LVIV, Ukraine – The last straw for Enver Bekirov was when several men from a pro-Russian “self-defense group” beat him up on the street in Simferopol late on March 31, 2014, after he refused to show them his passport.
The attackers also robbed Bekirov, a Crimean Tatar, of his money and cell phone. But the police officer who attended the crime scene told Bekirov that he was the one who had provoked the fight, and the ambulance team refused to document his injuries.
That very night Bekirov, 41, and his wife Lana, 31, decided to leave Crimea.
“I understood that I live in an absolute ghetto of mess and lawlessness, where you can simply get killed and nobody will be punished for it,” he said.
In the morning, Bekirov headed to the railway station and bought tickets to the city of Lviv in western Ukraine, for himself, his wife and his son, Amir, who was only seven months old at the time.
Bekirov, who has never hidden his pro-Ukrainian stance and participated in the EuroMaidan Revolution in Kyiv, was among the first Crimean Tatars to decide to leave their native land following Russia’s military takeover and annexation of the Ukrainian territory.
He said it was a matter of dignity for him to live in a free country and to protect his family.
He said previously he had experienced oppression from locals in Crimea back in the 1990s, when he arrived there together with his parents from Uzbekistan, where most of the Crimean Tatars had spent years in exile following their deportation from their homeland by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1944.
In the years after their return to their homeland, the Bekirovs settled down and set up a small family hotel business.
Lana Bekirova is an ethnic Russian and was born in Russia. She moved to Crimea with her parents when she was a teenager.
She remembers making friends with Crimean Tatars and even hosting a Crimean Tatar family who returned from Uzbekistan in the 1990s in her family home. However, she said her parents supported Crimea’s invasion and annexation by Russia.
While on the train, Bekirov called volunteers in Lviv who were helping people from Crimea to resettle in the west. He chose the city because many of his friends had already moved to Lviv after the Russian invasion. Lviv also appealed to him culturally.
New home in Lviv
Volunteers met the Bekirovs at the railway station and brought them to the house of Ruslan and Natalia, a Lviv family, who hosted them for the next year.
“Imagine that western Ukraine is occupied and we escaped to Crimea to get shelter in your house,” their hosts told to Enver and Lana to make them comfortable in their new home.
In spring 2014, just after Russia annexed Crimea on March 18 and instigated war in eastern Ukraine in late April, the first internally displaced people From the Crimean Tatar community started arriving in Lviv and other Ukrainian cities.
The Ukrainian government wasn’t able to provide help to everyone, but activists in western Ukraine were eager to support those who had escaped from Crimea and the war-torn Donbas.
“Before the annexation, only 20 Crimean Tatars used to live in Lviv, while now more than 2,000 Crimean Tatars live in Lviv and Lviv Oblast,” said Alim Aliev, the co-founder of Crimea-SOS, an organization that provides support to IDPs from Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Bekirov was so grateful and inspired by the work of the Lviv volunteers that he decided to become a volunteer himself. He joined the Crimea-SOS team and started dealing with social needs of the IDPs.
Now Bekirov starts every morning by going to the team’s warehouse – a small garage located not far from Lviv city center, which is filled with clothes, canned goods, baby food, and diapers. Then he makes up care packages and delivers them to people in need.
His phone is constantly ringing as IDPs from Crimea and Donbas call for his advice and assistance. As he speaks to the Kyiv Post Bekirov is juggling two calls, one asking for help for an elderly man, who recently came from Crimea and lost his passport on the way, and another from a woman from Donbas who is to give birth soon and needs medicines.
He regularly visits the internally displaced to see what they need, and connects them with non-government organizations that can provide them with housing or a job. He also helps to solve their paperwork problems or get them registered at schools and hospitals.
Carpathian Tatars
Bekirov often drives to Borynia, a small mountain village on the border with Poland, to visit four Crimean Tatar families belonging to the strictly orthodox Sunni Muslim Salafi sect.
After a three-hour drive from Lviv along bumpy village roads, he stops by a small house near a power-saw workbench.
The house belongs to Abderrakhman and Dilyara Dzhepparov, who bought it with the help of a Lviv NGO after spending a year in a dormitory in Borynia with another three Salafi families from Crimea.
In April 2014, the Dzhepparovs fled the Crimean steppe for the Carpathian mountains. Now they call their son Abdalmuin, who was born in Borynia in 2016, a “Carpathian Tatar.”
Dilyara remembers how locals, who had never seen Muslims before, initially thought that her husband was a new Orthodox priest who had come to their village, and were wondering why her seven-year-old daughter Amina wears a hijab.
It took some time for Dzhepparovs to explain to their neighbors that hijab is one of the requirements of their religious sect.
Locals and newcomers have had to be tolerant: Dzhepparov remembers that once he was digging a well for his family on Sunday and some local men who were passing reprimanded him for working on the Christian holy day. Dzhepparov didn’t want to argue, so he apologized and stopped.
But despite the religious differences, Dilyara says she likes living in the Carpathian village, as the local people have “high morality.” “They believe (in God), the same as us, and we both respect each other’s faith,” she said.
At first, Dzhepparov, who used to make his living by farming cattle in Crimea, along with his brother Hassan and other Crimean Tatars, cutting lumber with the power-saw workbench in Borynia, and also did some seasonal farming work.
Later he went to business courses organized for IDPs in Lviv, where he learned how to start a small business. In the end, he decided to produce cheese, wrote up a business plan, and received some funding. Now the family runs a small creamery.
Dzheparov buys cow milk from other villagers, then his wife boils it in one of the two rooms in their house and puts it in a press for a couple of weeks to make cheese. Dzheparov sells the cheese at fairs and markets in Lviv city, and even ships some of it abroad.
Since their home-based business was growing, Dzheparov next had to buy a creamery machine. He also plans to start producing smoked meat, together with his brother Hassan. They are now trying to obtain a grant to buy a special machine for meat smoking.
‘Not one of us’
Elvira Drozdova, 32, traveled from the Crimean city of Yevpatoria to Lviv in February 2014, thinking she was leaving her home just for a few weeks.
At that time the “little green men” – the Russian soldiers without insignia who appeared in Crimea in late February 2014 – had just started their invasion of the peninsula.
Since Drozdova worked as a human rights activist and supported the EuroMaidan, her husband Yaroslav feared for her safety and asked her to go to Lviv with their daughter for a couple of weeks “until the situation gets better.” He knew that Drozdova could never remain silent when she saw injustice.
The several weeks in Lviv has extended into more than two years.
Arriving in Lviv, Drozdova started speaking out about the Russian invasion of Crimea. She gave several interviews about the occupation of the peninsula, and called the pro-Russian groups operating in Yevpatoria “criminals.”
Soon after that, she started receiving threats on her phone, social media, and email. Her parents, who still live in Yevpatoria, were told that their daughter was a traitor and if she came back she would be beaten.
Drozdova’s husband was reunited with his family in Lviv a few months later. His wife no longer wants to return to Crimea.
“Even if Crimea becomes Ukraine again, I will never want to go back. The people who told me all those nasty things will still be there, and I don’t want to live near to them,” she said. “I have already been through humiliation when we returned to Crimea from deportation, and I don’t want my daughter to live through the same oppression as I did.”
Drozdova’s daughter, Ilona, 5, suffers from celiac disease, a genetic disorder affecting the digestive system, and lactose intolerance, which have caused developmental delays. Her son, Rollan, is one year old and was born in Lviv.
In Lviv, Drozdova organized a support group for parents whose children have celiac disease. The group calls for stiffer regulations for companies that produce gluten-free products, and exchanges information about gluten-free foods.
Drozdova says the first year in Lviv was the toughest one for her.
At first, it was easy to find a place to stay, people were eager to help Crimean Tatars who were escaping Russia’s annexation of their homeland. But when the war in Donbas started, her landlords couldn’t understand why she was not going back to Crimea, as unlike in Donbas there was no shelling there.
One of Drozdova’s landlords even told her: “The fact that you speak Ukrainian doesn’t make you one of us. You will never become one of us.”
For Drozdova, who has always spoken Ukrainian, even in Crimea, it was extremely hurtful to hear that.
When her mother Elmira, comes to visit her in Lviv sometimes, Drozdova compares the trips as a breath of fresh air for her.
But Drozdova knows that leaving Crimea is not an option for her mother, who like many Crimean Tatars spent years trying to return to their native land from Central Asia after Stalin’s ethnic cleansing of the peninsula.
Meanwhile, Elmira is now making a Crimean Tatar national costume for her granddaughter, and dreams that one day Ilona will be able to wear it in her homeland, Crimea.
The story is produced with the support of Magnum Foundation and is a part of a group project “What Works” which was exhibited at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York, USA.
