Meskhetian Return Stirs Georgian Dissent

"For my whole life before I came here, they called me a Georgian," said Aladin Makaridze, who returned to his historical homeland of Akhaltsikhe in southern Georgia, four years ago. "Now everyone is calling me a Turk."

Makaridze's parents were among the tens of thousands of Meskhetian Turks deported to Central Asia in 1944. He left Uzbekistan for Azerbaijan, before finally fulfilling his dream of coming to Meskhetia with his wife and three sons.

He is one of only a tiny number of Meskhetian Turks resident in Georgia - but if many Georgians have their way, the population will not get any bigger.

The majority of the Georgian and Armenian population in the southern Samtskhe-Javakheti region, from where the Meskhetians were deported from 60 years ago, is strongly opposed to their return.

Ivane Apriamashvili, a student who lives near Makaridze, told IWPR that he has had no problems with the returnees, "But they're not like other neighbours," he said.

"They don't make an effort to get to know us - the whole Makaridze family is very closed. In any case, whatever they say, I don't think of them as Georgians."

Temur Gogoladze, an engineer in the town of Akhaltsikhe, is more outspoken. "If Tbilisi insists on resettling the Turks and dares to begin this process, all of us, with the Armenians, will take up our axes," he said.

"We won't allow a repeat of the nightmare which our grandfathers and parents lived through. You lot in Tbilisi will get another Abkhazia in Javakheti."

Views like this are a reason - or perhaps an excuse - for the Georgian government to stall on the commitments it has made on the Meskhetian Turk issue.

In 1998 the Council of Europe made the repatriation of the Meskhetians a condition of Georgia's accession to the institution. The council gave Tbilisi two years to pass a law on repatriation, three years to begin the actual return and twelve years overall to complete the entire process.

More than four years later, that schedule is in tatters as while the draft law on repatriation has been drawn up, it has not yet been put to parliament. Meanwhile, only 649 Meskhetians have returned to Georgia at their own peril, with only eight families resettling in Samtskhe-Javakheti itself.

The Georgian government responds to criticism by saying that it is still coping with the problem of more than 200,000 refugees from the war in Abkhazia, and that it has no land to accommodate tens of thousands of returnees.

Another argument - not cited by Georgian officials but mentioned frequently in parliament and in Samtskhe-Javakheti - is a fear that the returning Meskhetians could become a destabilising political force on Georgia's border with Turkey.

"Some Meskhetian associations, such as the Russian-based Vatan or Akhskhalila in Turkey, are already advocating a Meskhetian autonomous region in Javakheti," claimed Merab Beridze, professor of the Meskhetian Branch of Tbilisi State University in Akhaltsikhe.

Beridze told IWPR that, prior to the 1944 deportation, there had been a history of ethnic strife between Meskhetians and local Armenians and Georgians.

Another Georgian academic from the area, the ethnographer Tina Ivelashvili, says she has been recording the oral history of the region. "Muslim Georgians persecuted their Christian compatriots. I have thousands of stories and facts on file to prove it," she said.

"With a heritage like this a new ethnic conflict in Georgia would be inevitable," she went on.

Meskhetians themselves dispute these assertions. "I would not attribute Georgians' hostility to the repatriation to their 'historical memory', which, I'm sure, would reveal a lot of very diverse and contradictory facts," said Marat Baratashvili, a Meskhetian who is head of the Union of Georgian Returnees non-governmental organisation, NGO.

"The problem is that no one in Georgia really has any information about what actually happened and what the return of Meskhetian Turks would be like."

Baratishvili said that the deportation of his people did not even rate a mention in Georgian history textbooks, or a stand in the local history museum in Akhaltsikhe.

"Georgian parliamentarians like to say there is no land in Javakheti to accommodate the returnees," he went on. "My colleagues and I have explored the entire region - and the 72 villages evacuated by Stalin are still uninhabited."

One pressing problem is that no one seems to know exactly what the full implications of repatriation may be. Estimates of those who might wish to return go as high as 200,000.

Arif Yunusov, an Azerbaijani scholar who has studied the issue, believes the actual number of returnees would actually be far lower. "There is an idea in Georgia that once they open the doors, the country will be overrun with Turks," he said.

"The reality is that many - especially the younger generation - will not want to uproot and start all over again in Georgia. But they should not be denied the theoretical right to do so. I think no more than 10,000 of the Meskhetian population in Azerbaijan will wish to return."

Meanwhile the draft law on repatriation, which has received the approval of both the justice ministry and Council of Europe experts, is still lying on desks in the presidential administration, awaiting a positive verdict.

"I believe the draft law on repatriation is ready for parliament," deputy justice minister Zurab Ezugbaya told IWPR.

"But I don't think this is a good time to put the document to vote. With less than a year to go before parliamentary elections, the deputies are unlikely to pass an unpopular law like this."

Giorgy Chkheidze of the Association of Young Lawyers of Georgia, who is one of the co-authors of the bill said that by not considering the new legislation, the authorities were simply delaying the inevitable. "We'll have to tackle this one way or another, whether to become part of the wider European community or simply to prove we are responsible human beings," he said.

"The problem can be solved if two conditions are met: a rational mechanism for repatriation is adopted and information about the situation is spread that is realistic and not hysterical."

But some Georgian parliamentarians are already upping the rhetoric over the issue of the Meskhetians' return. "We will greet wolves like wolves," deputy Guram Sharadze told a press conference recently.

Lela Inasaridze is head of the NGO Gulis Meskheti in Akhaltsikhe. Margarita Akhvlediani in Tbilisi and Dan Brennan in Azerbaijan contributed to this report.