Syrian Refugees in Turkey – Only Muslims after all

In September 2012 Angelina Jolie visited Turkey in her capacity as United Nations Special Envoy for Refugees. At that time the civil war in Syria had been going on for eighteen months, and there were approximately 80,000 men, women and children who had fled across the border to escape the violence. Ms Jolie and the UN High Commissioner António Guterres expressed high praise for the twelve well-organised camps set up by the Turkish Government to house the displaced Syrians. At the same time, they also urged other UN member states to recognise the need to provide tangible assistance to neighbouring countries like Turkey that were directly affected by the influx of destitute refugees.

Syrian refugee family in Istanbul 2014

That was then – this is now. There are currently 224,000 Syrians in those camps near Turkey’s southeastern border. The UN estimates that to be less than one third of the 700,000 they believe are in the country. The Turkish Government puts the number higher, at around 900,000. Whichever is correct, it is evident that those government camps, however, well-organised, are no longer able to cope with the vast numbers fleeing the war – and hundreds of thousands of homeless, jobless Syrians have now made their way to the larger cities in search of work and accommodation.

Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ahmet Davutoğlu, has been in Jordan meeting with Mr Guterres and other regional foreign ministers. According to an article in Hürriyet Daily News, ‘the U.N. refugee chief criticized the international community for “not contributing enough” to solve the issue’.

“Let me be very clear, there has been very little support. There must be massive support from the international community at the level of government budgets and development projects related to education, health, water and infrastructure,” he said. He stressed that the problem of refugees was not only the responsibility of regional countries, but of “all countries in the world.”

“To share the responsibility that has fallen upon the neighboring countries, every country should open its doors to Syrian refugees,” Guterres added.’

For his part, Mr Davutoğlu suggested that what was really needed was international aid to protect Syrian citizens in their own country. While Turkey maintains an open border policy and does not turn refugees away, the huge numbers are placing great stress on the economy, and there is a danger that resentment against them will grow and lead to undesirable outcomes.

This influx of refugees, however, is by no means just a recent phenomenon. The first major wave of immigration was large numbers of Sephardic Jews fleeing from religious persecution in Spain at the end of the 15^th century. The so-called ‘reconquest’ of the Iberian Peninsula involved the forced conversion or expulsion of Muslims and Jews whose families had lived there for centuries. Sultan Bayezid II welcomed Jewish settlers into his empire, reputedly saying “the Catholic monarch Ferdinand was wrongly considered as wise, since he impoverished Spain by the expulsion of the Jews, and enriched us”. By the 19^th century, the Ottoman city of Selanik (now Thessaloniki in Greece) was home to the largest Jewish population of any city in Europe. Many of them relocated to Istanbul after the Greek occupation, and later to the new state of Israel. There are still, however, many synagogues to be found in Istanbul, their congregations worshipping in the archaic Spanish dialect known as Ladino.

It is generally agreed that the Ottoman Empire reached the peak of its power during the reign of Sultan Suleiman around the middle of the 16^th century, although it continued to extend its territorial reach until the armies of Mehmet IV were notoriously turned back from the gates of Vienna in 1683.

From that time, the seemingly invincible Ottomans began losing battles and ground to, in particular, the rising and expanding powers of Habsburg Austria and Tsarist Russia. Habsburg expansion occurred primarily in the Balkan region, much of which had been under Ottoman rule for centuries. For the Russians, a major goal was annexing territories that would give them access to warm water ports on the Black Sea and ultimately the Mediterranean. These territories, Ukraine, Crimea and the Caucasus, while not directly under Ottoman control, were inhabited predominantly by Muslims and definitely within their sphere of influence.

As Habsburg and Russian forces seized control of these regions, vast numbers of Muslims were killed or uprooted. It has been estimated that between five and seven million refugees flooded into the shrinking Ottoman Empire between 1783 and 1913. More than half of these were Crimean Tatars and Circassians displaced by the Russian southward advance. Dawn Chatty, Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration in the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, in an article entitled Refugees, Exiles, and other Forced Migrants in the Late Ottoman Empire, suggests that an understanding of historical context is essential in the study of refugees. She argues that  ‘by and large the circumstances, experiences, and influences of refugees and exiles in modern history are ignored’. Her article focuses on ‘the forced migration of millions of largely Muslim refugees and exiles from the contested borderland between the Ottoman Empire and Tzarist Russia’. In particular, Professor Chatty examines the plight of the Circassians, hundreds of thousands of whom sought sanctuary in Ottoman Anatolia after Russian conquest of the Caucasus was completed in 1864.

In March 1821, encouraged by Lord Byron and other romantically poetical, classically indoctrinated English aristocrats, ‘Christians’ on the ‘Greek’ peninsula began a revolt against their Ottoman rulers. Certainly there were decidedly unromantic atrocities committed by both sides in the conflict, but the end result was that Muslims, whose families had lived there for centuries, and others perceived as Ottoman sympathisers (eg Albanians and Jews) were pretty much exterminated on that side of the Aegean Sea. Those who managed to escape sought refuge on the opposite coast.

This is the context in which we need to the view the later sufferings of Armenians and Orthodox Christians in the early years of the 20^th century. Ottoman Muslims (who had long coexisted with Christian minorities within their own borders) had learned that defeat by ‘Christian’ powers would quickly result in extermination or expulsion of Muslims from the conquered lands. They had also learned that a tactic of those powers was to incite Christian minorities to rebel, then claim the right to ‘defend their co-religionists’ from reprisals.

A sad result of Britain’s encouragement of the Greek invasion of Anatolia in 1919 was the event known to Greeks as ‘The Asia Minor Catastrophe’, when, after their defeat in 1922, more than a million Orthodox Christians were forced to relocate to Greece, their places taken by almost half a million Muslims sent the other way. Other refugee flows to Turkey occurred as a result of state-sponsored terrorism in Bulgaria and Romania from the 1940s to the 1980s when Muslims were forced to change their Turkish-Arabic names. It is estimated that 230,000 Muslim refugees and immigrants sought refuge in Turkey from the Balkans between 1934 and 1945, and 35,000 from Yugoslavia from 1954 to 1956. In 1989 a further 320,000 Bulgarian Muslims fled to Turkey and perhaps 20,000 from Bosnia.

In the end, of course, these events are all in the past, and to be fair, some Bulgarian Muslims were able to return to their former homes after the collapse of the Communist regime. In general, however, the developing economy of Turkey (and before it, the struggling Ottoman Empire) has been obliged to deal with huge inflows of impoverished refugees displaced by events occurring beyond their boundaries and control. In large part, they have done this without complaint and with little assistance from wealthier nations. Now, it seems, they are doing it once more.

Again, to be scrupulously fair, the British Government agreed in February to take five hundred of ‘the most traumatised Syrian refugees’. The decision came, however, only after stiff and protracted resistance to UN pleas for support. Even New Zealand has offered to accept 100, which, on a per head of population basis, is about three times more generous. Still, when you set it against the numbers flooding into Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon (without getting into a comparison of per capita GDP) both look like token gestures.

I too feel sorry for those two hundred schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria, but I can’t help feeling that anger in Western nations seems disproportionate when compared with their lukewarm response to the unfolding human tragedy in Syria. And I can’t help wondering whether, had those Nigerian girls been Muslim instead of Christian, the cries for action would have been quite so strident and widespread.

Into the Valley of Death – Another Crimean War?

What a strange education I had, or so I think now on looking back. When I was a lad in New Zealand there were still people referring to England (or Britain) as ‘Home’. My first primary school headmaster used to visit classes occasionally to brandish a leather strap he referred to as his ‘medicine’, and get us kids piping ‘Rule Britannia’ in our reedy little antipodean voices. Having pupils memorise chunks of poetry was a popular pedagogical technique. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ added to our sense of belonging to an empire on which the sun was still struggling to set, defended by men, any one of whom was worth ten or twenty of any other race on earth, and capable, when the chips were down, of staggering out into an Antarctic blizzard uttering a self-sacrificing epigram in ringing tones.

British lion defends Ottoman 'turkey' against
imperialist Russian bear

Well, there was one line in that immortal poem suggesting that ‘someone had blundered’, but most of it was clearly written to perpetuate the myth of men committed to facing, if necessary, overwhelming odds, and fighting or dying in defence of Empire. I have checked again and found one reference to the opposition – ‘Cossack and Russian’ – but no explanation of what those noble Light Brigade horsemen actually hoped to gain by charging into ‘the mouth of Hell’, other than death and/or glory.

In fact, the famous charge was little more than a futile sideshow in the Battle of Balaklava, the first major engagement in the Crimean War (1853-56). One might even think the whole war itself was a pretty questionable venture. I have no special reason to love Russians, but I have some sympathy for their plight, locked up in the largest, coldest most inhospitable and inaccessible land mass in the world. As the state of Russia (centred on Moscow) expanded from 1500 CE, one of its main driving forces was the need for access to warm water ports for shipping, trade and military purposes – and sandy beaches for summer holidays. Check your atlas. What would you have done if you were a Peter or a Catherine with Great ambitions?

For the Russians, it was pretty obvious that they had to have access to the Black Sea and if possible, a direct route to the Aegean or the Mediterranean. This involved fighting and conquering, or otherwise neutralising whoever was in the way – mostly Muslim Crimean Tatars, Ottomans and Circassians. An important tool in the Russians’ box of strategies was the Orthodox Christian religion which they used to enlist the support of allies, justify expansion and clear out unfriendly resistance.

Expansion as far as the Black Sea was pretty much accomplished during the 18^th century, culminating in a victorious war against the Ottomans (1768-74). The Russian government formally annexed Crimea (not just the peninsula in those days) in 1783.

Again, however, a glance at the map will show that even possessing ports on the northern Black Sea coast doesn’t circumvent all your problems from a Russian point-of-view. Your ships still have to negotiate the Istanbul Bosporus and the Dardanelle Straits past the hostile eyes and guns of your resentful Ottoman neighbours. Wouldn’t it be nice to possess Constantinople/Istanbul itself, or drive a corridor through eastern Anatolia, emerging down in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean around the port of Alexandretta/Iskenderun? Of course both of these will involve further wars with those pesky Ottomans – though by now, the middle of the 19^th century, they are not the fearsome military power they once were.

Still, you need a pretext for picking a fight, and what better than religion? How can good Christians allow those heathen Turks to control the holy places where Christ suffered and died? And there are Christian communities all through the region, Armenians and Syrian Orthodox for example, clearly in need of protection from the oppression and persecution of their Muslim overlords, never mind that they had all been co-existing in relative peace and harmony for centuries. Well, that protection idea caught on in Europe later, but at this stage, France and especially Britain were not about to let the Russians control the eastern Mediterranean and endanger their interests in that region and further afield in India. Hence the Crimean War. Let’s get over there, was the plan, and help our dear Muslim Ottoman friends defeat those dastardly Cossacks and Russians and keep them bottled up in their frozen wastes.

Well, international treaties and alliances make fragile bonds, and it wasn’t too many years before Britain and France were joining forces to finally erase the Ottoman Empire from the geo-political scene. Previously, however, in the 1850s and 60s, their sympathies lay more with Muslim populations suffering genocide and expulsion as a result of Russian expansion.

EGO | European History Online has this to say: ‘Taking advantage of the favourable anti-Turkish sentiment, the Tzarist army conducted a military offensive against the Ottoman Empire in 1877/1878 which ended with the defeat of the Ottomans in the Balkans and the re-establishment of Russia in the Black Sea. In the Russo-Turkish War, Russian and Bulgarian soldiers and francs-tireurs killed 200,000–300,000 Muslims and about one million people were displaced.  After the war, more than half a million Muslim refugees from the Russian Caucasus and the areas south of the Danube, which were under Russian protection, were settled in the Ottoman Empire.’ (Paragraph 3, 2014.03.10)

But who remembers that now? Apart from the Crimean Tatars and the Circassians themselves, that is. As far as I am aware, the XXII Winter Olympic Games in Sochi went off with little disruption despite hopes held by the ex-patriate Circassian community of using the occasion as a stage to draw the world’s attention to the above-mentioned  ‘resettlement’. ‘The world’, sadly, for the most part, doesn’t want to know. It's got enough problems of its own, and anyway it’s hard to know which plaintive cries of genocide to take seriously these days. Add to that the fact that most First World countries have ethnic cleansing skeletons in their own historical closets, and you can see why they are reluctant to risk their glass houses by throwing stones at each other.

Of course there has to be a certain amount of posturing. Our local Istanbul newspaper published pictures of the US destroyer Truxton steaming through the Bosphorus on its way to wave the Stars and Stripes in the Black Sea. President Obama, according to reports, has been having stern words over the phone with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin; and Republican Presidential hopeful, Senator Rand Paul says that ‘if he were President, he would take a harder stance against the Russian President for his actions.’

The sad fact of the matter is that it is extremely unlikely Russia will let Ukraine and Crimea go their own independent way. About as likely as the United States handing Hawaii back to the native Polynesians, or Texas back to Mexico. Probably the best Crimean nationalists can hope for is more conciliatory gestures from Mother Russia along the lines of renaming Stalingrad as Volgograd, recognising that the earlier name had bad associations for locals who remember the mass expulsion of Crimean Tatars to Siberia in 1944.

"Once persecuted, Sephardic Jews find Spanish embrace "

I’ve written about this before, so this time I’m letting other sources do the talking. The first is an article that circulated widely in news media last month. It seems the Spanish Government is trying to make amends for a 500 year-old “mistake” that saw its entire Jewish population forced to convert to Christianity or leave the country. Well, better late than never, you’d have to say.

Where did they go, those hundreds of thousands of expelled refugees, obliged to leave their property and most of their worldly possessions behind? The following news item, fairly representative, says that these days Sephardic Jews live in France, Israel, Iraq, Yemen, after  originally going to Northern Africa and southern Europe.

Certainly - I'd love to become a Christian

“MADRID – They were burned at the stake, forced to convert or chased into exile. Now Spain is moving to right a half-millennium old "historic mistake" against its onetime flourishing Sephardic Jewish community: the EU country is on the verge of offering citizenship to descendants of victims — estimated to number in the millions.

The Spanish conservative government plans to make amends with a law expected to be passed within weeks or months in Parliament that offers citizenship to the legions of Jews forced to flee in 1492. Asked whether the new law amounted to an apology, Spanish Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon replied: "Without a doubt."

"What the law will do, five centuries later, is make amends for a terrible historic mistake, one of the worst that Spaniards ever made," Ruiz-Gallardon told The Associated Press in an interview.

Descendants of Sephardic Jews, he said, will be considered "children of Spain."

Read more . . .

Jewish history seems to tell a more detailed and slightly different story:

“In the same month in which their Majesties [Ferdinand and Isabella] issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories, in the same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies." So begins Christopher Columbus's diary. The expulsion that Columbus refers to was so cataclysmic an event that ever since, the date 1492 has been almost as important in Jewish history as in American history. On July 30 of that year, the entire Jewish community, some 200,000 people, were expelled from Spain.

“Tens of thousands of refugees died while trying to reach safety. In some instances, Spanish ship captains charged Jewish passengers exorbitant sums, then dumped them overboard in the middle of the ocean. In the last days before the expulsion, rumors spread throughout Spain that the fleeing refugees had swallowed gold and diamonds, and many Jews were knifed to death by brigands hoping to find treasures in their stomachs.

“The Jews' expulsion had been the pet project of the Spanish Inquisition, headed by Father Tomas de Torquemada. Torquemada believed that as long as the Jews remained in Spain, they would influence the tens of thousands of recent Jewish converts to Christianity to continue practicing Judaism. Ferdinand and Isabella rejected Torquemada's demand that the Jews be expelled until January 1492, when the Spanish Army defeated Muslim forces in Granada, thereby restoring the whole of Spain to Christian rule. With their most important project, the country's unification, accomplished, the king and queen concluded that the Jews were expendable. On March 30, they issued the expulsion decree, the order to take effect in precisely four months. The short time span was a great boon to the rest of Spain, as the Jews were forced to liquidate their homes and businesses at absurdly low prices. Throughout those frantic months, Dominican priests actively encouraged Jews to convert to Christianity and thereby gain salvation both in this world and the next.

“The most fortunate of the expelled Jews succeeded in escaping to Turkey [in fact, the Ottoman Empire]. Sultan Bajazet [Bayezit] welcomed them warmly. "How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king," he was fond of asking, "the same Ferdinand who impoverished his own land and enriched ours?" Among the most unfortunate refugees were those who fled to neighboring Portugal. In 1496, King Manuel of Portugal concluded an agreement to marry Isabella, the daughter of Spain's monarchs. As a condition of the marriage, the Spanish royal family insisted that Portugal expel her Jews. King Manuel agreed, although he was reluctant to lose his affluent and accomplished Jewish community.

“In the end, only eight Portuguese Jews were actually expelled; tens of thousands of others were forcibly converted to Christianity on pain of death. The chief rabbi, Simon Maimi, was one of those who refused to convert. He was kept buried in earth up to his neck for seven days until he died. In the final analysis, all of these events took place because of the relentless will of one man, Tomas de Torquemada.

“The Spanish Jews who ended up in Turkey, North Africa, Italy, and elsewhere throughout Europe and the Arab world, were known as Sephardim — Sefarad being the Hebrew name for Spain. After the expulsion, the Sephardim imposed an informal ban forbidding Jews from ever again living in Spain. Specifically because their earlier sojourn in that country had been so happy, the Jews regarded the expulsion as a terrible betrayal, and have remembered it ever since with particular bitterness. Of the dozens of expulsions directed against Jews throughout their history, the one from Spain remains the most infamous.”

_______________________________________________

I didn't see any mention of Turkey in any of the articles about the Spanish Government’s recent overtures - nor that Ottoman Salonika had the largest population of Jews in Europe before that city was taken over by Greece in 1912. Anyway, let’s see how many descendants of the Sephardim take up Spain's invitation.

The Sochi Winter Olympics – What’s going on behind the curtain?

I’ve never been a big follower of the Winter Olympic Games. Ski-jumping, bob-sledding and the icy arts of curling were not much in vogue in the semi-rural beach suburbs of Auckland’s North Shore where I grew up. I can list the venues of the Summer Olympics in unbroken succession back to Helsinki, 1952 – but I would struggle to tell you one for the Winter Games . . . until this year.

This year, the Year of Our Lord 2014, I can confidently tell you the XXII Winter Olympic Games and the XI Paralympic Games (what is it with those Roman numerals?) will be held in Sochi. And I can further inform you that Sochi is a small city on Russia’s Black Sea coast near the Georgian border, with, somewhat surprisingly for Russia and a Winter Olympics venue, a sub-tropical climate. Two million tourists, mostly from the frozen wastes of more northerly regions, flock to the beaches of Sochi in summer – a fact that may explain some of what follows.

A little slice of Caucasian paradise
click for more

Needless to say, few of the winter sporting events will be held in the city itself. Sochi’s other major geographical appeal is its location on the fringes of the Caucasus Mountains, a lofty range with several peaks rising over 5,000 metres. Here is located the ski resort of Krasnaya Polyana, and as an interesting aside, Sochi is also, they tell me, where tennis heart-throb Maria Sharapova picked up a racquet at the age of four and took her first lessons in the sport.

Sad to say, this small piece of heaven on Earth seems to be attracting a good deal of unwelcome attention which is why, for the first time, the Winter Olympic Games have attracted mine. On 29 and 30 December, two bomb attacks killed at least 31 people in the city of Volgograd some 600 km northeast of Sochi. An earlier attack in October took seven lives, raising some fears for the safety of spectators and athletes at the Games. There seems to be some confusion about the reason for the violence in the collective mind of news media in the West. Say ‘Muslim’ and, as with the psychiatrist’s technique of word association, the inevitable responses are ‘terrorists’, ‘Arabs’, ‘Al Qaeda’, and ‘Axis of Evil’

An article in Time on 6 January was entitled ‘Ghosts of Munich Haunt Sochi Olympics in Wake of Russia Bombings’. The writer had interviewed the Vice President of Israel’s Olympic committee in an attempt to draw a parallel with the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, when a group of Palestinians invaded the Israeli athletes’ quarters killing eleven athletes before five of their own number were killed. Only towards the end of the piece did the writer (prompted by the Israeli VP) concede that the Russian events have nothing to do with Israel, Palestine or any other Arabs. So what, you may ask, was the purpose of that Time headline?

Reuters, as we might expect, provided slightly more informative article. They identified the suicide bomber as a woman (or a man) from Dagestan, ‘a hub of Islamist militancy on the Caspian’. They referred to Chechen insurgents who ‘want to carve an Islamic state out of the swathe of mainly Muslim provinces south of Volgograd’ and to ‘North Caucasus militants [who] have also staged attacks in Moscow and other cities, the most recent in the capital being an airport suicide bombing three years ago that killed 37 people.’  Reference was made to the fact that Volgograd was previously known as Stalingrad, with positive memories for Russians but hated by Chechens for its association with the wartime dictator who deported masses of them to inhuman conditions in Siberia. In the end however, the article seemed to accept President Putin’s attempt to relate the bombings to Afghanistan, Syria and 9/11. A White House spokesperson and British PM David Cameron expressed sympathy and solidarity with Russia, the latter offering unconditional support.

Well, we need not be surprised that the average citizens of the United States or Kingdom have no idea about the whereabouts of Sochi, or its turbulent history. The pressure-cooker weapons of mass destruction that created havoc at last year’s Boston Marathon were allegedly detonated by two brothers of Chechen extraction – and apparently generated a good deal of hate mail on social media directed at the innocent citizens of the Czech Republic. On the other hand, there is no excuse for ignorance among leaders of the ‘Free World’. For a stone-cold certainty, the Russian Government knows exactly what the problem is, even if they would prefer the rest of us to join in the festivities and/or mind our own business. They will be quite happy, I expect, if feminists in the Ukraine continue baring their breasts to the winter chills, and Western concerns focus mainly on the treatment of gays and lesbians in Mother Russia.

‘Before 1864’, Wikipedia tells me, ‘Sochi was a Muslim town’. Now it seems, of a total population of 420,589, a mere 20,000 (less than five percent) profess that faith, and the city has no mosque where they can worship. How did this situation come about? What happened in and around that town in 1864 is crucial to an understanding of the controversy surrounding the Sochi Olympics. In fact, that year saw the culmination of a process that had been going on for 300 years. The Muslim Ottoman Empire had reached the zenith of its power during the reign of Sultan Suleiman (the Magnificent) in the mid-16^th century. As its glory days and influence receded, one of the chief beneficiaries was the expanding Empire of Russia. These two neighbours fought fourteen wars during those three centuries, resulting increasingly in Russian victories and loss of Ottoman territory. Collateral casualties, as the Russians pushed their borders towards the warm waters of the Black Sea, were the Muslim inhabitants of the Crimea and Caucasus regions who were either killed or expelled from their homes.

There's more to this business
than meets the eye

The end stages of this southern expansion began in 1834 when Russia moved to complete its conquest of the Caucasus region. Impeding the push were various groups in Chechnya, and Dagestan, the Circassians and several other Caucasian tribes. The conflict went on for thirty years with some release of pressure when Russia was briefly diverted by the Crimean War. It eventually ended, predictably, with Russian victory in that fateful year whose 150^th anniversary the losers and their descendants will commemorate as the world’s winter sports athletes gather to compete in the city which witnessed the final expulsion of Circassian Muslims from their ancestral home.

Clearly we must admire the courage and determination of the Circassians and their neighbours in holding off the Russian advance for those thirty years. Interestingly, they did receive some outside support. It seems that the British Government, while fighting the Muslim Ottomans in the Aegean to establish the independence of a Christian Greek Kingdom, were hedging their bets in the Caucasus by supplying the Muslim locals with arms and ammunition in their struggle against Christian Russia. There was actually an incident in 1836 where a British schooner, the Vixen, laden with military supplies, was detained by the Russian navy, creating an international incident that almost led to war between the two great powers.

At that stage, however, the Brits were not ready to engage in war with Russia, at least not for the sake of the Muslim inhabitants of a region few of their citizens had heard of.  The Wikipedia entry on Sochi includes a table showing population growth over a period of 123 years until 2010 when it exceed 400,000. In 1887 the total population of the city was 98!

Exactly how many civilians lost their lives is the subject of debate. The Circassian Cultural Institute claims that more than a million Circassian men, women and children were killed, and a similar number were expelled from their homeland. Bryan Glyn Williams, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, suggests a figure of 600,000 deaths and ‘hundreds of thousands more’ forcibly expelled in what he calls ‘modern Europe’s first genocide’. Most of those were crowded on to ships at the port of Sochi and dispatched across the Black Sea to the Anatolian coast where Ottoman authorities attempted to cope with the vast influx of impoverished refugees.

It does not require a great stretch of imagination to make a comparison with the present-day situation in Syria, where rebels are undoubtedly receiving arms and other support from outside, and Turkey is having to deal with more than a million fugitives from the conflict. At least the Syrian refugees are able to walk across the border, and modern medical supplies are available to treat serious health problems. Back in 1864 some of the ships sank with great loss of life, and diseases were rife amongst the survivors on arrival in the unsanitary conditions of refugee camps. According to Professor Williams, 75 percent of the Circassian population was ‘annihilated’.

It is against this background that the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics will be held on 7 February. No doubt Russian security forces and the International Olympic Committee will do their best to ensure that the games go ahead – while supporters of the Circassian cause have pledged to do theirs to prevent them. David Satter, Russian analyst on CNN, accused the IOC of irresponsibility in ‘indulging [President] Putin's desire for a propaganda spectacular’. He claimed that Putin made a direct approach to the Committee and pledged $12 billon in preparations, ‘twice what was proposed by the other two candidates’. In fact, according to Businessweek, expenditure on the Sochi games has now exceeded $51 billion, making them the most expensive in Olympic history, far exceeding the $40 billion spent by China on the 2008 summer games.

Whether or not the cost will bring commensurate benefits to Russia, only time will tell. One thing, however, is certain – the Sochi Winter Olympics are providing a golden opportunity for Circassians to bring their historical grievances to the attention of the world.

The Balkan Wars - Centennial Commemoration

I have written a number of posts attempting to balance the ledger of genocide accounts in Anatolia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Professor Justin McCarthy is one historian who continues to publish the results of objective research - not denying anything, but attempting to clarify the context in which events took place. The Turkish Coalition of America posted this on the 100th anniversary of the First Balkan War:

1912-1913 Balkan Wars: Death and Forced Exile of Ottoman Muslims - An Annotated Map

This month TCA observes the 100th Anniversary of the start of the first Balkan War, which broke out on October 8, 1912. The war and those that followed caused immense suffering for all of the people of the Balkans. However, the tragedies suffered by the region’s Ottoman Muslims remain a story largely untold.

To this end, by publishing an annotated map displaying the geography of atrocities committed during the Balkan Wars, including the death and forced exile of approximately 1.5 million Muslims from Ottoman Europe, TCA commemorates the memory of these victims. The map also chronicles the settlement in Eastern Thrace and Western Anatolia of the surviving Ottoman Muslims, who had once represented a majority in their Balkan homelands. Millions of Turks today are the descendants of those who found refuge in Turkey.


Prepared by Justin McCarthy, Professor of History at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, the map is a powerful visual tool to better understand the devastating effects of the Balkan Wars on Ottoman Muslim communities.

"During the Balkan Wars many groups suffered, but those who suffered most were the Muslims, especially the Turks. 27% of the Muslims of the conquered areas of Ottoman Europe, mostly Turks, died as a result of these wars - the worst civilian mortality witnessed in any modern European war,” said Professor McCarthy. “I hope that this map will demonstrate the disastrous fate of these peoples during this time."

TCA is very proud to have supported this publication and we thank Professor McCarthy for his meticulous investigation into the forgotten history of these Ottoman Muslim communities,” said G. Lincoln McCurdy, President of TCA.

“The founders of modern Turkey urged the ravaged survivors of the Balkan Wars, who settled in Anatolia, to look forward, rather than back. This publication is a constructive effort to move away from the double-standards inherent in historical accounts that overlook Ottoman Muslim losses during this period when the Ottoman Empire was on the verge of collapse," stated G. Lincoln McCurdy.

The map can be downloaded in pdf format here. 
Hard copies can be requested by sending an e-mail to info@tc-america.org

Previously, TCA published a map titled Forced Migration and Mortality in the Ottoman Empire by Prof.Justin McCarthy. This publication can be viewed here

The Circassian Genocide – I’m a Caucasian too!

I was out and about last Sunday, showing a couple of friends from New Zealand around various parts of the city, and my eye was drawn to posters on a subway wall in Karaköy. The text was in Turkish, of course, so it meant little to my visitors, but it was announcing a demonstration planned for 21 May to commemorate the 148^th anniversary of the ‘Circassian Genocide’. Participants will apparently congregate in the big square of Taksim, whence they will march down Istiklal Avenue to the Russian Consulate. There, no doubt, they intend to request politely that Vladimir Putin and his government apologise, and perhaps make some restitution for the displacement, deaths and expropriations that took place in the years leading up to that date in 1864.

Circassian Genocide anniversary poster

I did mention this matter briefly in a previous post, but I have to confess, I wasn’t aware at that stage of the full ramifications. Well, I wouldn’t presume to claim even now that I’ve got everything worked out, but it’s an interesting business for sure, and its effects are still being felt in a part of the world most of us have heard of – though we might have trouble locating it on a map. Anyway, let’s plunge in and see where we end up.

First of all, I’m not much of an expert on Russian history, so I did what I usually do when I feel the need to improve an area of weakness – I ‘googled’ ‘Russian Empire’ and read a few of the suggested sources. Interestingly, none of them made any mention of invading or conquering the Caucasus or Crimean regions. The nearest they came was references to several wars with the Ottoman Empire as a result of which territory was gained and the Empire was expanded southwards.

Now, you can’t really blame the Russians for wanting to expand south and west. I’m sure Russia is a lovely country, but it’s not blessed with harbours and access to warm water seas. Accordingly, in the 18^th century, Tsar Peter the Great succeeded in wresting access to the Baltic from Sweden and established his new capital, St Petersburg. Another Russian ‘Great’ by the name of Catherine continued the drive south towards the Black Sea, and here, it seems, lie the roots of our problem with the Circassians. Most of the Ottoman imperial expansion had been completed a hundred years earlier, and undoubtedly not all of the conquered peoples were totally happy with the new situation. Nevertheless, the Ottomans did allow certain freedoms to their subjects, among them, freedom of language and religion. The Russians, on the other hand, were, evidently, somewhat less accommodating. Lands in the path of their southward expansion were populated largely by Muslims with distinct languages and cultures, and clearly this was not in keeping with the grand plan of a Russian-speaking, Orthodox Christian empire.

I don’t want to get sidetracked from my main subject, but the first people to suffer from the Russians’ grand plan were the Crimean Tatars. Crimea had been part of the Ottoman dominions since the 15^th century, and its inhabitants were mostly Turkic speaking Muslims. After the Russians’ military defeat of the Ottomans in the 1770s, they proceeded to annex Crimea and colonise it with Christian Slavs. It has been estimated that, over the next century, two-thirds of the Tatar population abandoned their homes and emigrated to various parts of the Ottoman Empire, many of them perishing on the way. 

We may imagine that word of this had reached the Tatars’ near neighbours in the Caucasus area, and when they saw signs that the Russians were aiming to move in their direction, they decided to resist. Some resistance they put up, in fact! The Caucasus War, also known as the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, lasted from 1817 until 1864 (the year referred to on those posters we mentioned above). The Circassians were the most organised, most determined and most militarily capable of the Caucasian peoples and their struggle bore the brunt of the Russian invasion. These people, who call themselves Adyghe, are considered to be the indigenous natives of the Caucasus region. In fact their resistance was such that the Russians were unable to subdue them by force of arms alone. The preferred method became a policy of clearance – burning of villages and killing or driving out the Muslim inhabitants. The author, Leo Tolstoy, served with the Russian army in the Caucasus, and the experience seems to have been the catalyst that turned him from a life of wealthy idleness to one of creativity, spirituality, pacifism and renunciation of privilege. One of his quoted observations:

"It had been the custom to rush the auls [mountain villages] by night, when, taken by surprise, the women and children had no time to escape, and the horrors that ensued under the cover of darkness when the Russian soldiers made their way by twos and threes into the houses were such as no official narrator dared describe."

Another contemporary observer, a British consul by the name of Dickson, also reported: "A Russian detachment captured the village of Toobah on the Soobashi river, inhabited by about a hundred Abadzekh [a tribe of Circassians], and after these had surrendered themselves prisoners, they were all massacred by the Russian Troops. Among the victims were two women in an advanced state of pregnancy and five children.

At such a distance of time it is not possible to arrive at an absolute figure for the death toll. Some Circassian historians claim a figure of four million; official Russian reports say perhaps 300,000. Less partisan sources suggest somewhere around a million and a half. Undoubtedly, apart from those killed during the war itself, huge numbers perished as a result of forced migration. Thousands died of hunger and disease after being driven from their villages; thousands more on the Black Sea beaches as they waited for Ottoman ships to ferry them away. More still were drowned when overcrowded vessels sank in passage, and more again after reaching the sanctuary of Ottoman territory in the insanitary conditions that prevailed there. The land, dwellings and possessions they left behind were taken over by Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Cossacks and Georgians, brought in to repopulate and ‘Christianise’ the area. Once again, we may imagine the feelings of anger and resentment these events stirred up, not only in the survivors and refugees themselves, but in the people of the Ottoman areas who listened to their tales of atrocities and suffering, and had to provide for them.

Who else knew what was going on in the Caucasus? Why do we know so little about it? These are pertinent questions. I came across an interesting source while researching this issue: an archive in the National Library of New Zealand, of a newspaper called The NZ Spectator and Cook’s Strait Guardian. In the edition of 17 August 1864, was an article reprinted from the London Times of May 9, based on a report dated 28 April, from Constantinople (Istanbul):

“Official information has been received here of the capitulation of Vardar, the last stronghold of the Circassians, and of the consequent submission of all the tribes. I had occasion in a previous letter to refer to the flood of immigration which was pouring into the Turkish dominions from the Caucasus, and to the defeats which had been experienced by these gallant mountaineers; and although there could be no doubt at that time that the cause of the Circassians was hopeless, there was not sufficient ground for anticipating the extraordinary movement which has since developed itself, and which threatens, unless immediate relief and succour be obtained, to degenerate, as regards these poor people, into an awful disaster. Whether this movement is to be attributed to a panic consequent on defeat, or to the hatred inspired by the Russians, it is rather difficult to determine; but there is no doubt that the three tribes known as the ‘Shabsoukhs’, Oboukhs’ and ‘Abazehs’ have determined to abandon their country to a man, and take refuge in Turkish territory. Already the outflowing tide of emigrants is so great as to place the Turkish Government in the greatest embarrassment. 27,000 of these unfortunate creatures, in the most utter destitution, have poured into Trebizond (Trabzon). The privations of the voyage in a most inclement season have produced disease of the very worst kind among them, which is not only committing fearful ravages in their own famished ranks, but it is extending to the local population. Typhus and smallpox are raging at Trebizonde, and the place is threatened with a famine. The Turkish government is willing and anxious to receive the fugitives, and incorporate them into its own population, but the movement has been so sudden and so extensive that it has been impossible to make provision for the hosts that are daily pouring in. It is calculated that no less than 300,000 will, in the next two to three months, seek shelter in this country . . .”

The British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Sir Henry Bulwer, presented reports to the Prime Minister of the day, Earl Russell. In one such report, dated April 12, 1864, he said:

“The continued advances of the Russians in Circassia, and the ill-treatment experienced by the natives from the Russian troops, have led to an almost complete emigration from the country: 25,000 have already reached Trebizond, and others are attempting to escape in small boats at every risk. The conglomeration of vast quantities of these people, who have no industrial habits, threatens the health and peace of any one locality, and the loss of life which is occasioned by their hazardous attempts to escape from their conquerors is shocking to humanity. The Turkish Government is therefore about sending vessels to Trebizond to remove the emigrants thence, and place them in different parts of the Empire; and it is also in negotiation with the Russian Chargé d’Affaires here, in order to be able to adopt some measures by which those unfortunate people who, after the most heroic attempts in defending the country where they were born, are at last obliged to abandon it, may be able to seek an asylum with safety in the Ottoman dominions.”

It seems reasonably clear, then, that the British Government of the day, and the literate public of remote New Zealand were aware of the events unfolding in the Caucasus region. Perhaps we can excuse their lack of action to alleviate the suffering of the Circassians, or to exert diplomatic pressure on the Russians. White settlers in New Zealand in those years were also engaged in forcefully driving the indigenous Maori people from their land, and suppressing their attempts to defend their way of life. The United States government was doing the same to its Native Americans, and the Redcoats of the British Empire were here, there and everywhere demonstrating to local peoples that resistance to the civilising benefits of empire was useless. It was a scant six years since the Brits had brutally put down what they liked to refer to as ‘The Indian Mutiny’. In the circumstances, it would have been difficult to act self-righteously.

Detailed map of the Caucasus region

Why we have ‘forgotten’ the Russians’ treatment of the Circassians is less easy to explain, when we seem well able to ‘remember’ the Greeks and the Armenians. Could it be that we find it easier to attribute brutality to Muslims than to Christians? Or perhaps Armenians were better able to draw attention to their cause by the use of terror tactics. Who knows? Whatever the case, Russian ethnic cleansing of its Muslim subjects did not end in 1864. In 1943 and 1944, Josef Stalin forcefully ‘relocated’ hundreds of thousands from the Caucasus and Crimea to remote and desolate parts of the Soviet Union, Siberia, Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia, resulting in untold deaths. 

Those Circassian demonstrators in Taksim on 21 May will be commemorating the 148^th anniversary of their final defeat by the Russians – but the legacy of those days continues well into the 21^st century. The population of modern Chechnya is 94 percent Sunni Muslim, and their struggle for independence continues. In neighbouring Dagestan, Ingushetia and North Ossetia, the situation is similar. It is unlikely, however, that Mother Russia will let her Caucasian children go, taking their wealth of oil, natural gas and other minerals with them. It is equally unlikely that President Putin will apologise to the Circassians and offer restitution for their past sufferings. After all, it was pre-Revolutionary Tsarist Russia that did the deed.