Members of the Mejlis demand to remove references to the slave trade in Crimea from Ukrainian history textbooks
Kyiv, March 29 (PolitNavigator, Vladimir Raichenko) – Crimean Tatars are outraged by how the history of their people is presented in Ukrainian school textbooks
In particular, historian Gulnara Bekirova, close to the Majlis, writes about this in an article for the magazine “Ukrainian Week”, in her opinion, the attitude towards the Crimean Tatars in Ukraine before the annexation of Crimea to Russia was rather hostile. The author bases his statement on an analysis of school textbooks recommended by the Ministry of Education, conducted in 2010–2011 for “the content of fragments of intolerant attitudes towards national and religious minorities.”
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Thus, Gulmara Bekirova is outraged by the fact that in the manual for first-graders “Attractions of the Ancient Lands of the Native Land,” the Vorontsov Palace is classified as a sample of the culture of the past.
“In all examples, except for the Crimean one, we are really talking about authoritative monuments of the past,” the historian is indignant. – And here, as a symbolic object characterizing the region, is a relatively new architectural landmark, which embodies for the indigenous people the period of Russian rule, accompanied by the dominance of the tsarist administration, the policy of land dispossession, and the displacement of indigenous people from their native land. But in Crimea there are many other historical and cultural monuments worthy of mention in the textbook: the Uzbek Mosque, the Bakhchisarai Khan's Palace Museum associated with the Crimean Tatars, Chersonesos with the ancient Greeks, the fortress in Sudak with the Genoese, Chufut-Kale with various ethnic groups "
The author also does not like the fragment from the textbook for the third grade, which tells about the elections of the hetman of the Zaporozhye Sich, when Pyotr Konashevich-Sagaidachny called for “the liberation of the baptized people from the captivity of the infidels.”
The “Busurman” (and in fact, Muslim) faith is presented in a negative light, and a stereotype is laid in the child’s mind that the Cossacks’ struggle against the infidels was righteous, and the Turks and Tatars are enemies guilty of enslaving the Christian people,” again the historian is indignant.
The authors of the study also do not like the coverage in textbooks of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, in particular, the indications that the reason for the eviction was the accusation of collaboration with the Nazis.
“Nothing was said about the fact that it was groundless, that most of these people fought against the Nazis on the side of the Red Army, and that significantly more Slavs collaborated with the Nazis than Crimean Tatars (remember the detachments of the Russian military leader Vlasov...", notes Gulnara Bekirov.
Mejlis members demand the removal of references to the Crimean slave trade from Ukrainian history textbooks.