

Put aside for a moment the geopolitical issues and cries of "Munich" and "Sudetenland" that surround Russia's ongoing annexation of Crimea: In human terms, Crimea's Tatars are the reason to care.


QuickTake Standoff in Ukraine




"There were just old people and children left here," says Berber, still pained and perplexed by Stalin's accusation as the war ended that the Tatars had been German collaborators. Some Tatars did fight for the Germans in a brutal war with Soviet partisans. At least as many, however, fought for the Soviet Union.


Five families were piled into each of the trucks that were brought to the village, says Berber. They were taken to the train station at Simferopol, where he remembers being piled into a freight car with his family and about 50 other people. It was the first time he had seen a train. "I thought this was a new house we were going to live in -- I was so surprised it started moving," says Berber.


Finally, their car and two others were emptied in a remote part of Uzbekistan. They were taken to a set of barracks, one of which was already full with Polish Jews. Berber's grandmother and grandfather died within months, and his older sister followed. People were so weak they couldn't dig graves deep enough for the dead, and wild animals would dig them up, Berber says.

Eventually, the Jewish camp commander found a house for Berber's family in a nearby village. Until 1956, they weren't allowed to leave it, but gradually they built up their lives. Then, in 1990, the road was cleared for Crimea's Tatars to return home.

Because all of them left at once, there was no market to buy their houses in Uzbekistan, while inflation made their savings worthless. They weren't assigned land or homes in Crimea, so they squatted and built their own. Eventually, Ukraine's authorities gave them title, and for the first time, Berber and his family felt free. Today he lives with one of his sons in a solidly built breezeblock house on the outskirts of Simferopol.

It is the unreality of Moscow's claims, reminiscent of the distortions under Stalin, that gets to Berber. "Did you watch Putin's meeting with reporters a few days ago? I have never seen a man lie so much. Every word was a lie. I didn't know what to think," he says.

Few groups in the region need the protections and rights that Ukraine's gradual integration with the European Union would bring more than Crimea's Tatars. With the arrival of masked Russian gunmen, the closure of dissenting television stations and news media outlets, and the announcement of a preordained referendum on joining Russia, that prospect is fast slipping away. Berber's elderly wife collapsed from shock when the referendum was announced, and she remains in the hospital. Young Tatar men have begun forming neighborhood watches, in their own version of a self-defense force. There is little, however, that they can do.

"There is no freedom in Russia. We know this," Berber says, sitting at night at his son's kitchen table. "They have taken away our hope."



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Marc Champion at

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