Life in the Soviet Union Dzhemilev was born to a
Crimean Tatar family on 13 November 1943 in
Ay-Serez,
Crimea, then Russian SFSR, though at the time under
Nazi occupation. He was only six months old when his family, with the rest of the
Crimean Tatar population, was
deported by Soviet authorities in May 1944, soon after
Soviet forces retook the peninsula. He grew up in exile, in the
Uzbek SSR. At the age of 18, Dzhemilev and several of his activist friends established the Union of Young Crimean Tatars. He thus began the arduous and long struggle for the recognition of the rights of Crimean Tatars to return to their homeland. Between 1966 and 1986, Dzhemilev was arrested six times for anti-Soviet activities and served time in Soviet prisons and
labor camps and lived under surveillance. Dzhemilev is also remembered for going on the longest
hunger strike in the history of
human rights movements. The hunger strike lasted for 303 days, but he survived due to forced feeding. He was expelled in the second year from the Tashkent engineers of irrigation and reclamation of agriculture "for unworthy behavior", namely the writing of historical work on the history of Turkic culture in the Crimea before the elimination of the Crimean Khanate from "nationalist" positions. In May 1989, he was elected to head the newly founded Crimean Tatar National Movement. The same year, he returned to Crimea with his family, a move that would be followed by the eventual return of 250,000 Tatars to their homeland.
Ukrainian politics During the
1998 Ukrainian parliamentary election he was elected into the
Ukrainian parliament on the
Rukh list; in
2002,
2006 and
2007 In early November 2011, Dzhemilev announced his retirement from politics. But during the
2012 parliamentary elections he joined the
All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland" election list and was re-elected to parliament. In the
2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election, Dzhemilev was re-elected into parliament after being in the top 10 of the electoral list of
Petro Poroshenko Bloc. In the July
2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election Dzhemilev was placed sixth on the party list of
European Solidarity. He was reelected to parliament. Dzhemilev is a member of the Committee on Human Rights, Deoccupation and Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories in Donetsk, Luhansk Regions and Autonomous Republic of Crimea, the city of Sevastopol, National Minorities and Interethnic Relations.
Russian annexation of Crimea Dzhemilev was in
Ankara during the
Crimean referendum. After the preliminary results of the referendum were announced, he held a joint press conference with the
Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. Dzhemilev declared that the Mejlis had a stance identical with
Turkey in considering the referendum illegal and claimed that the results were manipulated by Russia. In April 2014, Dzhemilev was handed a document on the
Ukrainian border informing him he is banned by
federal law from entering Russian territory for five years. The typewritten document was unsigned, with no official heading, and was made public by the Crimean Tatar parliament, the Mejlis. A spokesman for the Russian
Federal Migration Service (FMS) said the agency did not have any information on the travel ban. Russian authorities then issued an
arrest warrant for Dzhemilev and placed him on the federal wanted list, allegedly for trying to illegally cross the border when he attempted to return to Crimea. == Awards ==