Circassian Ball in Moscow

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..."

#APISCANBERK

#apiscanberk

Circassian Ball in Moscow