KENNAN CABLE - The Ahiska Turks: Prisoners of the Soviet and Russian Empires

The conditions the possibility that the KGB arranged the pogroms of the deportation were deplorable: people were to show the Uzbek authorities that the locals could moved by trucks and cattle trains in the depth of not cope with interethnic strife.7 The Soviet army winter with insufficient food, rampant disease, and eventually evacuated the Ahiska and resettled KENNAN CABLE 95 | 2 . [...] Fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh in the early from the economic (stealing Russian jobs, evading 1990s led to another deportation for Ahiska placed taxes) to the criminal (raping Russian boys, dealing there.8 Others went to Southern Russia, where they in drugs) and the political (spying for the United lived in the regions of Belgorod, Kabardino-Balkaria, States). [...] Under the auspices of the International Organization for Migration The Post-Soviet Period (IOM) and the US Department of State, US During the 1990s, the regional authorities in authorities gave asylum to roughly half the Ahiska Krasnodar refused to recognize the presence (10,000 to 15,000) in Krasnodar. [...] to a leadership role with the national movement Russia is drafting the Ahiska at high rates, so Ahiska of Cossack societies, Ahiska Turks are likely on serving in the Ukrainian armed forces may have the list of targets.22 The Ahiska are victims not just to shoot at kin mobilized in Russia—although this of mobilization and death on the front, but also situation is not unique to the Ahiska. [...] government for its continued refusal to facilitate the They endured deportation in 1944, pogroms resettlement of the Ahiska in line with obligations in Uzbekistan in 1989, and Cossack attacks in accepted in 1999 in preparation for admission to Krasnodar in the 1990s and throughout the North the Council of Europe.