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In the name of Allah the Merciful and Forgiving!
Dear Compatriots,
Today, on 23 February, we again remember the tragedy of the Chechen and Ingush peoples when 66 years ago all Vainakhs were deported to Central Asia. As a result of that monstrous deed hundreds of thousands died of starvation, cold, disease and from the bullets of their executioners. To this day every Vainakh feels the pain of that tragedy personally because there is no family in Chechnya or Ingushetia which did not lose some of its nearest and dearest in those years. The pain and those grievous losses will never be mere history for us, and nothing and nobody will ever erase them from our memory. What the Chechens and other peoples of the Caucasus have endured has woven our past and present together into a single tragic, tangled skein.
Russian historians call the expulsion of the peoples of the North Caucasus the ‘Stalin deportation’; and that description of the genocidal operation has been adopted, without recognition of its hidden agenda, even by the victims. That hidden agenda is, however, to shift responsibility for the crime, in the eyes of the world community and of the victims of the genocide themselves, from the Russian state to Stalin personally.
Historical documents present a different picture. The democratic constitution drafted by one of the leaders and principal ideologists of the Russian Decembrists shows that the notion of deporting the peoples of the Caucasus was a fully articulated doctrine of Russian political thinking in the early 19th century. Here is what the Decembrist liberals had in mind for the Caucasians, including the Chechens, in their draft constitution:
“All the Caucasian peoples are to be separated into two categories: the peaceful and the unruly. The former are to be left in their dwellings and afforded Russian governance and institutions, while the latter should be forcibly resettled in the Russian interior, dispersing them in small numbers to every Russian sub-district. Russian settlements should be established in the Caucasus, and the land taken from the former unruly inhabitants should be redistributed to the Russian settlers so as to expunge all trace of its former inhabitants from the Caucasus and transform the region into a tranquil, well governed province of Russia.”
The originator of the plan to deport the Caucasian peoples and subsequently repopulate the ‘liberated’ lands with Russian colonists was not the bloody dictator Joseph Stalin but the liberal and democrat, Pavel Pestel. It has to be said that the attitude towards the Caucasus of Tsar Nicholas I, who hanged Pestel as one of the five principal ringleaders of the Decembrist uprising of 1825, was extremely close to that of the democrat he executed. This is evident from the renowned rescript Nicholas I sent to his governor in the Caucasus, General Paskevich: “Having thus accomplished one glorious task (the war against Turkey), you must now embark upon another, in my eyes no less glorious and in respect of the advantage which will directly accrue, of much greater import - the pacification for all time of the mountain peoples or destruction of the insubordinate.”
The secret order of Pavel Grachev, Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation and director of a group of Russian ministers whose departments were involved in imposing ‘constitutional order’ in Chechnya in December 1994, testifies to the continuity of Russia’s state policy towards the Chechens:
“To N.D. Yegorov, V.F. Yerin and S.V. Stepashin
On the basis of Secret Directive of the President of the Russian Federation “Measures to restore constitutional legality and order in the Chechen Republic”, preparations are being made to deploy one division of Interior Troops and two divisions from the Ministry of Defence to the Chechen Republic.
It has been decided to take advantage of the anticipated mass, but disorganised, resistance by implementing mass deportation of the local population under the guise of orderly evacuation from the theatre of military operations to other regions of the Russian Federation which will be identified separately.
Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation and Director of the Group of Army Generals, P.S. Grachev.”
In Russia tsars, general secretaries, and presidents have succeeded one another, as have their regimes. The monarchy was replaced by bolshevism, which in turn was replaced by democracy. Russia’s underlying policy towards the Chechens, ‘subjugate or destroy’, has, however, never changed. The lengthy Caucasian War of the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in the death of more than half the Chechen population. The communists’ hatred of the insubordinate Chechens cost the lives, according to various estimates, of as many as 70% of our people from repression, starvation and the cold during transportation in unheated cattle trucks in the severe frosts of February 1944. The modern wars have brought about the physical annihilation of up to 250,000 Chechens, including 40,000 children under the age of 12. More than 300,000 Chechens, seeking to protect their families from destruction, have dispersed all over the world. ‘Subjugate or destroy’: every generation of Chechens for the past three centuries has been on the receiving end of Russia’s unchanging policy.
Today too the Chechen people is oppressed by a regime of occupation and deprived of all opportunity to take political initiatives. We know, however, that hundreds of thousands of Chechens and tens of thousands of Ingushes are living beyond the borders of our Fatherland. It is the Wainakh diaspora in Europe and Asia which must become the nucleus for a regeneration and consolidation of our people in order never again to allow tragedies on the scale of the 1944 genocide to take place in the lands of the Caucasus. There are more than 300,000 of us, but let us not forget the time when just three sons of the Vainakh people, - Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, Khamid Ozbek, and Salavdi Gugayev, - were outstandingly successful in compelling the Kremlin's rulers to return the Vainakhs to their homeland.
Dear Compatriots, we must set aside our personal grudges and ambitions and unite to liberate our Fatherland. The times have placed historic tasks before our people, which it is our duty to accomplish.
Dala bart tskh’a” boila vai!
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