German government must press Russia for ratification of the EU Charter for Minorities

Supported by the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) the exile organisations of the Tatars in Germany have written to the German government with the urgent request that it press for the ratification by Russia of the EU Charter for Minority Languages. The Tatars are afraid that their language will be pushed into the background by the regulations recently passed by the Russian authorities. The Crimean Tatars living in Ukraine also complain of discrimination. They have been denied their rights of language and rights of land-ownership.

„In Tatarstan the Tatar language was abolished in schools and now all teaching and examinations are conducted in the Russian language alone”, criticised the GfbV expert for Turkic peoples, Mieste Hotopp-Riecke. At the universities in Tatarstan the faculties for the Tatar language have been closed.

Outside the Autonomous Republic of Tatarstan the number of Tatar schools is rapidly diminishing. While there were in 2004/2005 still 712 Tatar schools the number had dropped in this last school-year to 490. Examinations, applications and reports must now be written in Russian alone.

The approximately two million Tatars make up in the Autonomous Republic of Tatarstan just over half of the population. In the Russian Federation there are about four million Tatars, above all in the Volga-Ural area, Nizhniy Novgorod, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in Ukraine also the language of the Crimean Tatars is in danger. For the approximately 265,000 Crimean Tatars there are only 14 schools. In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev more than 120 Crimean Tatars have been demonstrating since 6th April in a hunger-strike in front of the parliament buildings for the right to their land and their language. The Crimean Tatars were collectively deported under Stalin’s rule to Central Asia. About 46% of the 191,000 Crimean Tatars deported at that time died. The Tatars were not allowed to return until 1991. However about 70,000 Crimean Tatars who have returned – approximately 15,000 families – are still waiting for the restitution and assignment of their land, which after the deportation passed into the hands of Russians, who make up about 57 percent of the population on the Crimea.

The Crimean Tatars are today in the minority in their own home country. They make up only 13 percent of the population, but 25 percent of school students. Over 100,000 Crimean Tatars have not able to return because the assignment of land has to the present day remained uncertain and the social situation on the Crimea is dreadful. Most of the people wanting to return are living in Usbekistan. Various bills of the Ukrainian government on compensation, restitution and equal rights for the language of the Crimean Tatars have either not been ratified or have disappeared in the drawers of the bureaucrats.