[LINK] "Christian village welcomes fleeing Tatar Muslims"

[rfmcdonald]

Al Jazeera America's John Wendle describes the situation facing Crimean Tatar refugees settled in a western Ukrainian village.

Abdurrahman swept a small pile of breadcrumbs into his hand. Then he picked up the blanket that serves as prayer rug, dinner table and playground, shook it out at the window, and laid it again in the dorm room. He straightened the corners, readying it for the evening prayers he would soon perform with his son and two friends with whom he had settled with in western Ukraine after fleeing Crimea in March.

The men, recent converts to a devout practice of Sunni Islam, live with their wives and children in some rooms at a boarding school in the village of Borinya, deep in the Carpathian Mountains, near Ukraine’s border with Poland — and the European Union.

With their bushy beards and wives in headscarves, they stand out in the tiny village, but the mostly Catholic farmers here have accepted the refugees from Russia's annexation of Crimea, allowing them to settle and start new lives.

[. . .]

Currently, there are nearly 473,000 internally displaced people in Ukraine, up from 275,000 just two months ago, the UNHCR reported on November 21.

Of that number, around 19,400 come from Crimea, which people fled after Russia annexed the peninsula in March. Unlike the new arrivals in Ukraine’s war-torn east that have mostly fled the violence, those in Crimea are escaping repression under the pro-Russian government.

[. . .]

Abdurrahman and his friends and their wives and children left their homes and most of their belongings in their village in Crimea on the last day of March. They found a new place to live with the help of Crimea SOS, an organization started to aid the waves of people displaced by Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian autonomous province — and now aiding those fleeing fighting in the east.