Meskhetians: RFE/RL CAUCASUS REPORT, Vol. 3, No. 32
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Subject: Meskhetians: RFE/RL CAUCASUS REPORT, Vol. 3, No. 32
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Meskhetians: RFE/RL CAUCASUS REPORT, Vol. 3, No. 32
RFE/RL CAUCASUS REPORT, Vol. 3, No. 32, 10 August 2000
RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
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RFE/RL CAUCASUS REPORT
Vol. 3, No. 32, 10 August 2000
A Weekly Review of Political Developments in the North Caucasus and
Transcaucasia from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
..................
WILL NEW LEGISLATION EXPEDITE THE MESKHETIANS' RETURN TO GEORGIA? One
of the obligations that Georgia assumed on acceptance in April 1999
into full membership of the Council of Europe was to expedite the
repatriation to Georgia of the Meskhetians deported by Stalin from
southern Georgia to Central Asia and Kazakhstan in November 1944. A
Georgian samizdat document of 1975, and eyewitness accounts by
Latifshakh Baratashvili, who subsequently spearheaded the campaign for
permission to return to Georgia, describe how between 90,000 - 100,000
Meskhetians, Kurds, and Khemshins (Armenians whose ancestors were
converted to Islam) were rounded up and transported in cattle cars to
Kazakhstan. Thousands of them died en route or of the harsh conditions
in exile.
Following Nikita Khrushchev's legendary denunciation of Stalin's
crimes at the XXth congress of the CPSU in 1956, most of the other
ethnic groups deported during the Second World War, including the
Crimean Tatars and the Chechens and Ingush, were exonerated and
allowed to return home. The Meskhetians, for reasons that remain
unclear, were not, and they began lobbying the Soviet authorities for
permission to do so.
That process, inevitably, acquired political dimensions. Both scholars
and the Meskhetians themselves dispute their origins: some consider
them Georgians whose forebears converted to Islam when the
Samtskhe-Djavakheti region of Georgia constituted part of the Ottoman
Empire. Others believe they are ethnic Turks. Accordingly, the
Meskhetians gravitated into two camps. One, named Khsna ("Salvation")
and founded by Latifshakh Baratashvili, united those Meskhetians who
consider themselves Georgians; the other, named Vatan ("Homeland")
represents those who identified themselves as Turks.
In the mid-1980s, despite protests from some members of the Georgian
intelligentsia, an initiative was launched to bring Meskhetians back
to Georgia, but only a few hundred succeeded in taking advantage of
that opportunity, and they were hounded out of the republic a few
years later by supporters of ultranationalist President Zviad
Gamsakhurdia.
The widespread clashes in the summer of 1989 in Uzbekistan's Ferghana
valley between Meskhetians and local Uzbeks culminated in the
evacuation of nearly all of the entire 90,000-strong Meskhetian
population of that region. In an article published in "Nezavisimaya
gazeta" in 1998, Professor Khadji-Murat Ibragimbeyli, one of the
co-chairmen of the Russian Muslim organization "Nur," estimated that
as of 1 January 1998, there were still 15,000 Meskhetians in
Uzbekistan, some 30,000 in Kyrgyzstan, 90,000 in Kazakhstan, 70,000 in
Azerbaijan and 90,000 in the Russian Federation. Of the latter group,
some 13,500 are compactly settled in two districts of Krasnodar Krai.
There they are regarded with enmity and suspicion by both the local
Cossack population and the regional authorities, who refuse to grant
them the right of permanent residency, but encourage those who wish to
do so to emigrate to Turkey.
In March 1999, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze issued a decree
setting up a government commission charged with preparing by 1 October
2000 a legal framework for the voluntary return over a period of 12
years of those Meskhetians who wish to settle permanently in Georgia.
That commission has already drafted legislation that characterizes the
Meskhetians as victims of political repression, rehabilitates them,
and affirms their right to Georgian citizenship.
But the repatriation process, which is to be funded entirely by
international organizations, is nonetheless likely to prove
problematic, as Repatriation Service head Guram Mamulia told RFE/RL's
Tbilisi bureau earlier this summer.
According to Mamulia, the Georgian authorities do not have up-to-date
accurate estimates of the number of Meskhetians who want to return to
Georgia. The only data available are from 1989. At that time, Mamulia
said, 10,594 heads of households had filed applications to resettle in
Georgia, but it is not clear how many of those still desire to do so.
He predicted that only a very few Meskhetians will come to Georgia
over the next two to three years because the economic situation there
is so bad.
Asked where the returning Meskhetians will live, Mamulia said that
like all other citizens of Georgia, they are free to choose their
place of residence. That response suggests that the Georgian
government will not make any special effort to help the Meskhetians
return to the villages in southern Georgia from which they (or their
parents or grandparents) were originally deported. Some in Georgia
have protested that the region is now so densely populated that it
could not accomodate an influx of resettlers, but Vatan chairman Yusuf
Sarvarov rejects that argument: he told "Nezavisimaya gazeta" two
years ago that the population of the region now is 20 percent less
than in 1944. But the present inhabitants of Samtskhe-Djavakheti, who
are predominantly Armenian, have warned that they will resort to force
if necessary to prevent any attempt at the mass resettlement of the
Meskhetians. Mamulia does not say either whether any Meskhetians have
returned to Samtskhe-Djavakheti, or how many have settled elsewhere in
Georgia, and where.
Mamulia downplays the division of the Meskhetians into those who
consider themselves Turks and those who believe themselves Georgians,
claiming that the overwhelming majority are members of neither Vatan
nor Khsna, and are "not politicized." According to him, the
Meskhetians consider themselves simply as natives of Meskheti: he
argues that their sense of national identity is "weak" because in
medieval Georgia, Georgian national consciousness centered on
membership of the Georgian Orthodox church, and at that juncture the
Meskhetians had already converted to Islam. "We shall have our work
cut out," Mamulia says, "to strengthen their national identity."
One of the requirements set down by the Council of Europe is that the
process of integrating the returning Meskhetians into Georgian society
should proceed in tandem with that of repatriation. Mamulia
interpreted as evidence of a burgeoning sense of national identity the
fact that without exception, all those Meskhetians who have returned
to Georgia have adopted Georgian surnames and send their children to
Georgian-language schools. That willingness to conform could equally,
however, reflect a fear of being stigmatized.
Mamulia said that he does not anticipate problems in integrating the
returning Meskhetians into Georgian society, but that the success of
that process will depend on the Georgian authorities. In that context,
he admitted that the main danger is indifference, insensitivity or
inefficiency on the part of bureaucrats who, for example, may fail to
provide Georgian language instruction, or to assist those Meskhetians
who wish to change their surnames.
Whether the new draft legislation will indeed pave the way for the
Meskhetians' return is, however, questionable. Writing last year on
the anniversary of the deportation, one Meskhetian suggested that
while paying lip-service to the need for repatriation, the Georgian
authorities are in fact doing little to encourage it. A second author
has suggested that the Georgian leadership would be committing
collective political suicide if it allowed the Meskhetians to return
to Georgia en masse before it negotiated a solution to the Abkhaz
conflict that would allow displaced Georgians to return to Abkhazia.
Mamulia's admission that repatriation could prove "a destabilizing
factor" could be interpreted as corroborating that hypothesis. (Liz
Fuller)
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