M-214 Crimean Tatar “Sürgünlik”

That the House:

(a) recognize that on May 18, 1944, the Crimean Tatar “Sürgünlik” was launched by Soviet dictator Stalin to (i) ethnically cleanse Crimea of over 200,000 Tatars by dispossessing them of all of their belongings, cramming them onto railway cattle cars, and transporting them 4,000 kilometres across the steppes of Central Asia, (ii) eliminate the Crimean Tatars as a people by creating the physical conditions which would lead to death on a mass scale, and, in fact, during this forced ethnic cleansing, close to 30,000 Crimean Tatars died of suffocation, hunger and thirst, and half of those surviving the deportation died due to hunger and disease in the inhospitable Central Asian steppes, (iii) eliminate all traces of the existence of Crimean Tatars by ordering the burning of Crimean Tatar books, the renaming of Crimean Tatar towns and villages with Russian names, the razing of Muslim cemeteries and mosques, and eliminating all written references of these people, including the erasing of the Crimean Tatars from the pages of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia; and

(b) recognize these actions as genocide as defined by Raphael Lemkin in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and mark the Crimean Tatar Deportation (“Sürgünlik”) Memorial Day on the eighteenth day of May, in each and every year.