Window on Eurasia: Russian Region Persecutes Armenian Muslims
Paul Goble
[email protected]
Tartu, May 11 – Officials in Krasnodar kray, a Russian region in
the north Caucasus, have refused for the fourth time to register the
cultural organization of the Khemshils, a small group of Armenian speakers
who practice Sunni Islam and who were among those deported by Stalin to
Central Asia at the end of World War II.
That has prompted an organization of their co-ethnics and
co-religionists in Armenia itself to appeal to the Russian ambassador in
Yerevan to get Moscow to intervene in this case and overrule the regional
officials who seem intent on preventing the Khemshils from gaining official
registration and thus being able to live a normal life.
As a result, this case, involving an ethnic community that
numbers no more than 1600 according to the 2002 Russian Federation census,
threatens to spill over into an international one involving not only Moscow
and Yerevan but quite possibly the leaders of traditionally Muslim countries
among the post-Soviet states.
The current situation has been described by the Regnum news
agency whose report was expanded upon by the Islam.Ru website last week
(). The facts of the case appear to be
the following:
Since 2000, the Khemshils of Krasnodar have tried four times to
register with the authorities. Each time they have been refused with
officials explaining that they have made mistakes in their application. In
the most recent case where the authorities gave this excuse, their refusal
was handed back to the Khemshils on May 3rd but dated May 4th.
The Amshen organization in Armenia, which unites the Khemshils
there, decided to appeal to the Russian ambassador there to have Moscow to
help out. But neither they nor the Khemshils in Krasnodar appear to be very
optimistic about their chances for success via this channel.
Indeed, they suspect, according to the words of the appeal
published by Regnum, that „by such actions, the representatives of the Main
Administration of the Federal Registration Service for Krasnodar kray are
creating a precedent for the appearance of yet another people who left
Russia as political refugees’ and thus lack rights that other residents
have.
And one indication of the level of their despair is the fact
that the Khemshils of Krasnodar kray are even now working with the
International Migration Organization to organize their resettlement to the
United States just as the IMO is currently working toward for Meskhetian
Turks and Kurmandzh-Kurds living in the Kuban region.
Should the Armenian Muslims of Krasnodar in fact emgrate to the
United States, that would be only the latest twist in their complicated
history. For more background on this group and its problems, see the report
on the status of ethnic minorities in Krasnodar at
Armenians who converted to Islam called themselves „Amshinli’
(„Amshentsy’), and those of them living in Central Asia and the Russian
Federation, identify themselves as „Emshil’ – which according to the rules
of Russian phonetics becomes „Khemshil.’
According to the Kars peace treaty of 1921, several villages in
Khopsk kray where the Khamshils lived were joined to Adzharia in what is now
Georgia. Then in 1944, Stalin deported them along with other groups in the
region to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan from which they returned only in the
late 1950s.
Since that time, some 1500 Armenian-speaking Sunni Muslims have
been living in the Apsheron and Belorechensk districts of Krasnoyarsk kray,
perhaps their last stop on the territory of what was once the Russian Empire
and the Soviet Union before they move on to the United States.