Circassian Genocide – World History – Free PDF Download

Circassians

• The Circassians are a Northwest Caucasian ethnic group native to Circassia, many of whom were displaced in the course of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century, especially after the Russo-Circassian War in 1864.
• Many Circassians have been exiled by Russia to lands of the Ottoman Empire, where the majority of them live today.

BACKGROUND

• In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Russian Empire began actively seeking to expand its territory to the South at the expense of the neighboring Ottoman and Qajar empires, and it thus aimed to incorporate the Caucasus into its domain.
• The areas of the Caucasus, those that were never yet conquered by outside empires and where power was not heavily concentrated, proved the hardest for the Russians to incorporate. It was to this category that most of Circassia belonged.
• Circassians, Christianised through Byzantine influence between the 5th and 6th centuries, were often allied with largely Christian Georgia.

BACKGROUND

• In Circassia, the Russians faced disorganized but continuous resistance. While Russia believed it held authority over Circassia based on the Ottomans ceding it in the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople.
• The Circassians considered this invalid, arguing that because their territory had been independent of the Ottomans, leaving Istanbul no right to cede it.
• The Circassians fought the Russians longer than all the other peoples of the Caucasus from 1763–1864.

 RESISTANCE

• The Russian military tried to impose authority by building a series of forts, but these forts in turn became the new targets of raids and indeed a number of times the highlanders actually captured and held the forts.
• With the goal of imposing stability and authority over the whole Caucasus, Russian troops retaliated by destroying villages where resistance fighters were thought to hide, as well as employing assassinations, kidnappings and the execution of whole families.
• Circassians responded by creating a tribal federation encompassing all tribes of the area.These tactics further enraged natives and intensified resistance to Russian rule.

RESISTANCE

• The Russian army was thus frustrated by a combination of highly mobile (often mounted) raiders and evasive guerrillas with superior terrain knowledge.
• The Russians countered the heavy Circassian resistance by modifying the terrain. They laid down a network of roads and cleared the forests around these roads, destroyed native villages, and often settled new farming communities of Russians or pro-Russian Caucasian peoples.
• In the negotiations to formulate the 1856 Treaty of Paris and end the Crimean War that the Kuban river should be the boundary between Russia and Turkey, which would place Circassia outside of Russian rule.

STRUGGLE

• In 1859, three years before the approval of the plan by the Russian government, Russian officials began talks with the Ottomans about the migration of a limited number of emigrants.
• In 1860 the two sides negotiated a treaty for the migration of 40,000-50,000 Circassians, with the Ottoman side being eager for an increase in population.
• With a gathering sense of emergency, on 25 June 1861, leaders of all the Circassian tribes to jointly petition the Western powers for help.
• Ottoman and British delegations both promised recognition of an independent Circassia, as well as recognition from Paris, if they unified into a coherent state, and in response the Circassian tribes formed a national parliament in Sochi, but Russian General Kolyobakin quickly overran Sochi and destroyed it.

 EXPULSION

• In 1862, the proposal to deport the Circassians was ratified by the Russian government, and a flood of refugee movements began as Russian troops advanced.
• Four thousand families from those areas left their homeland around the Kuban river estuary and departed for the Ottoman Empire.
• Although some Circassians went by land to the Ottoman Empire, the majority went by sea, and those tribes which had “chosen” deportation were marched to the ports along the Black Sea by Russian forces.

TILL INDEPENDENCE GENOCIDE

• Although the order given by Tsar Alexander II was to deport the Circassians rather than to massacre them, the Russian commanders were open to the idea of massacring large portions of the Circassian population.
• In April 1862, a group of Russian soldiers slaughtered hundreds of Circassians who had run out of ammunition.
• As the deportations increased, there were not enough Ottoman and Russian vessels to carry all the deportees, even when Ottoman and Russian warships were recruited for the job, and the situation began taking a heavy toll on Ottoman treasuries, as the Ottomans bore the brunt of the task.
• Initially, on 17 May 1863, Tsar Alexander II ruled that “those who chose to emigrate” should pay their own way.

GENOCIDE

• The Ottoman authorities often failed to offer any support to the newly arrived. They were settled in the inhospitable mountainous regions of Inner Anatolia and were employed on menial and exhausting jobs

GENOCIDE

• The Ottoman authorities often failed to offer any support to the newly arrived. They were settled in the inhospitable mountainous regions of Inner Anatolia and were employed on menial and exhausting jobs

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