Thursday, June 21, 2007

Will Georgia Allow the Meskhetian Turks to Return Home?

Recently the Georgian government introduced a bill into parliament that would allow tens of thousands of Meskhetian Turks to return to their ancestral homeland. The story from Turkish Daily News can be found here. Stalin deported the Meskhetian Turks from Georgia to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in November 1944. I have written about this ethnic cleansing here. The Soviet government did not allow the Meskhetian Turks to return home as it did the Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush and Balkars. Instead they have remained dispersed in exile across Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and since 2004 the US. I have some more information on the subject in this post. The Meskhetian Turks have now been forcibly separated from their homeland for over 62 years.

No comments: