Nearly every day, 65-year-old Server Abybulayev comes to the Verkhovna Rada in Kyiv, Ukraine’s parliament, with his trolley bag and a sign that reads: “I am an internally displaced person from Crimea. Now I have no place to live. Help me!”
Abybulayev, who took part in the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2013-2014, was wounded by a stun grenade fragment on Feb. 19, 2014.
He now lives in the waiting room of Kyiv Central Railway station.
A Crimean Tatar who lived in the town Bakhchysaray for almost 35 years, Abybulayev was forced to leave his home after Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula in March 2014.
Setting in Kyiv Oblast in Velyka Dymerka, the owner of a private villa evicted him in June.
He is not alone in that struggle: Victoria Savchuk, a lawyer and activist of the Krym SOS human rights initiative, told the Kyiv Post that the group is working with several dozen internally displaced people who have been evicted from similar accommodation.
According to the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, more than 1.6 million people from Crimea and Donbas have left their homes since the Russian annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in the Donbas. Local authorities around the country have found more than 659 places of accommodation that can provide shelter to no more than 11,178 IDPs.
The remaining internal refugees have sought shelter on their own. Most of them rent apartments or live in private resorts or children’s camps in Luhansk (247,872), Donetsk (116, 618), Kharkiv (209,160), Dnipropetrovsk (86,669), Zaporizhia (67, 267) and Kyiv oblasts (47, 819).
“We recorded incidents of eviction in areas of compact settlement – resorts and camps, and shared households in big cities like Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk. Those who rent apartments on their own have fewer complaints,” said another Krym SOS lawyer, Maria Levchenko.
Reasons vary why people get evicted, Savchuk said.
“As for rented apartments, the main reasons for evictions can be the owners’ dishonesty or their prejudiced attitude to internally displaced people from the Donbas or Crimea,” she said.
When it comes to holiday camps and resorts, IDPs can be evicted because most private resorts,
camps and households simply have too many people staying there. Alternatively, the owners have personal disputes with IDPs, or arguments over debts for utility bills.
Krym SOS works on many eviction cases, and every situation is different, lawyers say.
“If our government had a strict strategy on how to work with IDP’s, how to make the life of these 1.6 million people better, we would have a governmental housing program for them. It would have brought back stability to their lives,” Savchuk said.
The press service of the Social Policy Department of Kyiv City Council told the Kyiv Post that all IDPs in the capital get financial help from the government to pay rent and buy food. The total sum of Ukrainian government aid to the 39,047 officially registered IDPs in Kyiv since the start of the aid program in 2014 has been Hr 4.27 million – about $178,000 at the current exchange rate.
After his eviction, Abybulayev began to fight the government’s aid system. He even went on hunger strike for 40 days because no one wanted to help him, he said.
“I came to the Kyiv City Council and they said they can do nothing about a private owner, because he has all the rights to his property. They offered to shelter me in a mental asylum. Yes I’m old, but I’m not crazy,” said Abybulayev.
He even tried to sue the Ukrainian government for failing to protect his rights.
“But soon I realized that this was useless. The lawyer the Social Policy Ministry assigned to me advised me not to sue the government. He said I had no chance of winning,” said Abybulayev.
Meanwhile, government agencies appear to be passing the buck concerning the IDP housing problem.
“The IDP housing issue is no longer in our competence. Ask the State Emergency Service,” the Social Policy Ministry press service told the Kyiv Post in response to an e-mail inquiry.
But Olga Kozak, the head of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine’s press service, said that the service had only just started working on the IDP housing issue, and hadn’t set its policy yet.
“So you need to ask the Social Policy Ministry for comments. We only started working on the IDPs’ housing problems in January,” Kozak told the Kyiv Post.
Kyiv Post staff writer Veronika Melkozerova can be reached at [email protected]
