The Moscow Times, Russia
June 18 2007

Exuberant Patriotism or Dangerous Xenophobia

By Matthew Collin

The legacy of Josef Stalin’s predilection for uprooting ethnic groups
and brutally shifting them around the Communist empire still has the
power to spark conflict in the Caucasus. The latest political scuffle
erupted in Georgia last week, over the issue of the repatriation of
the Meskhetian Turks. Tens of thousands of these people were expelled
from Georgia back in 1944 and transported in cattle trucks to Central
Asia. Thousands are believed to have died of cold or starvation
during the horrific journey east. Their tragic story doesn’t end
there; in 1989, many were forced to leave their homes again after an
outbreak of ethnic violence in Uzbekistan.

The Georgian government has just introduced draft legislation that
will allow some of the Meskhetian Turks and their descendants to
return, fulfilling a human rights commitment that Georgia made years
ago. But some people are distinctly unhappy about the suggestion that
thousands of Muslims could be on their way home to the villages of
Meskhetia, near the Turkish border.

The Conservative Party says Georgia has enough problems with
separatists without Turks coming back and demanding their own
language schools, regional autonomy, and maybe somewhere down the
line, unity with Turkey. "They are speaking in Turkish, their
religion is Islam, and we are not sure that they will be loyal to
Georgia’s government and territorial integrity," said leading
Conservative Kakha Kukava. This isn’t anti-Muslim prejudice, Kukava
insisted — it’s just that Georgia is a small, relatively poor
country that can’t even cope with the 200,000 or so refugees from the
separatist conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The line between exuberant patriotism and outright xenophobia can be
thin in a relatively new state like Georgia, which still fears that
its identity and independence is under threat from outsiders. The
proliferation of Chinese-owned shops in Georgia over the past year
has brought some ugly sentiments to the surface. One admittedly
marginal party leader recently "joked" that if a Chinese couple went
to bed at night, there would be four of them in the morning. More
mainstream politicians have also made unpleasant statements about
Chinese immigration, some of them using the kind of language that
ends political careers in Western Europe.

President Mikheil Saakashvili often stresses that Georgia’s many
ethnicities should live together in Utopian bliss. "I will be an
Azeri for those who hate Azeris, and I will be an Armenian for those
who hate Armenians. And despite this, I will remain 100 percent
Georgian," he said recently. Unfortunately for Saakashvili, by no
means do all of his compatriots think the same way.

Matthew Collin is a Tbilisi-based journalist.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress