Dilyara Alieva remembers virtually every minute of the terrible day in 1944 when the Soviet NKVD burst into the homes of her family and all other Crimean Tatars and drove them from their homeland. Nor will she ever forget how, 72 years later, Russia’s FSB burst into her son Muslim Aliev’s home, waving machine guns and forcing him to the floor in front of his terrified children. It was genocide in 1944, she says, and genocide and unrelenting repression now. Muslim Aliev is recognized by numerous human rights groups, including Amnesty International, as a prisoner of conscience. Russia is ignoring that, as it is the demands from the UN General Assembly and numerous international bodies for his release. Without greater pressure from the international community, 83-year-old Dilyara Alieva fears that, like her husband who died last year, she too will not live to embrace her son again.
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