CIAO DATE: 03/06

A Presentation of Preliminary Findings and a Roundtable Discussion with Government and Civil Society Actors in Georgia

Abstract

The Meskhetian Turks are one of the last of the national groups of the Soviet Union deported by Stalin in 1943–44, who have not yet been able to return to their native region (in southwest Georgia). Currently numbering some 370–400,000 people, the Meskhetian Turks, following pogroms and multiple displacements, find themselves scattered across vast territories of Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and, most recently, the United States. In some of these countries, the Meskhetian Turks are exposed to ethnic persecution and discrimination, while Georgia, so far, has effectively blocked resettlement to their native region. International actors seeking to address these problems encounter severe difficulties in finding solutions, inter alia, due to a lack of consistent knowledge on the Meskhetian Turks’ own perceptions of their displacement and their visions for future settlement.

The ECMI project, “Between Integration and Resettlement: The Meskhetian Turks”, aims to produce a comprehensive and comparative cross-border study of today’s Meskhetian Turk communities and strives to develop an alternative discourse to the framework maintained by international actors addressing the problems of the Meskhetian Turks, based on an a priori assumption that the Meskhetian Turks desire to return to their region of origin. The project, through the conduct of multidisciplinary research in nine countries, seeks to grasp the complexity of the subject by obtaining a thorough understanding of Meskhetian Turkish identity, migration processes, concepts of ‘home’ and social organization, which can provide the basis for new approaches to find durable solutions to the problems of the Meskhetian Turks.

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