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We Want to Remain Meskhetian Turks
We Want to Remain Meskhetian Turks in the Ahiska. In late fall of 1944, Muhabat Mamedova recalls, she got married and moved to her husband’s village in Ahiska. She planned to live her whole life there. Yet, within a few weeks, she had to leave the village, Zharali, forever.
![]() ![]() ![]() The boxcar that carried Mamedova, who is now 91 and living outside Bishkek, and her family to Central Asia was freezing; food was limited. Many died – their bodies thrown from the wagons onto the snowy steppes. After arriving in Kyrgyzstan, her group was so hungry that they boiled hay to make soup. Besides the cold and hunger, Mamedova’s family also had to deal with local suspicions. "Somebody spread the word that cannibals were coming,” says Mamedova. "When we arrived, they were afraid of us, and we were afraid of them. But soon they saw that we were just normal people like them.” Only after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s 1953 death were Meskhetian Turk’s allowed to venture outside their designated areas. In 1954, Mamedova’s father, who had been deported from Georgia to Uzbekistan, found her. "It was so unexpected,” says Mamedova, who was pregnant at the time. "I had lost any hope of seeing him ever again.” The shock from meeting her father after 10 years caused her to miscarry, she says. "The child just stopped moving inside of me,” recalls Mamedova, who didn’t tell anyone and carried the dead fetus in her womb until her father left. "Father asked why I was crying. I said, ‘Because you’ll leave again.’ It’s really shameful to reveal those private kind of things.” ![]() During those Ferghana pogroms, Firuza Partova’s brother was severely beaten. Her family fled to Kant, a town near Bishkek. "[The Uzbeks] were like relatives to us. But after those events, that ended suddenly,” Partova, now 47, recalls. "Even those Uzbeks who were close to us started talking to us grudgingly. We understood that life there would become impossible and decided to leave.” ![]() ![]() In Kyrgyzstan, the Meskhetian Turk’s felt especially unwelcome in April 2010, when, during the political upheaval that followed the overthrow of Kurmanbek Bakiyev, some were targeted for their land and their relative prosperity. During pogroms in Maevka, outside Bishkek, dozens of houses were burned and at least five Meskhetian Turk’s died. One of the dead was Kaptan Karipov. Karipov’s widow, Kizhanim Karipova, recalls how a group of ethnic Kyrgyz gathered near the village, demanding land. "My son-in-law ran home from the field and told us to leave the house urgently. He said that more than a thousand people were heading down here. I grabbed my sons and ran away,” Karipova says. She also called her husband, but he ignored her pleas to stay away from the village. "They caught my husband [next door]. They did all sorts of things to him. He was mutilated.” ![]() ![]() ©
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