A Forgotten Genocide, A Lost People

It is a genocide which I never knew about.

A genocide of a people whose former lands I have visited without ever knowing they existed.

 
A genocide of a people of whom I have only heard in history books but never met in person.

A genocide which you cannot look up in wikipedia for noone has bothered to write an article about it.

 
It is the Genocide of the Circassians perpetrated by the Russian Empire in the 1860s, only 50 years before the Ottoman massacres against Armenians.

Today Circassia is long gone, but take a look at a map of Russia dating from the early-nineteenth century and you will find Circassia clearly marked � a country in the north-western Caucasus and along the north-eastern shore of the Black Sea. 

Circassians are an ancient people with a very long history, whose origins can be traced back as far as the 8^th century BC.

They were Christianized under Byzantine influence in the 5^th and 6^th century. While many of their neighbours, were Islamized under Arab influence as early as the 8^th century, Circassians remained resilient and loyal to their faith. They entered an alliance with the Georgians, whom they regarded as the same people and constituting a single Christian island in a Muslim sea.

Muslim influence among the Circassians dates no earlier than the 17^th century, and only in the eighteenth century, under the threat of impending Russian invasion, did they accept Islam, with a view to facilitating a defensive alliance with Ottoman Turkey and the Crimean Khanate.

The Circassians fought agains the Russian conquest for over a century from 1763 to 1864. Their final defeat in the 1860s led to massacre and forced deportation, mainly across the Black Seat to Turkey, in the course of which a large proportion of them perished.  Since that time the great majority of people of Circassian decent (90%) have lived in exile, mostly in Turkey, Jordan and elsewhere in the Middle East. Only isolated remnants, currently 3-4 thousand, remain in Russian and other parts of the post-Soviet region. During the last decades of the tsarist regime, the emptied and devastated Circassian lands were resettled by Russian, Ukrainian, Armenian and other colonists.

The Russian invasion of Circassia  was accompanied by the total annihilation of the Circassian tribes Pskhu, Akhtsipsou and Aibg and Jigit to the last man, woman and child. The remainder of the Circassians were to be deported to the Ottoman Empire. The deportations began on 28 May 1864.  They took place under horrendous conditions. The Russian historian Berzhe bore witness to the state of the Circassians even as they awaited deportation on the Black Sea shore:

I shall never forget the overwhelming impression made on me by the mountaineers in Nvorissiisk Bay, where about seventeen thousand of them were gathered on the shore. The late, inclement and cold time of the year, the almost complete absenve of means of subsistence and the epidemic of typhus and  smallpox , raging among them made their situation desperate. And indeed, whose heart would not be touched on seeing, for example, the already stiff corpse of a young Circassian woman lying in rags on the damp ground under the open sky with two infants, one struggling in his death throes while the other sought the assuage his hunger at his dead mother�s breast? And I saw not a few such scenes.

Those that had survied the ordeal thus far were herded on by Russians soldiers en mass on to barges and small Turkish and Greek ships, loaded with several times passengers as they could carry. Many sank and their passengers drowned in open sea. For those who survived the voyage, conditions on arrival in Turkey were no less horrific. The arrangements made by the Turkish government to receive and resettle the migrants were grossly inadequate.

Historians estimate that over a million Circasssians have lost their lives in the 1860s for the duration of just 3 years.

George Ditson, the first American to visit Circassia, in a book dedicated to Prince Vorontsov cites the Russian ruler of the Caucasus as saying:

These Circassians are just like your American Indians - as untamable and uncivilized ... and owing to their natural energy of character, extermination only would keep them quiet.

Today, the Circassian Genocide is not only unrecognized, but is mostly forgotten. The final stage of Genocide, which is oblivion, is now complete.

Source:
http://www.circassianworld.com/A_Forgotten_Genocide.pdf

PS: I visited Karachaevo-Cherkeskaya Respublika, which encompasses parts of Circassia, in 1999. Then I had no idea of what had take place on those land 2 centuries ago.  

Bravo....

well written and certainly evocative in substance... I 'felt' your emotionalism thru out...and I thank you for sharing this.