“War is not a woman’s business”? In the previous article of MIL Ukraine, we looked at the female faces of the Ukrainian resistance and were convinced that this thesis has no place in the modern struggle against the occupiers.
In the second part of the series about the female faces of the Ukrainian resistance, we learn about the Donetsk love for the preservation of traditions and the preservation of the Crimean Tatar identity.
Zarema Bariieva, manager of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, has been participating in the resistance and struggle to preserve her own identity for almost ten years. In fact, as Zarema herself notes, her people have been resisting for much longer.
“Immediately after the occupation of Crimea in 2014, we began to resist and there was no doubt that we needed to act, and not to take a waiting position, or even more so to put up with the occupation. Together with my husband (Eskender Bariiev), we started organizing actions and pickets along the roads, in which Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians participated. The Committee for the Protection of the Rights of the Crimean Tatar People was established, and hotlines were opened to collect information about human rights violations by the occupiers in Crimea.”
Together with her husband Eskender and the team of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, Zarema does everything to ensure that the voice of occupied Crimea is heard on all human rights platforms in the world, and that the topic of Crimea is on the agenda. This is a colossal daily job: gathering information, working with materials of criminal cases, communicating with victims of occupation, documenting violations, filing complaints with UN treaty bodies and international courts, conducting information and advocacy campaigns, filming documentaries about Crimea and victims of occupation, and much more.
Another of our heroines, an immigrant from Sloviansk, Donetsk region, Olha Holubiatnikova, knows for sure that resistance can be creative and unifying.
“For me, resistance is not sitting idly by, you should do something, help in any way you can. Do everything you can. I, for example, donate. For a whole year, while staying in Germany, I helped my foundation “Slavic Dream”, which supported people who needed food and cleaning products. We wrote projects, collected lists of people who required help, negotiated. This, in my opinion, is also such resistance – help. She also held creative classes with Ukrainian and German children in Germany. They supported Ukrainian! Thus, we survive and prove that we are able to preserve our state, that in Ukraine we fight against the enemy, helping each other.”
Olha makes a wide variety of dolls according to ancient Ukrainian traditions, incorporates elements from the history of Ukraine into them, and teaches others to make such dolls. This greatly socializes and supports the psyche of Ukrainians in the conditions of a full-scale war.