RFE/RL on Meskhetians and Georgia

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Subject: RFE/RL on Meskhetians and Georgia

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RFE/RL on Meskhetians and Georgia


RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
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RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol 2, No. 183, Part I, 22 September 1998

"AND HOME THERE'S NO RETURNING"
 
by Liz Fuller
 
For almost 40 years, the Meskhetians (an ethnically mixed group
comprising mostly Muslim Georgians and some Kurds and Muslim
Armenians, whose common identity was largely forged in the course of
deportation) have been lobbying for permission to return to their
ancestral villages in southwestern Georgia, from where they were
deported in 1944.

The most recent attempt to secure such permission failed. On 17
September, Georgian special police detachments surrounded a hostel in
Tbilisi, rounded up some 40 Meskhetian men,  loaded them on to buses,
and deported them to the Russian Federation. The men belonged to an
83-person delegation that had traveled to the Georgian capital the
previous day to plead with the Georgian leadership for permission to
settle permanently in Georgia. The women members of the delegation
were left behind in Tbilisi.

Georgian Interior Minister Kakha Targamadze told journalists that he
had ordered the expulsion of the Meskhetians because, he claimed, they
are aligned with opposition supporters of deceased President Zviad
Gamsakhurdia.

The deportation recalls the mass expulsion of the Meskhetians from
Georgia in November 1944 on Stalin's orders. The rationale for that
action was the need to clear a strategically located region on the
Soviet-Turkish frontier of elements suspected of pro-Turkish
sympathies so that Soviet military operations could be extended into
northeastern Turkey. On 15 November 1944, the entire Meskhetian
population of several districts in southwestern Georgia, totaling
between 150,000 and 200,000 people,  were loaded into rail cars and
transported to Central Asia. Thousands died en route, and thousands
more in the harsh conditions in which they were forced to live in
exile.

Following Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the 20th CPSU
congress in 1956, which disclosed some, but by no means all the evils
committed during the Stalin era, the restrictions imposed on most of
the deported ethnic groups were lifted. But unlike the Chechens,
Ingush, Balkars, and others whose exile Khrushchev had explicitly
condemned, the Meskhetians were not permitted to return to Georgia.
Their efforts to do so were hindered by the fact that in many cases,
their nationality had been arbitrarily changed to "Turkish" in their
internal passports. Consequently, some were offered the chance to
settle in Azerbaijan and accepted on the assumption that it would
prove easier to resettle in Georgia from that neighboring republic.
That assumption quickly proved to be false.

By the late 1960s, the Meskhetians had split into two factions. One
faction continued to push for the right to return to Georgia, while
the other launched a campaign for the right to emigrate to Turkey. In
the mid-1970s, the first of those two factions enlisted the help and
support of the tiny Georgian dissident movement headed by Zviad
Gamsakhurdia, who at the time was a faculty member of Tbilisi State
University. Now represented by an informal association called
"Salvation," the faction eventually registered a modest success in the
early 1980s, when small-scale repatriation to Georgia got under way, 
presumably thanks to the efforts of then Georgian Communist Party
Central Committee First Secretary Eduard Shevardnadze. That influx
petered out, however, in the late 1980s.

A further catastrophe hit the Meskhetians in the summer of 1989, when
approximately 100 were killed in ethnic clashes in Uzbekistan's
Fergana valley. Some 4,500 Meskhetians were swiftly evacuated from
Uzbekistan to the Russian Federation, rather than Georgia. Since the
collapse of the USSR, Meskhetians in several cities in southern
Russia, especially Krasnodar, have been subjected to systematic
harassment by the local authorities, who refuse either to acknowledge
them as Russian citizens or to grant them residence permits.

Following his return to Georgia from Moscow in 1992, Eduard
Shevardnadze at first argued against allowing the Meskhetians to
return to Georgia on the grounds that social and economic collapse
precluded creating adequate conditions for their repatriation. But in
December 1996, Shevardnadze signed into law a state program whereby
some 5,000 Meskhetians would be gradually repatriated to Georgia by
the year 2000. Some Georgian political figures objected to the
proposed repatriation on the grounds that the Meskhetians considered
themselves Turks, and would thus constitute a "fifth column" and
potential separatist movement. The Georgians and Armenians who for the
past 50  years have inhabited the villages from which the Meskhetians
were originally deported in 1944 threatened to take up arms to prevent
their return.

In the event, whether for political or financial reasons, the1996
program was not systematically implemented. One Georgian observer
suggested that Shevardnadze would have been committing political
suicide if he had made provision for the deported Meskhetians to
return to Georgia before reaching a settlement to the Abkhaz conflict
that would create secure conditions for those ethnic Georgians who
fled Abkhazia during the 1992-1993 war to return to their homes.

The Meskhetians therefore renewed their lobbying campaign, seeking
support from, among others, OSCE High Commissioner on National
Minorities Max van der Stoel and the Turkish government. Ankara has
apparently agreed to allow some of those Meskhetians who wished to
settle in Turkey to do so, on condition that the Georgian government
expedite the repatriation of those who prefer to settle in Georgia.
 
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RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

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