May 20, 2016

Jamala’s win at Eurovision

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Dear Editor:

Any bit of good news means a lot for Ukraine currently as its soldiers continue to die in the war against Russia, the pace of reforms moves at a glacial pace, and no significant criminal or corrupt businessman/politician/bureaucrat has been jailed (despite repeated urging from Vice-President Joe Biden).

So it’s wonderful that a Crimean Tatar performer, Jamala (full name Susana Jamaladinova), won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest with a moving ballad about how her people were uprooted from their homeland or perished when Moscow brutally deported them in 1944.

Since the Russians invaded Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014, the Tatars have been persecuted once more by Russian “gauleiters” terrorizing them, trying to suppress their identity and not disguising a desire to deport them again. Around 20 Crimean Tatars have been murdered or disappeared, presumed killed, since the invasion. Dozens of others have been arrested and detained for varying lengths of time, and some 200 homes have been ransacked by armed uniformed thugs in searches primarily designed to intimidate the Crimean Tatar community.

It must be a recurring living nightmare for some of the older people who were deported as kids, allowed to return home by independent Ukraine and are now again living under Russian occupiers who would like to eliminate them because they are living proof that Crimea, for the vast majority of its chronicled history, has not been, as Moscow dissembles, “always Russian.”

Many in Western Europe tend to view the contest with a bit of amusement. However, it is taken a lot more seriously in the post-Communist countries of Eastern Europe. In the late 1980s the Eurovision song contest seemed to be stumbling towards retirement until the fall of communism yielded a slew of newly independent countries that reinvigorated the competition.

Ukraine won the Eurovision contest once before, in 2004, just prior to the Orange Revolution and winner Ruslana’s support gave impetus to mass pro-democracy demonstrations at that time.

Winning the competition has lifted spirits in Ukraine and provided a welcome cause for big celebrations throughout the country, which will host next year’s competition.

For the Crimean Tatars the song has the sort of huge morale-boosting significance that Britons felt during World War II listening to Vera Lynn’s defiantly uplifting song “There’ll Always Be an England.” It is the joy of a prisoner who receives a sign that the world has not forgotten about him.

The fact that a majority of all Ukrainians chose as their entry a song by a Crimean Tatar is something Ukraine should be justly proud of. Independent Ukraine, unlike the Russian “Federation,” was one of the few areas of the former USSR untouched by ethnic or religious strife until Vladimir Putin invaded in 2014.

The Kremlin was enraged the song was ever allowed to be performed as an entry. Mr. Putin’s PR trolls will lie that even noticing the Eurovision result would be beneath the little tsar’s dignity and that he was busy astride his tricycle leading a biker gang or flying with a flock of cranes. But we know he is massively indignant and will likely, like a sulking schoolkid, refuse to come to next year’s party. And that’s also pleasing!

Washington

PS: My favorite video of the song depicts the deportation story:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv71tmv_c7Q. Jamala’s Eurovision performance was also great: www.youtube.com/watch?v=o xS6eKEOdLQ.

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