UKRAINE: BACK FROM THE DEAD…

Genocidal attacks in the war years failed–not by much–to exterminate Ukraine’s Jew and Tatars. The United Jewish Community of Ukraine held an inaugural congress in Kyiv on April 5-6. Nearly 1,500 delegates, representing Jewish groups throughout the country with a combined membership reported as 240,000, gathered to hear the chairman, businessman Vadym Rabinovych, call for “a strong and influential Jewish community” and an “independent, democratic and prosperous Ukraine”…. In Simferopol and other cities, thousands of Crimean Tatars staged rallies to demand cultural and political rights, including official status for their language. Since 1990, an estimated 250,000 Crimean Tatars, descendants and survivors of Stalin’s mass deportation of 1944, have returned from their Central Asian exile to Ukraine to live in appalling conditions.

Tajikistan and Russia initialed an alliance treaty which gives Russia military basing rights in Tajikistan for twenty-five years. Russia now has about 20,000 troops in Tajikistan, including 8,000 army and 12,000 border troops.