The World - News from March 6, 1988

Soviet police detained 15 Crimean Tatars after members of the ethnic group held up a banner in Moscow demanding the right to live in their homeland, a dissident said. Vladimir Riabokon, an editor of the unofficial journal Express Chronicle, said 20 people gathered outside the Hotel Rossiya and unfurled a large banner reading “Return Our Homeland to the Crimean Tatars.” KGB officers and police ripped down the banner and took about 15 of the demonstrators into custody, Riabokon said. During World War II, Soviet leader Josef Stalin accused the Tatars of collaborating with Nazi Germany, abolished their ancestral homeland on the Black Sea and exiled them to the Ural Mountains, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.