Ukraine, Uzbekistan conclude deal to help resettle Crimean Tartars

Reply-To: [email protected]
Sender: [email protected]
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 16:27:45 +0200 (EET)
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Subject: Ukraine, Uzbekistan conclude deal to help resettle Crimean Tartars

From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>

Original sender: Felix Corley <[email protected]>

Ukraine, Uzbekistan conclude deal to help resettle Crimean
Tartars


Ukraine, Uzbekistan conclude deal to help resettle Crimean Tartars
October 13, 2000
 
(AP) - The presidents of Ukraine and Uzbekistan signed a package of
agreements Thursday, including a deal to help ethnic Tatar natives of
Ukraine deported to Uzbekistan by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
 
Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and Uzbek President Islam Karimov
also struck agreements in the Uzbek capital Tashkent on fighting drug
smuggling, on extradition of illegal immigrants, and on military
cooperation.
 
Stalin ordered hundreds of thousands of Tatars deported from the
Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea peninsula to Central Asia in 1944,
after accusing them of collaboration with Nazi Germany. Crimea was
part of the Soviet republic of Russia at that time, but was later
handed over to Ukraine. The exiles and their descendants were allowed
to return only shortly before the 1991 Soviet collapse. More than
270,000 have gone back to Crimea, but many remain in Central Asia,
held back by problems in acquiring citizenship and finding jobs. The
agreement is intended to ease the acquiring of Ukrainian citizenship
for Uzbekistan's Crimean Tartars.
 
Kuchma's visit came just days after the prime ministers of Russia,
Kazakstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan met in Central Asia to
turn their current customs union into the Eurasian Economic Community.
The deal's significance beyond the merely symbolic is unclear, but
Kuchma said it unfairly excluded other former Soviet republics.
 
"Several countries got together and announced the community - and what
about the others?" Kuchma asked during a news conference Thursday. "We
ask ourselves, why haven't we been invited?"
 
Ukraine and Russia are both predominantly Slavic nations with close
linguistic, religious and cultural ties, but the two countries'
relations have been complicated over a number of disputes.

-- 
==============================================================
MINELRES - a forum for discussion on minorities in Central&Eastern
Europe

Submissions: [email protected]  
Subscription/inquiries: [email protected] 
List archive: http://www.riga.lv/minelres/archive.htm
==============================================================