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.
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| A little slice of Caucasian paradise click for more |
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-16th 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.
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| 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 150th 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.
