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rfmcdonaldPaul Goble writes about one way in which the large Caucasian diaspora in Turkey is trying to make its weight felt.
From the 19th century on, modern Turkey has received large numbers of Muslim refugees fleeing southeastern Europe and the Caucasus ahead Christian nation-states and the Russian Empire.
Leaders of the six-million-strong Circassian community of Turkey met with that country’s President Abdulla Gul this week to press for the reopening of ferry service from Trabzon to the Abkhaz port of Sukhumi, a link that was suspended in 2006 when the CIS imposed an embargo on that breakaway republic.
On Monday, Gul received the leaders of the Caucasus Federation Khase, which unites 56 Circassian groups in Turkey, for 45 minutes to discuss this and Circassian demands for more broadcasting in their by Turkish channels and more Circassian language classes in Turkish universities (www.kafkasfederasyonu.org/haber/tr_basin/2009/070109_bianet.htm and
www.natpress.net/stat.php?id=3756).
After the meeting, Khase general coordinator Dzhumkhur Bal told the media that the reopening of sea communications with Abkhazia was not only possible but vital for his community because now after the August 2008 war, “there is no need for compatriots of Abkhazia [such as the Circassians living in Turkey] to obtain a Russian visa.”
And he added that expanding Circassian broadcasting in Turkey, where TRT-3 now broadcasts seven hours a day in that language was especially important given the increasing attention of his community to what is taking place in Abkhazia and other historically Circassian areas in the northern Caucasus.
From the 19th century on, modern Turkey has received large numbers of Muslim refugees fleeing southeastern Europe and the Caucasus ahead Christian nation-states and the Russian Empire.
[T]he Russian defeat of the Circassians (Çerkezler) in the North Caucasus in 1864 led to an estimated one million Muslim refugees fleeing to the Ottoman Empire.
The gradual contraction of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new states led to millions of Christians and Muslims being uprooted from their Ottoman homelands from the late 19th to early 20th century. Those displaced—many forcibly—included Armenians from eastern Anatolia and Greeks from central and western Anatolia, as well as Muslim Albanians, Bosnians, Pomaks, Tatars, and Turks from the Balkans.
The early years of the Turkish Republic continued to see large movements of people in both directions. Most significant of these was the forced exchange of population between Greece and Turkey in the mid-1920s, involving over a million Greeks from Turkey and almost half a million Muslims and Turks from Greece. The government also established an immigration program encouraging Muslims and Turks from the Balkans to settle in Turkey.
