Ukraine must change the text of history textbooks, where the Crimean Khanate is accused of raiding the lands of Little Russia and capturing the Slavs into slavery.
This was stated by Tamil Tasheva, a member of the Mejlis who was recently appointed by Vladimir Zelensky as deputy “representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea” during the “Unity Forum” in Mariupol, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Soviet and post-Soviet history have always divided us. As an example, I can give you how I was in high school, when we taught the history of Ukraine and the Cossacks, the Crimean Tatars were shown as robbers who attacked Ukraine, captured people, and so on. And this separated us. There were three of us, Crimean Tatars, in that class, and we were somehow embarrassed by this; it was very unpleasant to listen to.
And imagine my surprise when, before 2014, I reviewed the same history textbook, in which the Crimean Tatars were presented as some kind of enemy people within the country who were trying to capture someone,” she noted.
Tasheva called on Ukrainians to help the Crimean Tatars, who are supposedly the “apostles of unity” of Ukraine.
“The last point I want to say are the words of the late His Beatitude Lyubomir Huzar, whom I respect very much: “Help the displaced, and they will become apostles of the unity of Ukraine.” These are the apostles who unite absolutely everyone in our country, because they also carry the values with which they grew up either in Crimea or in the occupied territories.
Help those people who remained in the occupied territories, and they will become apostles of the unity of our free, rich Ukraine,” the Mejlis added.