This English version is automatically translated by artificial intelligence from the original Turkish texts published at apiscanberk.blogspot.com. The translation may contain errors or inaccuracies; please consult the Turkish original when in doubt.
During my high school years, in Antakya's Armutlu neighborhood, a friend of mine had gifted me a book; Mikhail Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy. This was not the first anarchist philosophy text I had read, nor would it be the last; but there are books that leave not just a thought in one's mind, but a question that would not be erased for years—it was one of those. There was a sentence I encountered somewhere in the book, which I still carry in my memory today: "A person is strong only when they stand upon their own truth, when they speak and act with their deepest convictions. Then, no matter the situation they are in, they always know what to say and what to do." “Defeated, he may fall, but he can cast a stain neither upon himself nor upon his cause.” I am conveying this sentence as I remember it; translation differences between editions and its exact place in the original text need to be compared separately. However, what concerns me here is not merely the bibliographic accuracy of a quote; it is its moral weight, which confronts a person with their own history. I already suspect that our older brothers from the sixties, seventies, and eighties generation knew Bakunin even if they hadn't read his book, and that those who didn't love him at least knew his name; surely there are those who love him, who read him, who spent their youth debating with him—my words are not directed at them. Among our younger siblings, there are undoubtedly those who know him; yet, I must say with regret that I suspect the number of those who do not is greater. At the same time, it does not cross my mind to underestimate the new generation's capacity to access information; the information we spent years searching for on library shelves, in photocopy shops, and on the dusty tables of bookstores, they can find, compare, and re-question in a matter of seconds. It is enough for them to type "Who is Mikhail Bakunin?" into an AI-powered search engine; information stretching on as a Russian revolutionary, anarchist thinker, critic of the state, and the controversial and influential figure of the First International will appear before them. A significant portion of this may be true; but let us also state that no machine should be substituted for an unquestioned, infallible court of history. Accessing information and taking moral responsibility before the truth are not the same thing. The story I am going to tell you starts right here; because I have no intention of writing an encyclopedic summary of Bakunin’s life, nor of turning the feeling left in me by the book I read years ago into a romantic memory. Rather, I want to spread the fabric of that word over history and see whose shoulders it suits and on whose shoulders it turns into a shroud of shame. Words are such a fabric that they need no body; a person can wear one themselves, make someone else wear it, or sometimes, while thinking they are covering their own nakedness, they are left exposed in all their moral wretchedness. When we hear the name Bakunin, we often recall only the grand objection leveled against the state, authority, the church, and domination. Yet, sometimes the most astonishing aspect of history is the hearth from which an objection arises. The emergence of one of the world's most powerful anti-statist thinkers from an aristocratic family that had been in the state service of Tsarist Russia is a contradiction worth pondering on its own; yet for Circassia, this contradiction has a heavier, more burning, and less discussed face. Because when we trace the Bakunin surname, we encounter not only revolutionary pamphlets, European exiles, and political polemics, but also the diverging traces of a family history that extends to the recognition, classification, and siege of Circassia by the Russian state apparatus, and to the military conquest of the Caucasus. Let us especially underline this here: Not everyone bearing the same surname is the perpetrator of the same politics; kinship in itself is not proof of complicity. A person's historical responsibility should be evaluated not according to their pedigree, but according to their deeds, what they advocated, and the powers they stood against. Yet precisely for this reason, the story of the Bakunin family is important; for it will show us that lineage does not impose a destiny upon a person, and that history also tests individuals against their heritage. Let us go back to the mid-eighteenth century. As the Russian Empire sought to understand the peoples, passes, social relations, and political orders of the Caucasus, it was not collecting this intelligence merely as the innocent notes of a curious scholar; like any state wishing to expand its borders, it was well aware of the power of knowledge to generate authority. In 1743, the name of Vasily Mikhailovich Bakunin appears around the Russian College of Foreign Affairs, alongside information compiled from Kabardian notables and other Caucasian representatives. These records also describe the Abadzex and the Shapsugs. It is stated that the Abdzakhs had no rulers, with elders playing a role in governance; it is noted that the Shapsugs had their own distinct language and a similar system of governance. Here, we need to emphasize how two seemingly ordinary observations actually carry profound political significance. For today, against those who attempt to portray Circassians throughout history as a people devoid of the capacity for self-governance and acquainted with order only upon falling under the protection of a great empire, the empire's own diplomatic records bear traces of a different social reality. Those people were not masterless crowds waiting for the Tsar to bestow upon them a political life; they possessed their own social authorities, traditional laws, decision-making methods, and relations of sovereignty established with the land they inhabited. Of course, these records are not direct observation logs kept by a Russian official visiting Circassian villages, but rather the accounts given by representatives who came to St. Petersburg, as recorded within the imperial bureaucracy. Furthermore, the absence of a central ruler does not mean that there was no law, rule, assembly, and moral order in society. On the contrary, while researching the historical importance of Xabze and the traditions of social deliberation, one must be careful precisely against this conceptual fallacy. But our fundamental question is this: By what right can a state render the will of the communities it faces null and void after learning that they possess a distinct political life of their own? If the freedom of a people depends on another state recognizing it, then what is at hand is not freedom, but merely a temporary permission granted by the strong. While it would be historically incorrect to present Vasily Bakunin's records as a direct order of conquest, it is not difficult to see, on the other hand, that the bureaucratic world in which these records were produced was part of an imperial interest over the Caucasus that would steadily expand. While for the Tsardom the names of the mountains, the locations of the passes, the relations between tribes, and the administration of villages turned into strategic information, for the people living in those mountains, the same geography was not merely a border drawn on a map; it was the soil of their dead, the language of their children, the voice of their councils, and the material embodiment of their freedom. A place that fit into a few lines in one side's report was the entire world of the other side. This is precisely where one of the greatest tragedies of Circassian history emerges: the expansionist calculation of a state is written over the existential right of a people. In the lineage of Vasily Bakunin, we see Mikhail Vasilyevich Bakunin, and following him, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Bakunin; the revolutionary Mikhail, born in 1814, belongs to the next generation of this family history. Thus we learn that from a family whose name appeared in the state bureaucracy even before the final destruction of Circassia, there emerged a thinker who would later question the state itself as an institutionalized form of domination. However, let us not turn the story into a moral fable at this point. We have no direct document stating that every decision made by Mikhail’s father or elders became the subject of a personal settling of scores by the young revolutionary. Nor is it correct to transform his intellectual transformation into an imaginary text of revenge written against his own family. Yet, the facts have no need whatsoever for such romanization; for the political divergence witnessed across different branches of the same family tree is sufficiently shattering as historical truth itself. On one side, the state’s desire to learn, record, and govern the world; on the other, a mindset rejecting that state’s dominion over human will. On one side, service, rank, title, and the continuity of the empire; on the other, a philosophy that questions the legitimacy of obedience, rejects the sanctity of the state, and defends that freedom cannot be bestowed from above. Moreover, the second major trace of the Bakunin surname in the Caucasus comes not from bureaucratic records, but from the heart of war. In 1841, General Ilya Modestovich Bakunin appears before us in the Avar region of Dagestan, during the Russian military campaign around Tselmes, where Hadji Murad had taken refuge. We must not lose sight of the geographical distinction here: Tselmes is not Western Circassia, nor can those resisting there be declared Circassian simply because they were Caucasian. The way to recount the intertwined histories of the Caucasian peoples is not to conflate their distinct identities. Yet this distinction does not diminish the significance of the event in terms of imperial history. Russian forces demand the surrender of Hadji Murad; the community that sheltered him refuses to hand over the person entrusted to their care. An ethic of asylum and protection rises up against a command imposed by military force. The Russian forces are forced to retreat; General Bakunin is severely wounded and dies shortly after. What truly interests me in this event is not a childish joy over the defeat of a general, but how an order whose life is built upon the legitimacy of rank, state duty, and military command is tested against the mountain villagers' own understanding of honor. Human life is lost on all sides of war; death does not automatically create justice. Yet the truth that those who view history solely through the empire's casualty lists fail to understand is this: what the highlanders chose to protect was not merely a single person, but a moral boundary determined by their own free will. Protecting the man whom the state demanded be surrendered was a decision that could cost them dearly; nevertheless, the meaning of this decision rested upon a claim to dignity above all calculations. And there is another striking detail here: General Ilya Modestovich and the revolutionary Mikhail’s blood brother Ilya Alexandrovich are not the same person. Mikhail’s brother also served in the Russian army, in the Mingrelian Jaeger Regiment in the Caucasus. However, to present him as the perpetrator of a specific massacre without providing reliable records regarding which operations against Circassian villages he participated in would be to imitate, in reverse, the methods of the historical denialism we fight against. Our truth has no need for such intellectual laziness. It is heavy enough to state this: Within the immediate family circle of a man who developed one of history's most radical critiques of state authority, there was a brother who served in the military organization of the very same empire in the Caucasus. The juxtaposition of these divergent lives shows not that a lineage is inherently good or evil, but rather that, under the same historical conditions, people can make opposing moral and political choices against one another. Thus Mikhail Bakunin, who appears in the middle of the story, becomes important not because he condemned every member of his own family, but because he represents an intellectual break that defends personal freedom against the sanctity of the state. Moreover, his life has shown that disobedience is not just a pretty-looking word on bookshelves. Prosecuted, arrested, imprisoned, exiled, escaped, and having rejoined political struggles due to his revolutionary activities, he faced defeat, loneliness, poverty, and fierce conflicts within his own political circle. We do not have to accept every word of his as true, every political choice as flawless, or every thought as indisputable. Indeed, defending freedom means not turning a thinker into an idol, but being able to criticize even his thoughts when necessary. However, it must be acknowledged that Bakunin did not fit into the narrow horizon of a selective opposition that criticizes the power of the state only when it is in the hands of a rival state. In a text he wrote to his comrades around the Jura Federation in 1872, he argued that he would not object to the condemnation of the Russian Empire’s conquests, but that conquest should be rejected regardless of which state carries it out. The context of these lines is the debate among European socialists; it would not be accurate to present them as evidence that Mikhail had directly participated in the Circassian national movement. A Russian revolutionary, stating that he was ready to sign with both hands the condemnations directed at Russia’s conquests, was reminding that criticizing the crimes of one’s own state is not hostility toward one’s own people. Sometimes, the greatest good that can be done for a people’s future is not to produce justifications for the state crimes in its past. For this reason, we commemorate 1864 not merely as the end date of a war long past, but as the symbol of the great catastrophe that shattered Circassia’s population, territory, and historical continuity. The evacuation of the villages in Western Circassia, the driving of people to the coasts, forced deportations to the opposite shores of the Black Sea, epidemics, starvation, death, and torn-apart lineages constitute a social devastation too immense to be fitted into the footnote of any military victory celebration. While the definition of this devastation as genocide is a subject of historical and legal debates, within the Circassian collective memory, it is not merely a choice of words, but a struggle to name the perpetrator and the true nature of what was experienced. On the contrary, the greatest strength of a demand for justice spanning over a century and a half is its meticulousness regarding verifiable historical truth. When we place an army, a general, a diplomat, a revolutionary, and a people within the same historical sentence, we must meticulously distinguish who did what. Because colonization does not occur solely through armed campaigns; the language that classifies knowledge, the law that makes domination appear natural, the bureaucracy that regulates settlement policy, and the historiography that gives conquest the name of civilization also constitute different faces of this process. However, demonstrating the existence of a historical relationship and attributing personal agency are distinct responsibilities. The surprising mirror that the Bakunin family presents to us shines precisely when we preserve this distinction. In the same family, we encounter a diplomat keeping records on the political organization of Circassians, a general participating in a military expedition in the Caucasus, a soldier serving in the Caucasus, and a revolutionary who condemned the conquests of the Russian Empire on principle. When we place each of them within their own historical context, the truth that heritage does not automatically determine the individual becomes clear. Now it is possible to bring the issue to the present day with a more pressing question: While Mikhail, hailing from a Russian aristocratic family, could consider opposing the state’s conquests as part of moral consistency, how is it to be explained that a Circassian, whose ancestors defended their homeland against those conquests, remains silent today in the face of narratives glorifying those same conquests? Here, I am not placing the name of any lineage in the crosshairs; because to think that all members of a Circassian clan must be on the same political line is to fall into another authoritarianism that demands obedience through ancestry. People thinking differently about history, forming friendships with Russians, loving the Russian language, drawing nourishment from Russian literature, or developing democratic relations with Russian society is, of course, not a moral problem in and of itself. Indeed, it is an essential necessity for a Circassian politics that claims the cause of freedom to be able to defend its own historical justice without generating hostility toward other peoples. My words are directed at those who, hiding behind the guise of friendship, legitimize the occupation of Circassia; those who deny the catastrophe experienced by their ancestors; those who assign ahistoricity to their own people wherever the imperial narrative sees fit; and those who diminish their own collective memory in exchange for political opportunity. One does not relate to their own history merely to feel pride; when necessary, one interrogates it, critiques it, and accepts its errors as well. Yet, turning the devastation suffered by one's own people into a gift of civilization just to please the powerful of today is not critical historiography. This is the liquidation of truth with our own hands. A Circassian being in favor of peace with Russia does not require them to justify the conquest of Circassia. The desire of the peoples living in the Caucasus today for security, equality, peace, and a democratic future does not entail an obligation to whitewash what happened in the past. Peace is not the product of amnesia, but of recognizing one another as equal subjects. One cannot declare one's own people as brothers by first denying their existence. One cannot sit at the protocol table of a victory that does not belong to them and applaud the defeat of their own elders as a civilizational achievement; of course one can applaud it, but one cannot expect this to be called historical consciousness or honorable representation. Because representation is not merely attending meetings while carrying the name of a community; it is not sacrificing the rights, losses, and demands that name has borne throughout history for the political comfort of others. Therefore, the fundamental conflict we face today is not a hostility allegedly innate between Russians and Circassians; it is the ongoing political and moral conflict between the empire's narrative of conquest and the equality of peoples. The language of the empire turns the memory of the conquered first into a detail, then into a flaw, and ultimately into an inconvenience that must be eliminated. According to him, a person who tells their own history disrupts the peace; a people seeking its truth is ungrateful; descendants who utter the names of their dead are stuck in the past. Yet that same language never considers the conquering state’s military ceremonies, heroic tales, and imperial symbols as things of the past. While the victor's memory becomes state tradition, why should the vanquished's memory be considered a dangerous obsession? This inequality is precisely what needs to be questioned. The inability of those who sanctify the memories of military units that marched on other peoples' lands for two hundred years to tolerate the people living there commemorating their struggle for freedom is the language of domination, not history. Moreover, the fact that a people has been defeated does not make them historically unjust. The might of arms does not issue a moral judgment; the success of occupation does not produce legitimacy; a border drawn on a state's map does not prove the consent of the communities silenced beneath that border. The fact that the Circassians resisted in those mountains does not require us to declare all our ancestors faultless heroes. We will not ignore the class hierarchies, inequalities, internal conflicts, and historical wrongs in our social order. Nevertheless, a society knowing its own flaws does not justify the politics of extermination and displacement coming from the outside. Looking critically at one's own history is one thing; repeating the propaganda of the state that conquered it as history is quite another. The former entails intellectual courage; the latter, a political conformism that seeks a safe space for itself by borrowing the language of the strong. That is precisely why, when I rethink Bakunin's words years later, I feel their true weight right here: Man is strong when he stands upon his own truth. Pay close attention: not when he focuses on his own self-interest; and certainly not when he focuses on the rank, position, invitation, applause, or temporary security offered to him. To stand by one's own truth, to accept history even when it is unpleasing, to defend a truth that brings no advantage, and to be able to object to the wrongs of one's own circle. If what we call belief were merely a sum of words a person could utter in public squares, everyone would look brave within a crowd that suits them. The real issue is what one does when the cost of those words becomes apparent. History does not always offer a person the opportunity for heroism; yet it offers the opportunity for moral consistency almost every day. Sometimes this appears in signing a declaration, sometimes in objecting at a meeting, sometimes in speaking a language they want silenced, and sometimes in saying a polite yet clear "no" to a historical narrative that demeans one's own people. Therefore, dignity is not a measure of grand words, but of how well we can stand our ground against petty calculations. I do not want everyone who says their ancestry is Circassian to adopt the same politics, join the same organization, or speak with the same words. Such a desire would simply be the reconstruction of the mandate I criticize in a different form. Yet, I am not willing to accept that an attitude which makes a special effort to deny the history of its own people, considers exonerating the perpetrator of destruction a political virtue, and treats the memory of exiled people as a bargaining chip at today’s tables of power be presented as an innocent difference of opinion. A person is, of course, not obliged to refight the wars of their ancestors; but they are under an obligation not to knowingly lie about why that war was fought. Nor are they required to bless the graves of their grandfathers; it is enough that they do not cast themselves as the willing narrator of the official fairy tale built upon those graves. He may not have seen the mountains of Circassia; he may not have been able to learn its language, may have forgotten his family name, and may have built another life amidst the great rupture caused by exile. None of these alone can tarnish his dignity. One of the most painful consequences of the destruction suffered by a people is the difficulty their grandchildren experience in accessing memory; turning this difficulty into their fault is unjust. My criticism is not directed at those who have lost their memory, but at those who have made a career out of destroying it. Because forgetting is sometimes the result of a wound; whereas denial is at times a conscious choice. Being silenced is one thing, acting as a spokesperson for the silencer is quite another. Not knowing the past is one thing, twisting the truth—despite having the opportunity to learn it—to sing praises to the conqueror is quite another. The most dangerous moment in a person's relationship with history is not when they learn a truth that might harm them, but when they knowingly begin to defend a lie that brings them personal gain. That is precisely where personal interest replaces thought; the expectation of a position replaces conscience; and official approval replaces social responsibility. And sometimes a person falls without ever being defeated. Moreover, this is such a fall that, when viewed from the outside, it may resemble a great success: doors open, seats are found in protocol rows, photographs are taken, respectable titles are bestowed upon them, and they are even given the opportunity to speak in institutions bearing the name of their people. Yet when we ask what truth is silenced behind all this spectacle, a profound historical impoverishment emerges beneath the glittering facade. However, what Circassians need is not intermediaries who surrender their memory in exchange for a chair reserved for them in the corridors of power, but individuals who can independently defend their own people's democratic will, cultural existence, connection to the homeland, and demand for historical justice. This independence does not mean constantly generating hostility toward other peoples and states; in order to speak among equals, it means first taking back one's own voice from someone else's mouth. Look again at the history of the Bakunin family: In one generation, an imperial official gathering information on the political order of the Circassians; in another branch, a general directing military operations in the Caucasus; a brother serving in the state army during the same period; and a revolutionary questioning the right of conquest of all states. The greatest lesson here is not the wholesale condemnation of a Russian family, but rather that even a person emerging from that family did not have to submit to the empire's claim to historical legitimacy. Therefore, a Circassian is not obliged to rewrite their own people's past according to the victory celebrations of others. Human freedom is manifested not in adhering to all the decisions handed down by one's ancestry, but in being able to reckon with them when one sees the truth. And sometimes the sharpest irony of history is that someone from the aristocratic family of the conquering state rejects the principle of conquest, while some descendants of the conquered people manufacture excuses for that very same principle. I do not sanctify individuals by bloodline here, nor do I condemn them by it; I judge will and choice. The value of the dissent that Bakunin defended with his own life lies not in the surnames of those who came before him, but in his ability to distinguish his own word from the word of the state. Precisely for this reason, the word to be said to those who today turn the history of Circassia into a decoration for a spectacle applauding the military victories of the Tsardom is loud but simple: Before you recount from which mountain your lineage descended, look at which truth you bow before. For the height of the mountains does not automatically grant a person dignity; the interests for which one is willing to sacrifice those mountains reveals the true measure of their character. Turning the catastrophe of one's own people into the glory of another is not called compromise; it is the political organization of oblivion. Degrading one's own history to win the favor of power is not called peace; it is the voluntary spokespersonship of inequality. And trading the wound that a people has carried for over a hundred and fifty years for a few minutes of applause from official recognition is not called representation either; it is the moral bankruptcy of the claim to representation. What remains with me today from the pages of that book handed to me in Armutlu is not the claim that I have fully embraced all of Bakunin’s thoughts, but rather the responsibility of the individual before their own truth. It is possible to be defeated; history taught this to our people in the most painful way. It is possible to be exiled; our families torn from the mountains are the living memory of this. It is possible to lose one’s language, to be unable to see one’s homeland, to half-remember the names of ancestors whose graves you do not know; none of these inherently make a person dishonorable. But knowingly bending the truth, mistaking the belittlement of one’s own people for loyalty to the strong, and—while being the descendants of those who lived defeat—spreading the lie of the conquerors in one’s own voice is something entirely different. This is where man falls; moreover, what brings him down is not the sword of his enemy, but his self-interest, which he places on the scale of the balance he holds in his hand, making it heavier than his dignity. I now read Bakunin’s whispered words, which I recall, in reverse: When man does not stand upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts not with his deepest convictions but with his deepest interests, he may perhaps learn very well what he ought to say; yet he can no longer comprehend why what he says does not belong to him. He may not be defeated, he may even attain office, receive awards, and gain prestige; but precisely in this way does he find the path to staining himself and the cause he claims to defend. And history's heaviest verdict is sometimes handed down not after a lost war, but amid a small, won gain: It is no shame to be the grandchild of those who once defended their mountains and were defeated; to voluntarily turn into the language of the domination that prepared that defeat, well, that is the shame a person chooses with their own hands.
The recent encounter staged in Moscow under the official auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation and within the gilded salons of the Zinaida Morozova Mansion has laid bare one of the gravest institutional deviations and most shaking memory purges faced by the Circassian people in their nearly two-century-old struggle for existence, justice, and dignity. This organization, crafted through the partnership of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rossotrudnichestvo, and the International Circassian Association, was marketed by the leadership of the umbrella federation in Turkey to its base and the diaspora public under the packaging of a "historic meeting" possessing the character of an independent political will, a rights-based and diplomatic victory. Yet behind this picture, marketed under the guise of diplomatic courtesy, international humanitarian cooperation, and public diplomacy, lies a deeply insidious, calculated, and hegemonic assimilation plot aimed at paralyzing Circassian national consciousness and burying the truth of the exile and genocide in the darkness of imperial archives. Trapped in the grip of global isolation deepened by the war in Ukraine, the Moscow administration, attempting to produce a showcase of artificial legitimacy and loyalty both at home and abroad, has rushed to articulate the indigenous peoples of the Caucasus into its own imperial projection by deploying the rhetoric of the "Year of the Unity of the Peoples of Russia." The deep chasm between the sprawling victory bulletins published by the federation administration in Turkey and the statements found in the official sources of the host Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not a simple translation error or an innocent protocol difference; it is the audacity of a bureaucratic elite, claiming to represent the diaspora's will, to withhold the truth from its own people, and to blatantly censor and distort reality right before the eyes of its own society. Sitting at a table announced by Russian diplomacy to the world and its own public on the eve of the "470th Anniversary of the Accession of Kabardino-Balkaria to the Russian State" and with the official theme of "Hand in Hand with Russia for Centuries, Winning Honor and Glory," and then, upon returning to Turkey, hiding this title—which reeks of surrender—from the people without mentioning a single word about it, is a clear political and moral bankruptcy. It is a pathetic delusion for those who cannot even bring themselves to pronounce the true name of the table and the historical and ideological grounds of legitimacy upon which that meeting was built, to claim that they defend any national rights behind closed doors. A delegation that is afraid to even state the name of the meeting it attended when facing its own public opinion was hosted in that hall not as demanding negotiators or representatives of a proud people, but as showcase props and living mannequins that reinforced the Kremlin's centuries-old official historical thesis and legitimized occupation and annihilation. This hypocritical attitude is the registration of a chronic mechanism of submission that, while displaying a docility that bows to Moscow's imperial grandeur on the one hand, mocks its own people's intelligence, conscience, and historical memory by fabricating epic tales of victory in Ankara on the other. The ominous "1557" and "470th anniversary" narrative, which forms the main backbone of the meeting and which the federation administration has masterfully tried to keep away from the attention of the diaspora public, is not an ordinary protocol detail or an innocent chronological record of the past; on the contrary, it is a poisonous dagger intended to be thrust into the heart of Circassian national existence. This narrative is the most fundamental propaganda tool of the official imperial ideology, inherited from Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union, and from there to today's Russian Federation, aimed at rendering invisible the colonization of Circassia and the physical, demographic, and cultural destruction to which our people have been subjected. With Goshenay, the daughter of Prince Temryuk Idar, and Tsar Ivan IV. This false thesis, which attempts to palm off a tactical dynastic marriage forced by the periodic, regional, and military conjuncture between Ivan as the "free-willed and voluntary accession" of the entire Circassian nation to Russia, is one of the most shameless distortions witnessed by history. To claim that, based on the situational alliance of a single prince, an ancient nation surrendered its thousands-of-years-old independent homeland to a state is an insult not only to reason and logic, but also to the blood of martyrs infused into every inch of the Caucasus' soil. We ask: If the Circassian people joined the Russian state of their own free will in 1557 and, as claimed, walked hand-in-hand with Russia in glory and honor throughout the centuries that followed, then with whom, for what purpose, and at what cost was the Russo-Circassian War fought—a war that raged uninterrupted for precisely 101 years, from 1763 to 1864, turning the mountains, valleys, and forests of the Caucasus into a bloodbath? When the invading armies under the command of the likes of General Zass, Yevdokimov, and Lazarev were setting fire to our villages, displaying severed Circassian heads on the tips of their spears, putting an entire population to the sword from babies in cradles to white-haired elders, and attempting to bring the autochthonous owners of the Caucasus to their knees through starvation and epidemics, which honorable page of that so-called "hand-in-hand march" were they writing? If there is a tale of a 470-year-old unshakable unity and brotherhood to speak of, where do the hundreds of thousands of our martyrs who perished on the death-spewing shores of the Black Sea in 1864, the ships off the coast of Sochi filled with corpses, and the hundreds of thousands of our exiled people scattered starving to the Ottoman lands fit into this imperial narrative? Today, the sole reason why we live as a stateless, scattered diaspora struggling for our identity in Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Israel, Europe, and all four corners of the world is none other than the very mentality of occupation and genocide that that table is attempting to celebrate. The mindset that silently swallows the Russian president's special representative brazenly reducing this century-old savagery, genocide, and great exile to the level of "difficult times in history," and moreover, conveys this reductionist language to its own public as a success, is in a state of unforgivable disrespect and historical heedlessness against the sacred memory of our ancestors who fell for their homeland and defended their honor and freedom at the cost of their lives. This truth is a historical reality far too heavy, living, and searing to be covered up by a few diplomatic smiles, empty declarations, or fake discourses of friendship.
The issue was not limited to the meeting's hidden, false title; it also included [the statement] found in the official declaration of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which dealt a severe blow to the dignity of the Circassian public. reaching a shameful peak with statements characterized by. Because the official Russian bulletin explicitly recorded that the Circassian representatives attending the meeting expressed their "gratitude and appreciation" to Russia for the care shown in preserving the historical and cultural heritage of the Circassian people and for the support given to native languages. We ask: while in our ancestral homeland, on our very own soil, the lifelines of our native language are being severed one by one, while native language classes were removed from the mandatory curriculum by federal laws enacted in 2018 and turned into optional hobby classes, and while the constitutional autonomies of our republics are being pruned step by step, who is expressing gratitude to Russia, on whose behalf, and with what face? While Circassian activists defending their identity, language, and historical rights in their Caucasian homeland are thrown into dungeons on fabricated pretexts, while the homes of intellectuals and academics are raided in dawn operations and silenced, while every voice wanting to keep national consciousness alive is criminalized with the label of "extremist," and even bureaucratic obstacles and police barricades are put up against the May 21 Genocide and Exile commemoration ceremonies, what kind of price is it to join the chorus in the palaces of Moscow saying "thank you for preserving our language and culture"? When not even a single child in our villages and cities in the diaspora can speak their mother tongue, while the gears of assimilation grind our identity to dust, and while the ties between us and the homeland are severed by bureaucratic arbitrariness, which conscience can accept this unbelievable display of gratitude? When these representatives return to Turkey and spin fairy tales to the public, saying "we conveyed our demands for our mother tongue, put our rights on the table, and built bridges," the fact that only an obedient expression of gratitude entered the host state's official records is the most concrete proof of the spiral of illusion and deception the diaspora has been pulled into. Did the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs grant major concessions and is it hiding them from its own public, or has it become a tradition for our leaders to turn into nightingales that have eaten mulberries in Moscow only to act like lions once they return to Ankara? It must be known that this fabricated declaration of "gratitude" and "appreciation" has not an ounce of backing, validity, or moral legitimacy in the eyes of the entire Circassian people; we totally reject this submissive and capitulatory mindset that mistakes thanking one's executioner for diplomacy. The false expressions of gratitude offered by those who bow their heads in the face of our people's language, which is being driven to extinction, their censored history, and their usurped rights, can only be a document not of our nation, but of the personal and clique-based bankruptcy of those who occupy those seats. This capitulationist line, which turns a blind eye to the cries of its own nation and tries to win the favor of imperial bureaucracy, will never be absolved before history.
The political lack of foresight displayed by the delegation attending the meeting, the lack of seriousness in the way diaspora rights were demanded, and the corruption in the handling of issues revealed themselves in all their nakedness regarding the formal dimension of the matter as well. Existential issues—such as the right to return to the historical homeland, which is the most vital and indispensable right of the diaspora that must be addressed at a constitutional level, the demand for dual citizenship, constitutional guarantees, and the historical redress of the genocide—in the hands of a group of association executives and bureaucrats, have been reduced to tourism tours, commercial relations reduced to hotel management and fair organizations, and thus commodified. To think that the struggle for repatriation can be waged by taking refuge in the concept of the "compatriot"—which has no historical or legal binding force, but rather aims to turn the diaspora into a pool of obedient subjects within Russia’s sphere of influence—is, if not massive ignorance, outright deception; because this concept is an assimilationist trap that defines the Circassian people not as the primary and autochthonous founding element of their own homeland, but as loyal elements of the Russian imperial geography cast outward. This shallow, merchant mentality, which imprisons the cause of a people bearing the sighs of millions of exiles and the nobility of a century-long resistance into a few token university quotas, youth camps, and trade delegation visits, is the bankruptcy of Circassian political reason. Those who put their own professional and commercial interests ahead of their people's historical cause have turned the Circassian identity into a folkloric tourism commodity, serving it up as mere hors d'oeuvres for the Russian bureaucracy. Moreover, even these hollow demands were not deemed worthy of a single line in official Russian texts; they were completely ignored and used solely as a tool for Russia's "Year of the Unity of Peoples" propaganda. To top off all this political impotence, the detail proudly announced at the official closing of the meeting serves almost as a tragicomic seal on the tragedy that took place: The meeting began with a reception, followed by a guided tour of a historical mansion for the participants. The cause of a nation preserved for centuries with blood, tears, and honor was sacrificed to the official historical theses of the Kremlin in exchange for a glass of drink, a fancy buffet, and a guided mansion tour in the luxury mansions of Moscow. This mentality, which trades the memory of the Circassian people, the spilled blood of their ancestors, and their future for the pomp of a palace tour, has nothing left to offer diaspora politics and not a single honorable sentence left to say.
The disgraceful picture that has emerged makes it necessary to question once again, and much more harshly, the representative capacity, legitimacy, and ideological course of the International Circassian Association and its components in Turkey. That bitter truth, which conscientious intellectuals and sincere thamades have been crying out for years in Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria, and all over the Caucasus, has been confirmed once more: the International Circassian Association and the Circassian people are now living on completely different planets. The IAC, having long lost the national excitement, independent stance, and ideal of ensuring the global unity of Circassians that it possessed at its founding in the early 1990s, has completely transformed into a bureaucratic front organization that whitewashes the Caucasus policies of the Russian deep state and is used to keep the diaspora under control. It is a pity that the umbrella organization in Turkey has also denied its own independent, pluralistic, and democratic roots to tail along after this obsolete structure, aspiring to serve as its diaspora commissariat. We declare here openly and resolutely: Neither KAFFED, nor the IAC, nor the association presidents who took sides in that hall are the absolute and sole representatives of the Circassian people, nor have they ever been. The Circassian people are too deeply rooted, honorable, and vigilant a nation to mortgage their will to the ambitions of a handful of bureaucrats, shady networks of relations established with the Kremlin, or the false glitter of diplomatic receptions. The play staged today is the very operation of step by step disengaging the Circassian diaspora from its independent identity and transforming it into a "Russian diaspora"; indeed, the core strategy of Rossotrudniçestvo and the Russian Foreign Ministry is to position Circassians not as a nation with their own unique history, but as a loyal extension of the Russian world. The ICA and its diaspora extensions are voluntarily propping up this insidious operation, numbing our people's historical reflexes and conditioning them to surrender. This outdated tutelary mentality, which acts extremely arrogantly and haughtily toward its own society, ignores all kinds of justified criticism and democratic dissent from its base, avoids accountability, but immediately stands at attention before Moscow, is the greatest internal obstacle darkening the future of the diaspora. However, let no one forget that these antiquated elites, who have completely severed their ties with their grassroots, alienated themselves from their own people's profound historical memory, and considered it a skill to conduct politics within the narrow boundaries drawn by their masters, have long been condemned in the conscience of the Circassian people and the court of history. The organizational history of the Circassian diaspora in Turkey, dating back to the Circassian Union and Mutual Aid Society founded in 1908, is a magnificent heritage built over a century with great sacrifices, the prices paid by intellectuals through exiles, and painstaking efforts. Yet today, this glorious heritage is experiencing the heaviest and most disgraceful legitimacy crisis in its history at the hands of a ruling caste that has become alienated from its own history, cowardly, principled-less, and devoid of memory. Circassian institutions have been stripped of being centers for the people to seek their rights and have been turned into folkloric sanctuaries, protocol clubs where egos are satisfied, and public relations offices for imperial powers. Without a doubt, dialogue must be established with the Russian Federation; strengthening physical, cultural, academic, and social bridges with the homeland, and protecting and developing our republics in the homeland is a vital responsibility for every Circassian. However, diplomacy can never be conducted by trampling on one's own honor, applauding the lies of one's executioner, and endorsing official theses that deny the existential rights of one's people. True diplomacy is possible only through a courageous will that is among equals, based on mutual respect, rights-oriented, principled, and above all, uncompromizingly places the historical and moral weight of the 1864 Genocide and Exile on the table. What is carried out by those who cannot articulate their own existence and the genocide they suffered at the table, and who submit to the false fairy tale of a "470-year union" imposed by the opposing side, is not diplomacy at all, but outright political and historical suicide. Those who hesitate to pronounce their own proper name and hide behind hollowed-out umbrellas have once again displayed the same lack of identity today in the imperial halls of Moscow. As some claim, the Circassian people are neither a minority in need of Russia's charity nor a faceless prop to be dressed up and stripped away at the whim of empires; for thousands of years, living in those rugged mountains with their own name, language, and Xabze, they are the true and autochthonous masters of the Caucasus. History will record those who offer gratitude to their ancestors' murderers in the palaces of Moscow, those who make an appearance in that mansion and then fear telling their people the truth, and those who stand tall against this shameless game to defend their honor and memory; and no office, no reception, and no lie will be able to escape the justice of this historical record.
++in response to the added discussions
The issue is not about establishing contact with Russia, but rather the theater being staged in Moscow is a dialogue no, unadulterated Russian monologue is that it. A genuine dialogue is conducted between equal and independent subjects, with an open agenda and on the basis of the mutual recognition of rights.
From a scene where one side dictates a 470-year-old colonial thesis and the other expresses gratitude while its mother tongue is usurped, nothing can emerge but subservience and monologue. Indeed, even when the official bulletin of the Russian Foreign Ministry and the statements of the umbrella organization are placed side by side, what is seen at the table is not a negotiating diaspora will, but merely someone applauding the monologue.
it is obvious that there is a choir. Moreover, the first and most fundamental condition of a genuine dialogue transparencyAlthough the agenda of this meeting was known by the ICA at the very beginning of the month, the process was kept thoroughly hidden from the grassroots, member associations, and the public; with what merit, and with what hidden agendas the delegation
that its formation was not announced and that the society was only informed with a fait accompli after everything was over proves that the intention is a closed-door operation rather than public diplomacy. A nation's two-century-old historical memory and existential rights are being bargained away through hidden agendas behind closed curtains and backstage maneuvers kept away from the grassroots.
cannot be the subject of discussion. The truly funny part is this: whether within the Circassian diaspora or in Turkish sociology and politics, to accuse a will that has always stood on the side of genuine dialogue, pluralism, and rights-based negotiation—from the most extreme to the broadest spectrum, even on the most intricate issues—of dialogue, rights-seeking, or up to now
...it is an attempt by circles that have not taken a single risk for the sake of social contact, nor even lifted a finger, to label [others] as "opposed to dialogue." This panic of those who try to pass off surrender as diplomacy, and acting as mere props in a monologue as dialogue, is nothing other than the helplessness born of being caught red-handed, both historically and morally.
It is claimed that we are doing things—knowingly and unknowingly (the knowing part being treacherous, the unknowing part ignorant); to that theater of assimilation and denial in Moscow, to those fake tales of 1557
Those who try to instantly smear anyone who opposes them with the label of being "spokespersons for foreign powers" also shamelessly resort to the lie that we do not speak out against the democratic problems in Turkey.
Yet I don't feel the need to explain my stance in Turkey's democratic processes, the struggles fought in the streets, what happened to me, those who weren't by my side, or those who were, to everyone one by one; knowingly
Just as I have no obligation to explain to anyone that I am not engaging in Russophobia, while also not knowing that I am not engaging in Russophobia.
History and consciences both know very well who stands where and in the midst of what sacrifices; those who settled in Russia today and harvest comfort in the corridors of the ICA, wearing out their titles in government offices, to us
it has neither the legitimacy nor the audacity to lecture on democracy or matters of dignity. I am simply saying this: I am not a Circassian civil servant of Turkey, Europe, or the USA; thank God, I am a blue-collar worker.
and I am a laborer who, just like any other worker in Turkey, is crushed by the economy and the high cost of living, and who earns his living by the sweat of his brow. At the same time, I am not an official of Russia.
In short, I am not a civil servant, nor am I going to be one. Unlike some others, I have no state duties I was born into, nor is anyone holding me accountable for the deep wounds my duties have left in the public memory.
Those who, in order to win the favor of their masters, turn their own people's native language, exile, and the reality of the genocide into small talk at diplomatic receptions, naturally [cannot tolerate] those who, unlike them, are not underlings, but stand independent and with their heads held high
will try to criminalize everyone. That is precisely why, to those bureaucratic friends who live oblivious to the suffering of the people and play diplomacy in gilded halls, [I dedicate] the favorite part of a song I love
I dedicate this: "Some know very well how not to join production. But they apparently hold elegant glasses. Those who kiss the handle of power eat quality meat. And they never spit on the ground, they apparently swallow it..."
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This English version is automatically translated by artificial intelligence from the original Turkish texts published at apiscanberk.blogspot.com. The translation may contain errors or inaccuracies; please consult the Turkish original when in doubt.