Ayder Muzhdabaev: To the Fourteen Percent

To the Fourteen Percent
Ayder Muzhdabaev
April 4, 2015
echo.msk.ru
facebook.com

Governments, international organization, and concerned citizens in different countries have been protesting against the increasing discrimination against the Crimean Tatars. They have demanded an end to the crackdown. Only in one country have no such protests been heard.

Guess what country?

For more than a year, its citizens have pretended not to notice that their government has been behaving towards the Crimean Tatars along the lines of the Third Reich, having cast this people in the role of collective outcast. Moreover, it is not only officials and supporters of the regime who have behaved this way, but its opponents as well.

“Opposition,” “intelligentsia”: it is no longer possible to write these words in Russian without quotation marks. In this entire country of 140 million people you will hardly find ten people who have spoken out publicly in defense of the Crimean Tatars. Almost all my Moscow “friends” have been silent as well. When I appealed specifically to them here on Facebook, telling them in detail about the plight of the Crimean Tatars in Crimea, I got zero likes and zero reposts from those whom I had imagined as my addressees.

It is worth pondering this situation and evaluating it on its merits.

An entire people have been made second-class citizens in their country. People have been deprived of the chance to listen to the radio and watch TV in their own language, and children cannot even watch cartoons in this language! People are intimidated. Some of them have disappeared without a trace, others are in prison. The rest simply sit at home crying from fear, a sense of injustice, and despair. No one can be punished (at least not yet) for expressing sympathy with the Crimean Tatars. So why has the cat got your tongue, citizens?

It is just that no one really cares at all.

I think that even if the Crimean Tatars are shipped from Crimea in cattle wagons, as they were in 1944, I will read two or three posts about it in Russian on Facebook, amidst an account of sluts at a bar and snapshots of beloved doggies.

It is because of this, and not for some other reason, that I do not believe this country can essentially change for the better.

The damned eighty-six percent are to blame for everything? Is that right?

Look who is talking, fourteen percent.

Ayder Muzhdabaev is deputy chief editor of Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper. Image courtesy of Ukraine Today