Last weekend, along with most of Ukraine, I was sweltering in the heat and watching tanks. And bigger tanks. And absolutely massive tanks. They looked to me (I don’t know much about military hardware) like the giant Jurassic ancestors of turtles lumbering along the streets of Kiev accompanied by cheery brass band marches and what sounded suspiciously like a snappy rendition of ‘Phantom of the Opera.’
It was a military parade, the first in seven years, to celebrate Ukrainian independence declared in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. But as I watched I was thinking, as I’m sure were many people, about similar scenes in Georgia, a country not so far away which declared independence just as Ukraine did in 1991.
In Georgia people have been standing on the streets watching tanks too. But not on parade there; it’s an invading army they’re watching.
And in Crimea, in South Ukraine, I think maybe Safi is wondering, yet again, if she’s going to lose her home and her family to a war.
Safi doesn’t really exist; she’s the heroine of my book Dream Land, which retells in fictional form the story of a Crimean Tatar family in Ukraine. In 1944, when Crimea was in the Soviet Union, every single Crimean Tatar was sent away from the home where he or she had lived for generations, and deported to central Asia and Siberia. They were not allowed to return until the late 1980s, and then they found that many of the people who’d since come to live in Crimea did not want them at all. My heroine, Safi, has to cope with a completely different climate, a new school, and some new neighbours who bully her and laugh at her and worse because she’s Crimean Tatar. Perhaps you know what it feels like to be picked on just because you’re different. Safi and her family have to fight a kind of war, not with tanks but with spades and pitchforks, with pickets and petitions, to rebuild the homes they lost in 1944.
Safi’s story might feel a long way away. Not many people in Britain have really heard of Crimea or of Crimean Tatars, just as not that many people knew much about Georgia or had heard of South Ossetia before the war there started three weeks ago – and then suddenly it was in all the newspapers, on all the TV channels. But for children like Safi, these places are home; made up of all the roads and houses and people that they know, where they feel safe. Imagine if tanks came rolling along your street one morning, no parade with soldiers saluting and brass bands playing, but an army that might take away your family, blow up your house, turn you into a homeless refugee. Can you imagine it?
There are parallels between Georgia and Ukraine and Crimea. Like in Crimea, the ethnic problems today in Georgia are to some extent a legacy of Soviet policy. Like in Georgia, some inhabitants of Crimea now want to be part of one country, some part of another. Many people hate their neighbours because they have a different nationality or ethnic background.
Watching the tanks last weekend, some people in Ukraine worry that a war could start in Crimea just as it did in Georgia. I think that through understanding people and cultures that are different from us, via novels and movies as well as real-life encounters and friendships, we can help stop such conflicts. Safi doesn’t really exist, but there are real girls and boys like her in Crimea who jumped in front of bulldozers once to try and save their houses from being knocked down. I am hoping they will never have to jump in front of tanks to try and save their country.
Lily