All events · Cold War Proxies

Crimean Tatar Return to Crimea and Its Obstruction

c. 1989–2014 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Displacement

Displaced

266,000

About 260,000 of an estimated 400,000-550,000 Crimean Tatars had returned to Crimea by the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly's April 2000 report (Doc. 8655; Recommendation 1455), with roughly 30,000 remaining in Uzbekistan and others in Kazakhstan and Russia (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe). Later figures are about 266,000 by 2012-2013 (OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, 2013; Wilson 2013), with an estimated 100,000 still in Central Asia.

Share of the population affected

98%

of the Crimean Tatar population of the Soviet Union recorded at the 1989 census, overwhelmingly in Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian republics, 1989

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What happened

Deported wholesale to Central Asia in 1944 and barred from return for decades, Crimean Tatars began returning to Crimea in numbers from 1989 as Soviet restrictions collapsed. The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly recorded in April 2000 some 260,000 returnees out of a diaspora of 400,000-550,000, with about 30,000 still in Uzbekistan. Return was not accompanied by restitution: returnees found their former homes occupied, were allocated land on poor peripheral sites where many built unauthorised settlements, and faced infrastructure gaps in which 70 per cent of settlements had electricity, 27 per cent running water and none any sewerage. Many arrived stateless or without Ukrainian citizenship, a problem addressed by a 1997 law under which some 25,000 stateless Crimean Tatars had received Ukrainian passports by mid-1999 and by a UNHCR statelessness programme that reported over 90 per cent holding Ukrainian citizenship by 2001; unemployment among returnees was put at around 60 per cent. Ukraine spent some 300 million dollars on the resettlement between 1991 and 2000, which the Assembly judged insufficient against needs. Return slowed after the early 1990s; the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities put the total at about 266,000 Crimean Tatars by 2013 and found that many structural problems of integration remained unresolved when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, which is treated in a separate entry.

Parties

Crimean Tatars deported in 1944 returned from Central Asia to Crimea as Soviet restrictions lapsed, and faced Soviet and then Ukrainian obstacles to citizenship, land and housing

Disputed

Estimates of the total Crimean Tatar population eligible to return vary widely (400,000 to 550,000, excluding a much larger Turkish diaspora of older origin), and responsibility for the failure to restore property and land was disputed between Ukrainian national authorities, the Crimean administration and the successor states of the USSR.

The denominator

The 1989 Soviet census counted 271,715 Crimean Tatars, of whom fewer than 40,000 had managed to return to Crimea; by the 2001 Ukrainian census 248,193 Crimean Tatars were living in Crimea. The return was self-organised and its scale is measured by these two censuses rather than by any resettlement programme.

Where the baseline comes from

Crimean Tatarsopen-edited
Deportation of the Crimean Tatarsopen-edited

On the death toll

There was no significant death toll associated with the return itself; the lethal phase of this history was the 1944 deportation and the first years of special settlement in Central Asia, which are counted separately.

Documented forms of violence

Denationalization

The Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly documented that large numbers of returning Crimean Tatars were left stateless or without citizenship of the state they had returned to, requiring a special 1997 naturalisation procedure.