May 01, 2010

The Meskhetians

Exactly five years ago, something happened in Russia which one might have thought impossible half a century after Joseph Stalin’s passing: an entire ethnic group – one which Stalin had accused of treason and evicted from its homeland – was once again forced to change their place of residence.

Thousands of Meskhetian Turks, after surviving deportation in the 1940s and Uzbek pogroms in the 1990s, had only just become settled in Krasnodar Krai when, a few years into the 21st century, they were faced with run-of-the-mill nationalism cultivated by those in power and reinforced by Cossacks. The surge of violence prompted many Meskhetians to leave for the U.S., under a special immigration program. And while Russian media declared that the Meskhetian problem had been resolved, for many this was not the case: not qualified to emigrate, they now cannot join their families on the other side of the Atlantic.

in the recent past, the stanitsa* of Nizhnebakanskaya was, in its own way, the “capital” of a Turkish community in Krasnodar Krai. That is, until the phobias and myths of the Stalin era were resurrected, once again turning Meskhetians into outcasts and “agents of foreign espionage.”

Intercity buses normally do not stop at this small roadside settlement an hour from the Black Sea coast. So we had to leap from a moving bus. Buffeted by a penetrating wind, we stood at the stanitsa’s bus station, waiting for a fellow with a rather exotic sounding name: Kushali Dursunov.

Fifteen minutes later, an aging Zhiguli rolled up to the station. The driver’s external appearance little resembled a Janissary from the time of the Russo-Turkish War: there was no fez atop his head, nor did he sport a mustache. Dark haired and stocky, Dursunov more resembled a denizen of Central Asia, newly arrived in Russia and looking for work.

As we wove our way down the paved highway at a respectable clip, Dursunov kept his cellphone pinned to his ear, carrying on simultaneous conversations with the stanitsa’s ambulance service and with his wife. “Well, where the hell are they?!” he yells into his phone, in Russian. “Mama’s blood pressure spiked last night,” he explained apologetically. “Do you know what that means for someone who is 90? We called the ambulance this morning, but they still haven’t come. I just called for the fifth time, they said to just wait.”

Dursunov is 100 percent Meskhetian Turk, one of the few that remained in Krasnodar Krai after the mass exodus of Meskhetians to the U.S. And his 90-year-old father has become something of a local legend. Barely had he attained American citizenship when he gave up everything and returned to Russia, where he had absolutely nothing.

The historic region of Meskhetia is in present-day northeast Turkey and southern Georgia, in the area known as Samtskhe-Javakheti (which is part of the mountainous region known as Moschia). Meskhetians at one time also occupied the eastern region of Adjara, a Georgian province to the west, along the Black Sea. There is, however, no universal opinion on the origins of the Meskhetians; some say they are descendants of ethnic Turks and Georgians of the Meskhi tribe,^† others that they are descendants of Georgian-Meskhi who were Turkefied during the time of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922), with an admixture of ethnic Turks and Azerbaijanis.

Meskhetian Turks don’t speak “classic” Turkish, but one of its eastern dialects that is very similar to Azeri and completely unlike modern Georgian. (The Meskhetians call their language Ahıska Türkçäsi.)

Up until the beginning of the 20th century, Meskhetian Turks living in what was then the Russian Empire were not forbidden from calling themselves Turks or from practicing Islam (most are Sunni Muslim). But everything changed when the Bolsheviks came to power. In 1928, Georgian authorities required Meskhetians to adopt Georgian surnames. At the time of the onset of the Stalinist repression, “Georgification” had become so ramped up that the Meskhetian Turkish ethnic group officially ceased to exist: there were just isolated families who had previously ranked themselves among the Turks.

Stalin is often said to be the source of the aphorism: “No person, no problem.” In fact it was his guiding principle, since the biggest problem for the Father of All Nations (one of the many appellations given Stalin in the 1930s and 1940s) was the nations themselves. Meskhetian Turks, despite vigorous attempts to turn them into Georgians, fell beneath the same millstone as hundreds of thousands of people of other nationalities, from Crimean Tatars to Chechens and Kalmyks. After Fascist Germany attacked the Soviet Union, they all – irrespective of age, gender, professional qualifications or service to Soviet power – were packed up and sent thousands of miles away, accused of being “unreliable.” It always happened the same way. A village or town in the Crimea or Caucasus was surrounded by NKVD troops, and the Chekists went from house to house, herding men, women and children out of their homes, like cattle. Then they were shipped to Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia in cold, wooden train cars, with little but the clothes on their back.

Surprisingly, the Meskhetian Turks were able to cling to their historical homeland almost to the end of the war, until November 15, 1944, when 120,000 of them were forcibly deported over two weeks. Prior to this, practically all male Meskhetians of draft age had gone to the front, to fight the Germans. Thus, to suspect their families of sympathy for Hitler or Nazism was absurd…

The real reason for the deportation became known only after the fall of the Soviet Union, when documents of the State Committee for Defense of the USSR were declassified – in particular, Decree No. 6279 of 31 July 1944. This is how it explained why an entire people needed to be deported: “In connection with the fact that a significant portion of the population was related to residents of border regions of Turkey, these family relationships have evoked emigratory inclinations, charges of complicity with the enemy, contraband activities and have made them recruits for Turkish espionage and bandit groups…”

“we’re here,” kushali declared. The car was brought to a halt next to a wooden fence covered by grapevines. Behind it was a low house of brick and clay, a tiny yard, and a similarly tiny garden. In general, a typical home for this Cossack region. It had been in this condition even before Kushali and his wife Zulfia rented it.

Immediately upon stepping through the door, we stepped into another time and place. In the middle of the singular room – which served simultaneously as a bedroom, living room and kitchen – was a large topchan* covered with a colorful rug. On the walls were canvases with quotes from the Koran. Typically, a topchan is divided into “male” and “female” sections; in keeping with Islamic tradition, if men and women are in the same space, they should be separated.

But not today. The aged mother of our hero was sick and she was being fussed over by Kushali’s wife, Zulfia, his father Kamal, and a female friend of the family. Kamal is the previously noted local celebrity. Neighbors call him “the American” to his face, and local bureaucrats tremble at the sight of the 88-year-old elder sporting a Turkish fez, his threadbare jacket hung with military medals.

“He doesn’t have his own home, so he makes himself at home with my mother, with me and Zulfia, in this little detached hut. He is constantly going from office to office, requesting that he, as a veteran, be given an apartment, and they want nothing more to do with him in the administrative offices,” Kushali explained.

Kamal is not able to easily express himself in Russian. He discloses his age and the ghastly wounds he suffered in the war. Even through his jacket and vest you can see the cavity where they cut out the bits of shrapnel that tore into him.

“Was in Leningrad, in Baltics, in Germany,” Kamal said in broken Russian, ticking off on his fingers the stops on his front line tour.

In 1941, as a 17-year-old, he was drafted into the Red Army, and almost immediately sent to the Soviet-German front. Over the next four years, Kamal Dursunov walked several thousand kilometers through the Soviet Union and Europe, to the very heart of Berlin.

News never reached the young soldier that his family, along with thousands of other Turkish families accused of “emigratory inclinations,” had been shipped off to Central Asia. By the end of the war Kamal, a specialist in anti-tank defenses, had managed to distinguish himself. He had destroyed two German Tiger tanks, received several serious wounds and was celebrated for having, in a hand-to-hand combat, put his fist through the metal helmet of a German soldier.

Nonetheless, he fell under suspicion of sympathy for Hitler’s troops. “There was this case in Germany,” Kamal recalled. “I was walking along and saw a German in a British coat, clearly on the run. I pointed my gun at him and he cried, ‘Don’t shoot, I have children!’ And I didn’t want to kill him. The orders were: take Germans prisoner. I took him to our guys, and the lieutenant was all over me, ‘Why’d you bring this fascist here, why didn’t you shoot him?’ He said to me, ‘This is how you do it.’ He took out his pistol, put it to the German’s head and pulled the trigger…”

Kamal then heatedly declared to the butcher-lieutenant that, yes, you have to kill at the front, but not at army headquarters. And he paid for it. Instead of being sent home for treatment when he was next wounded, his commander ordered him to take part in the storming of Berlin.

Kamal met his future wife, Shakhria, after the war, in Central Asia. They have been married 63 years. Five of their sons, two daughters, and countless grandchildren and great grandchildren have disbursed across the globe, from Turkey to the U.S. And now it’s been three hours since the onset of Shakhria’s high blood pressure attack, and still no ambulance. So Kamal and his son Kushali, in order to relieve some of the tension, lead us on an excursion about their yard.

“Just don’t help him, don’t give him your arm,” Kushali said. “Let him walk on his own; he needs to keep moving.”

The yard creates a depressing impression. Behind a half-collapsed wooden shed is a tiny garden piled high with dried up branches and trash. You could film a horror movie here. In fact, the entirety of the Dursunov family’s life is a horror film: no permanent work, and the only regular source of income is the parents’ pension. And that is barely enough to rent this ramshackle little house without any modern conveniences.

There is no running water in Nizhnebakanskaya stanitsa, and the residents have to obtain water on their own. Those who have means drill wells; those who are less well off must use common wells. Until recently, Kushali hauled water from one such well, but this winter it was destroyed when the river overflowed its banks. Now he has to pay for water from his neighbor.

Despite these day-to-day struggles, when Kushali’s brothers left Krasnodar Krai five years ago for the U.S., along with thousands of their kinsmen, it was not such struggles they were trying to escape. But Kushali refuses to talk about what it was that led thousands of Meskhetian Turkish families to pick up and leave for another country, as if it were the time of the Stalinist deportations. “Politics,” is what he calls it. “And I don’t mess around in politics; I have to live here,” he said.

khalima badalova, a friend of the family who lives in the neighboring settlement of Novoukrainskoye, also has no love for politics, but she is much more willing to recall the events which forced her to come to the Kuban. Khalima’s family lived in Uzbekistan, where her parents had been sent after Stalin’s deportations. In May and June 1989, Uzbek pogroms suddenly gripped the Fergana Valley. There was chaos in Khalima’s hometown of Pskent. Uzbek nationalists attacked the homes of Meskhetian Turks. She and her husband, along with her mother-in-law and their three children, were saved from the impending massacre by hiding in the home of their neighbor, the head of the local militia.

“They hid us in the back room,” she recalled, “and all night long we heard someone tossing stones onto the roof and calling out, ‘We know you have Turks in there!’”

To this day, it is not clear what brought on these events, which have come down in history as the “Fergana massacre” and the “Tashkent massacre” (some are of the opinion that the nationalists simply took advantage of Uzbeks’ dissatisfaction in their poverty and lack of rights). But the facts remain: barely had Gorbachev’s reforms begun, when the Meskhetian Turks, who lived for many decades in Central Asia, suddenly became outcasts. Some 90 thousand Meskhetians were forced to flee Uzbekistan in fear for their lives.

“Allah is my witness, we have never feuded with anyone. My entire childhood I lived alongside Uzbeks,” Khalima said. “Went to school with them, then worked, celebrated with them, visited in each other’s homes.” Then, as if to illustrate her story, she placed on the table a large plate of authentic Uzbek plov, which she had prepared in front of us. “How do they put it in Asia? If I die, then let it at least be after the plov,” she laughed.

Table customs are tell-tale proof that the Meskhetian Turks assimilated many traditions from the locals during their Central Asian exile. Today, for instance, a guest in a Turkish home can seriously offend his host if he refuses to consume several portions of plov, to drink the required green tea, or to sample the thick soup, the main ingredient of which is something akin to pelmeni.

In Khalima’s family photo album, there is a gap in the chronology: there are black and white photos of Khalima and her former husband, taken in the Soviet Union, and then there are the very recent color photos of some sort of park with rides, a beautiful young woman and a fun-loving little boy.

“This is my daughter, Asya, and my grandson. They are in New York state now,” Khalima says in a far from happy voice. “When the Uzbeks attacked our home in Pskent, my daughter was very young… I feared for her most of all. I thought: ‘I will give up everything, run away anywhere at all, if only the children can be saved.’ In the store where I worked back then, I had a good boss. He paid me my back wages and even gave me some food for the journey. We took off, not knowing where we were headed. The only information I had was that, after the massacres, some Turks had gone to Russia, to the Kuban. So I thought, ‘Let’s just get on a train and go in search of our people.’”

after the nationalist uprising in Central Asia, the Soviet government was seriously bewildered by the mass exodus of Meskhetians. For the late Soviet Era, such an en masse, uncontrolled migration of citizens was something completely new and strange. For that reason the leaders were frightened, and they sought to somehow control the migration process.

The government decided that refugees from Central Asia would be allowed to settle only in Russia’s central regions, in Orlov, Voronezh and Kursk oblasts. They supposed that the Turks would only settle in Russia temporarily, while the groundwork was laid for their repatriation to their historical homeland, in Georgia. Of course the government’s decision was poorly executed; no one thoroughly monitored where the refugees actually went and where they settled.

The first Meskhetian Turk families arrived in Krasnodar Krai after the pogroms in Fergana. Soon others were drawn here as well – people who had tried unsuccessfully to settle in other Russian regions. “We really can’t live without land, without our farms,” Khalima explained. “We’ve tilled the land for several generations. And the Kuban had the best conditions for farming, better than anywhere else in Russia. Lots of our people were immediately drawn here and they were our relatives, our acquaintances. The ‘Sarafan Radio’ network sprang into action.”

As Khalima remembers it, at that time most of the population of Krasnodar Krai was very poor. As in all other parts of the former USSR, there were grave shortages of foodstuffs, which could only be purchased with ration coupons distributed at one’s place of employment. And it was especially difficult to find work, particularly in such a rural location, so many emigres began to work for themselves, doing backyard farming, raising vegetables, greens and potatoes for sale at local farmer’s markets. And, insofar as (according to definitions which existed at that time) they did not have any official workplace, they could not get foodstuff coupons.

When the emigres nonetheless asked the local authorities to give them coupons for sugar, butter and soap, it caused friction with the Russian-speaking population, who were dissatisfied that the immigrants (who in their eyes were living on “non-labor income”) wanted what they themselves desperately needed. It was almost an exact repeat of the situation at the beginning of the pogroms in Uzbekistan, where local nationalists, playing on the local population’s emotions, blamed people of a different nationality for all their problems: “while we were bent over in the cotton plantations, the Turks were trading in the bazaars.”

But, in contrast to Uzbekistan, the Kuban administration did not at all try to extinguish the source of hatred toward the migrants. Lots of refugees, from all corners of the expiring Soviet Union, were descending on Krasnodar Krai at that time, and the battle with “uninvited guests” became the favorite hobby horse of regional politicians.

“This is explained by the fact that local administrations could hang any of their failures on the migrants,” said Victor Gaskevich, a board member of the Krasnodar division of the human rights organization Memorial. “They could be blamed for the increases in poverty, unemployment, crime. It reached absurd levels: in several regions, the local leaders blamed the Turks for the fact that, since they had started trading their greens and vegetables at the markets, prices for these items fell, causing local peasants to suffer.”

Memorial has been monitoring the conflict between Meskhetian Turks and the Kuban administration since the beginning of the 1990s. The entire time, the organization has sought to have the Russian and Georgian governments revive their original plan to return the Meskhetian Turks to their historic homeland. In the mid-1990s, Georgia submitted an application for entry to the Council of Europe, the main demand from whom was the speedy repatriation to Georgia of peoples deported by Stalin.

“But the issue died after Georgia was admitted to the Council of Europe,” Gaskevich said. “On the other hand, the administration of Krasnodar Krai had no intention of waiting. Their logic was simple: since the Meskhetians are leaving soon, everything should be done to make it happen as quickly as possible. First of all they complicated the procedure for legalizing refugees and strengthened passport controls. In order to legally reside in Russia, every six months the Meskhetians had to obtain a certificate on temporary residency. But such documents were provided only upon presentation of a receipt proving one had paid taxes, plus a whole packet of medical and other certificates. The passport-visa service did not demand anything like this from any other foreign nationality.”

khalima badalova feels in her bones what it means to live in Russia as an “illegal.” In the first few years after she arrived in Krasnodar Krai, she used her old Soviet passport and, like many of her compatriots, sought a certificate of temporary residency. “I simply had to live here legally,” she said. “After all, I was traveling to the city to work, and constantly had to deal with the police.” Yet soon Khalima was condemned to several years of unemployment when she lost her papers.

“Did you not leave the house out of fear of the police?” I asked.

“What do you mean, police!” she replied. “They were not what was scary; scary was when the Cossacks started going house to house. This is what would happen: early in the morning, two or three people in Cossack uniforms – often drunk – kicked on our doors, in general acting rude and demanding that we show them our passports. Once, several Cossacks went to the home of my distant relative. They saw his son in the yard, squatting down and working on something. One Cossack goes up to him and yells, “Stand up!” The boy talked back somehow, and the Cossack smacked him across the face as hard as he could. The father came running out when he heard the cry… Luckily, some neighbor called the police: a horrible fight started and they would have killed each other. The Cossacks didn’t stop fighting until the police arrived. But none of them were punished.”

There were plenty of similar situations in villages where the Meskhetian Turks settled. One story became something of a local parable: during one of the Cossack’s raids to uncover “illegal immigrants” in a village not far from Anapa, the Cossacks, armed with rubber whips, rubber truncheons and gas pistols, broke into a private homeowner’s yard and, upon seeing a clay stove for baking lepeshki,* declared to the homeowner, “We need to set you on fire right here, douse you in gasoline and set you on fire…”

The fascinating thing about this situation is that the Cossacks had no legal authority to check documents. In Russia, only the police has such authority. But the police did nothing to hinder the Cossacks in their raids. And why did the Cossacks themselves need this? How were they bothered by this tiny diaspora of Meskhetian Turks? And who issued an order to the Cossacks to break the law, to stand in for the officials that are supposed to safeguard our rights?

Vladimir Gromov, the former leader of the Kuban Cossacks, declined to answer any questions of this sort. Gromov is the person many Meskhetian Turks point to as the ideological inspiration for “anti-immigration raids.” “This issue is far from something I worry about,” he said. “As far as I know, there is no longer any conflict.”

Polina Potsebneva, press secretary for the Kuban Cossack Troops said she was rather interested to know, “who will benefit from this publication,” and declared that the present leadership of the regional Cossack organization “does not feel it has a right to discuss the actions of its predecessors.”

When you put these questions to ordinary Cossacks in Nizhnebakanskaya stanitsa, they, on condition of anonymity, admit that they never had anything against Meskhetian Turks. They also admit that, yes, the “raids” went overboard, but back then, they say, the governor spoke rather often about battling against illegal immigration, and the Cossacks could not remain on the sidelines.

It is certainly true that ten years ago everyone and their brother in Krasnodar Krai was talking about the evils of immigration, which were personified in the Meskhetian Turks. And the local media constantly quoted Governor Alexander Tkachev, who promised to organize charter flights to send the Meskhetians back to Uzbekistan, who called on the Cossack citizens’ brigades to “activate” and conduct passport checks “not just every day, but every night as well.”

The anti-Turk hysteria even overflowed onto national television. One station aired a report, clearly intended for “sensational” effect, which alleged the Meskhetian Turks had moved to Krasnodar Krai on the orders… of Turkey’s intelligence services, which were interested in increasing their influence in southern Russia. How is it possible not to be reminded of the justification given for Stalin’s 1944 deportation of Meskhetians?

The family of Sakhid Mailov, a resident of Nizhnebakanskaya stanitsa, did not escape the attention of television reporters seeking sensationalism. “I was constantly surprised that this one journalist kept asking kids to make faces, and then the cameraman would take their picture.” Sakhid said. “Then I watched the report and learned that we Turks are very aggressive, that even our children have evil faces.”

the peak of the confrontation between Meskhetians and local authorities came in 2002, immediately after a new regional law on immigration was passed in Krasnodar Krai. The law made it possible to detain illegal immigrants in special centers, until the issue of their forcible eviction was resolved. At that time, some 15,000 Meskhetian Turks lived in Krasnodar Krai, and of those, according to official data, no more than 4,000 held Russian citizenship. The remainder were under threat of the governor’s “charter flights.”

In protest, some 200 Meskhetians declared a hunger strike, demanding that they be immediately granted Russian citizenship. They did not achieve their goals, but they did attract the attention of international human rights organizations and the Directorate for the UN High Commission on Refugees.

A representative of Amnesty International turned to the U.S. Department of State and asked that it consider granting refugee status to those of the Meskhetians who wanted it. A commission comprised of representatives from the OSCE, the UN, the Council of Europe and the U.S. visited Krasnodar Krai. As a result, the U.S. State Department gave its approval to a resettlement plan for Turkish communities in 2004 and 2005. The International Organization on Migration (IOM) headed up the effort.

“We immediately went to IOM,” said Mailov. “Not everyone was able to go to the States, only those who could prove that they had lived for an extended period in Krasnodar Krai. For this, one had to either have Russian citizenship or no citizenship at all. And many in our region had Uzbek passports. I myself had to go to Uzbekistan to get a local passport, so that I could live legally in Russia. So I was not eligible for this program.”

But Mailov’s 26-year-old daughter Adelya successfully navigated the interview and flew to Indiana. His brother and family also headed to the other side of the ocean. More dramatic events occurred in Khalima Badalova’s family. As she was wracking her brains trying to figure out how to get her lost Soviet passport reissued, her children and grandchildren all flew off to the States, leaving their mother and grandmother completely alone.

Then there is the orphan of Nizhnebakanskaya, Rashid. His entire family left for America, including his wife’s parents. He was reportedly left behind due to some problem with his documents.

As soon as the refugee quota set by the U.S. State Department was filled, the immigration program was shut down, and the Meskhetians who remained in Krasnodar Krai (from one to three thousand, by different estimates) could only hope to be reunited with their relatives through private means.

Among those left behind there circulate rumors that they didn’t get through the IOM program because lots of Meskhetian Turks from the regions of Voronezh, Rostov and Astrakhan got through, even though the program was specifically for the evacuation of Meskhetians living in Krasnodar (due to the fact that there was not a single serious case of ethnic violence against Meskhetians in any other region). Allegedly, Meskhetians from “better” regions succeeded in bribing Krasnodar bureaucrats to receive certificates stating that they had lived for a long time in the Kuban. Of course, there is no proof that any such machinations took place.

After the mass exodus of Meskhetians to the U.S., the Krasnodar administration unexpectedly softened in their treatment of those left behind. All were given Russian passports; the Cossack raids and xenophobic press hysteria faded into the past. When asked if they would like to leave for the U.S., to be with their relatives, many reply that they would prefer it if their relatives returned to Russia.

“I don’t even know whether I would want to go there,” confessed vegetable farmer Nuffadin Mursalimov. “On the one hand, my whole family is in America; on the other hand, no one is bothering us here. Ask my children if anyone in their school insults them for being Turks. They will say no.”

Nuffadin’s son and daughter are in primary school and speak very good Russian, giving the impression that they could give their heavily accented father some Russian lessons. Yet ten years ago accusations flew that the children of Meskhetian Turks could not study in Russian schools because they did not know the language.

Mursalimov’s wife shows off her miniature farm: two cows, which they keep in the backyard, and a small garden. Of course, the children help with the farming. In the winter, the Mursalimovs take their “vacation,” since they only have to look after their cows. But in the spring Mursalimov’s wife goes to the local administration to re-request the rental of their land plot, in order to plant vegetables and greens for sale.

The Mursalimovs were truly surprised by Kushali Dursunov’s father, Kamal. The old man could have lived out his days in calm and comfort in the States, yet he up and returned. Kushali’s parents and three of his brothers moved to Idaho. But his father had lived in the U.S. for barely two years when he asked his sons to put together the money for his return ticket to Russia. “America is alright,” he said, offering a typically sparing summary of his life as a political immigrant. “But I couldn’t get the language.”

Kamal and Shakhria returned, one might say, to subsist on ashes. Their only remaining son in Russia, Kushali, did not have a home or stable work. But they had nowhere else to go. For two years now, Kamal has been darkening the doorways of local administrators and veterans organizations, demanding that they provide him the entitlements promised all veterans – most importantly a place to live.

Recently, Kamal even wrote a letter to President Medvedev, in which he reminded him of “the responsibility of the state to guarantee veterans’ social securities, as stipulated in the Constitution.” The president has so far not replied, and the old warrior continues to joust with the windmills of the Russian bureaucracy, which, it turns out, are more tenacious than a German Tiger tank. RL

* STANITSA: a large Cossack village.

† The Meskhi or Moschi were indigenous people of this region of Georgia since before the modern era.

* TOPCHAN: a cross between a large bed and a low couch.

The famous Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli is reputed to have come from Meskhetia.

* LEPESHKI: round breads typical of Central Asia.

May 01, 2010

The Meskhetians

See Also

Meskhetians Resettled in Vermont

About Us

Latest Posts

Useful Links

Our Contacts