The Issue is National Freedom and Dignity
By: Adel Bashqawi
3rd of July, 2014
All indigenous nations and peoples of the world wish and have the right to live freely and independently with no foreign intervention in their own national affairs. They also wish to ascend, rise, and flourish as they are morally obligated to preserve their national identity, language, heritage and culture for the purpose of national co-existence and survival as respected and dignified nations safeguarding their sovereignty and independence. That was not considered more than 450 years ago, when the Muscovites started their aggressive wars and assaults against all peoples and nations around them, crossing borders and lines of blood and atrocities until they reached the objectives they wanted to attain, regardless of the high price that they had to pay; but seemingly that doesn’t apply to countries emerging as a result of occupation of the territories of others and illegitimate annexing of other peoples and nations by force and “fait accompli”.
The plight of the ancient nations of the North Caucasus with a confirmed history of more than 6000 years, which was subject to Tsarist Russian invasions based on war, expansion and murder that consequently occupied the entire North Caucasus territories, destroyed the homelands, committed atrocities to the degree of genocide, ethnic cleansing and eliminating a great portion of the population, in addition to forced exile, deporting and displacing entire nations beyond their original native land.
Murder and destruction, had continued for tens of years, with Tsarist Russians occupying all parts of the North Caucasus (http://www.justicefornorthcaucasus.com/eagle_combo/documents/eagle.php?title=north-caucasus-imperial-crisis&entry_id=1214444700), where the Circassians, Chechens, Daghestanis, Ossetians, Abkhazians and others had to bear the consequences of committed crimes. Many people at different times were affected by exposure to extreme cold and/or hot environments in winter and summer times, when they were forced to live and travel for months on the sand of the Black Sea Coast in the Circassian example, waiting for their turn to board the ships, or to be transported by trains and other means in the Chechen example, while some of the deportees consisted of entire families were gravely ill as a result of epidemics, let alone the sea or land journeys of agony, suffering and sometimes inevitable death.
Tragedies faced by the nations of the North Caucasus were never limited to a certain Russian regime, but extended to include all the successive regimes reaching the present Russian Federation. When Russia predominantly in its imperial capacity is free to choose and act, it will keep tackling the ways and means to go on changing the status of the occupied territories through dividing and subdividing the administrative regions of the North Caucasus and elsewhere (http://www.worldstatesmen.org/Russian_republics.htm) being called “federal subjects” for the best way to govern and rule.
Paul Goble highlighted one example of Russian relentless efforts in one of his published “Window on Eurasia” in April, 2008. He mentioned: “Moscow’s renewed plan to combine regions in the North Caucasus either with neighboring Russian ones or with each other threatens the survival of the national communities there and is leading some of their members to think about independence as the only way to save their peoples from extinction”. He stated that “Magomet Barakhoyev, an Ingush activist, argues that the Russian government’s plans to amalgamate regions in the North Caucasus are in fact a plan for the total “russification” of non-Russian groups there and elsewhere (http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/04/window-on-eurasia-kremlins-regional.html).
Referring to the title of this article, it’s worth saying that the whole issue is occupation and colonization performed by a greedy empire on one side, and on the other, tiny nations that exercised their basic right of self defense against conquering brutal forces that committed all kinds of atrocities in addition to full occupation and annexation. The matter is purely national one, which is classified and characterized as merely as a self-defense of peoples and nations endangered of annihilation and extinction or melting in the multi Russian crucible. Religion and religious considerations were never a major cause or factor; but from the hard way experience, all those oppressed peoples believe in: “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well”.
You can’t equal that who wanted the right but couldn’t reach it, and the one who wanted wrong but attained it. That day will inevitably come when all nations occupied and ruled by imperial Russia will achieve their legitimate rights of Freedom and Independence. Whatever efforts, the evil KGB had exerted to save the Soviet Union from collapsing; all attempts to keep controlling all nations had failed.
The notorious Soviet Union’s disintegration had occurred, and fifteen independent countries had evolved, while the so-called Russian Federation kept its preys in the North Caucasus and elsewhere as parts of its entity. What had happened with the Soviet Union will be repeated with its successor, no matter what the FSB would do to prevent that from occurring, when tens of independent nations will erupt.
