Georgia parliament gives tentative backing to repatriation of
long-persecuted minority
MISHA DZHINDZHIKHASHVILI, AP Worldstream
Published: Jun 22, 2007

Georgian lawmakers gave preliminary backing Friday to legislation
authorizing the repatriation of a long-persecuted largely Muslim
minority who were deported en masse to Central Asia in the 1940s.

Parliament voted 134-14 to pass the bill, introduced by President
Mikhail Saakashvili’s ruling party, which would mainly benefit the
Meskhetian Turks, although it also gives legal authorization for the
repatriation of others "forcibly deported by authorities of the USSR
from Georgia."

Stalin deported the Meskhetian Turks from regions along Georgia’s
border with Turkey to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan during
World War II. In 1989, racial violence broke out in Uzbekistan, with
the Meskhetian Turks and other deported ethnic groups targeted as
outsiders. Many members of the minority fled.

Georgian authorities delayed allowing the Meskhetian Turks to return,
fearing, among other things, violence with ethnic Armenians who moved
into the lands vacated when the largely Muslim group was deported.

Some 20,000 Meskhetian Turks have lived for years in legal limbo in
southern Russia, unable to get official residence permits or to rent
land _ the result of strict anti-immigrant regulations. Thousands were
given refugee status in the United States in 2004 and resettled there.

As a condition of joining the Council of Europe in 1999, Georgia agreed
to guarantee the return by 2011 of the Meskhetian Turks, an estimated
300,00 of which are scattered in several former Soviet republics. About
40,000 are believed to be actively seeking to return to their ancestral
homelands.

The Georgian bill, which must go through two more readings, provides no
financial assistance for resettlement and no guarantee that those
applying for repatriation will be allowed to return. Those returning
must also give up any other citizenship they have, take tests on
Georgian language, history and laws.

Saakashvili supports the measure. However, among Georgians, who are
mainly Christian, there is still deep suspicion of the Meskhetian Turks.

Opposition lawmakers voting against the measure complained that more
should be done to help ethnic Georgian refugees driven out of their
homes in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia during
wars in the 1990s.