtiers.”
On November 18, 2016, the exhibition “Mustafa Dzhemilev and the Ukrainian Sixtiers: A Solidary Struggle for a Common Freedom” opened at the Kharkiv Literary Museum.The exhibition was organized at the initiative of the Crimean group of the Kharkiv Euromaidan and personally by Olena Abiyuk.
The event began with a guided tour of “Mustafa Dzhemilev and the Ukrainian Sixtiers,” followed by an interactive lecture, “Imprisoned Histories,” and a screening of Taras Ibragimov’s documentary film “To Live to Return.” The film consists of 6 short novellas about the national movement of Crimean Tatars for their return to Crimea after the 1944 deportation. The main part of the film is dedicated to the history of the movement from the 1950s to the 1990s.
In May 2016, journalists from QirimInfo traveled to the temporarily occupied peninsula to speak with direct participants of the movement.
Among the main figures in the film are the deputy head of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, Ilmi Umerov, his brother Bekir Umerov, and veterans of the movement Abdurashyt Dzhepparov, Ilver Ametov, Shevket Asanov, and Zevdzhet Kurtumetov, who talk about their participation in the national struggle for the return to their homeland.
According to one of the film’s subjects, Ilmi Umerov, his struggle for the return to the peninsula began in school. Ilmi and his classmates made patriotic leaflets, which ultimately led to a criminal case. “When I was in the tenth grade, a few classmates and I wrote leaflets by hand. When we had made enough, a month before May 18, we posted them around the city. We weren’t particularly concerned about secrecy. Immediately after these leaflets appeared, a criminal case was opened in the city. Checkpoints were set up all over town. Exactly a week later, we posted them again. It was an extraordinary event.”
Abdurashyt Dzhepparov talks about the events of October 1987, when Crimean Tatars decided to organize a march on foot from Taman (Krasnodar Krai) to Simferopol. With this action, they wanted to draw the attention of the world community to their problem.
“A colonel gave the command to start putting us on buses. At first, they offered us to get on ourselves, but we refused to do it. We had elderly people, two children, and a woman sitting in the middle. We were all in circles; on the very outside were the more or less sturdy people who could somehow fend off the dispersal. Their reaction, our reaction—and they paused. Then the colonel says: ‘What, do I need to teach you how to do this?’ He rolled up his sleeves to his elbows and reached for the third circle from the edge. A girl was sitting there, her name was Aliye. He grabbed her by the hair and started pulling to drag her out of the crowd. For some reason, not the men, not the boys, but her specifically. Then our people grabbed the colonel. And to save their colonel, other officers rushed in. That’s where the clashes between our people and theirs began,” Dzhepparov recounts how the authorities counteracted the march.
Also participating in the film were the first deputy head of the Mejlis, Nariman Dzhelyalov, the head of the CEC of the Qurultay, Zair Smedlyaev, and the wife of political prisoner Akhtem Chiygoz, Elmira Ablyalimova, who share their thoughts on the relevance of the Crimean Tatar national movement after the ban on the Mejlis in April 2016.
“The most important thing is that there is no sense of security. There has been pressure on entrepreneurs, searches, quite harsh ones, in mosques, the closing of Crimean Tatar media outlets. This is a spring that is bound to snap at some point,” says Ablyalimova about the tension being fueled in Crimea today, which could cause a new stage of the national movement.
Mustafa Dzhemilev, the leader of the Crimean Tatar people, is a political and public figure, a patriot of Ukraine. The exhibition presents Mustafa Dzhemilev’s difficult path back to Crimea and the new beginning of his struggle in 2014 for his annexed Motherland. The book “Mustafa Dzhemilev: I am Ukrainian” was also announced.
Mustafa Dzhemilev became the first laureate of the Lech Wałęsa Solidarity Prize, which he received from President Bronisław Komorowski on June 3, 2014.
“The awarding of the prize to Mustafa Dzhemilev by the Polish state became a symbolic gesture of recognition for his struggle for the rights of his people in Crimea and his consistent work in the field of democratic development and respect for human rights in the world.”
Mustafa Dzhemilev first felt the repressive Soviet machine in his childhood, when Crimean Tatars were deported from Crimea in 1944. He received his first court sentence in 1966 in Uzbekistan. In Ukraine at that time, the first wave of arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia was underway, which would later be called the “first harvest” of the Ukrainian resistance movement of the 1960s–1980s.
In the 1960s–1980s, under the conditions of Soviet “social justice,” not only lawyers, but also people of other professions were forced to become human rights defenders. Writers, scientists, journalists, doctors, teachers, and military personnel, such as Vasyl Stus, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Leonid Plyushch, Henrich Altunian, Petro Grigorenko, Mustafa Dzhemilev, Levko Lukianenko, and others, became involved in the political struggle for human rights. Today’s situation of confrontation between Ukraine and Russia forces all of us not to be indifferent and to join, in one way or another, the struggle for everyone repressed by the Russian system.
For Ukraine, the issue of national freedom became widely relevant during this period. At the end of 1965, the Ukrainian literary critic Ivan Dziuba wrote his landmark work “Internationalism or Russification?”, in which he convincingly exposed the great-power chauvinism of Soviet national-cultural policy: “But those who today profess a similar thing—the absorption of many nations by the ‘exemplary Russian’ one—they call this… Marxism and communism! […] You will say that today no one preaches the absorption of nations, but—‘merging, rapprochement.’ […] Look at how this ‘rapprochement’ looks in practice, and you will see the very same ‘absorption.’”
The rapprochement of the defender of Crimean Tatar rights with the Ukrainian Sixtiers took place in 1969, when Mustafa Dzhemilev, together with Kharkivite Henrich Altunian and Kyivan Leonid Plyushch, joined the international Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR, created in Moscow on the initiative of Petro Yakir and Viktor Krasin. In the same year, Dzhemilev was again arrested in the same case as another Ukrainian, Major General Petro Grigorenko, who had spoken out in defense of the rights of the Crimean Tatar people.
Mustafa Dzhemilev began communicating with Viacheslav Chornovol in the early 1980s, during his exile in Yakutia. At the turn of the 1980s–1990s, when Crimean Tatars began to return to the Crimean peninsula and the project of building a national autonomy took on real features, a rapprochement occurred between the two politicians—the Ukrainian and the Crimean Tatar. The Crimean Tatars supported the policy of Viacheslav Chornovol and the People’s Movement of Ukraine. Thus, at the beginning of the formation of the independent Ukrainian state, the unification of the multi-ethnic population of Ukraine into a single Ukrainian political nation on transnational principles seemed possible.
The exhibition, through photographs and life stories, presents Mustafa Dzhemilev’s difficult path back to Crimea and the new beginning of his struggle in 2014 for his annexed Motherland. Today, the issue of a political nation has once again become extremely relevant for Ukrainian citizens. What answer will we find to this question today?
Modern political repressions by Russia also force us to return to the experience of the Ukrainian resistance movement of the 1960s–1980s, with its defense of national rights and human dignity, when art stood at the forefront of political thought. The exhibition presents materials demonstrating the struggle of Ukrainians against the Soviet system in the 1960s–1980s, such as micro-texts written in Soviet prisons, samizdat and “tamizdat,” and camp poetry. Perhaps what happened 50 years ago will provide material for a better understanding of the present.
Visitors to the exhibition were invited to write letters to political prisoners currently being held in Russia.
Information in support of the exhibition was provided by the Instytut Polski w Kijowie and the NGO “Information and Analytical Center Euro Kharkiv.”