GENOCIDE OF THE CIRCASSIANS
David Hamilton
Independent
11 April 09
UK
Robert Fisk is, of course, right to keep reminding us about the
Armenian genocide of 1915, which has left an indelible stain on the
Young Turk government of Enver Pasha (report, 6 April). But he risks
ungenerosity in dismissing as "usual weasal cliches" the statement
by the White House security spokesman Mike Hammer that "the US can
help Turkey and Armenia come to terms with the past".
The Turks, no less than the Armenians, are just now awakening from a
long nightmare of censored history. It should not be unduly offensive
to Vladimir Putin, with his immaculate KGB credentials, to point out
that the greatest crime of the later tsars, overshadowing all other
pogroms, was the genocide of the Circassians or Cherkassians, in the
1860s and 1870s. These people used to inhabit the Black Sea coastline
between Georgia and the Crimea. The ethnic Abkhazians are a remnant.
The Circassian masses that fled to the Ottoman Empire can only have
been too relieved to be allowed to call themselves Turks, something
no self-respecting Armenians or Kurds will ever allow themselves to
be known as, in the same way the Welsh and Scots would never answer
to being English.
The Circassians were nomads, scarcely Muslim, profoundly pagan,
and in considerable necessity. The problem of their resettlement
was eventually solved by the Armenian genocide. Thus it was that the
denial of one genocide created the conditions for the next.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
