Tbilisi holds conference in memory of deportation of Balkars

Today, in Tbilisi, in the building of the Sukhumi State University, the NGO "Free Caucasus" and the teachers of the university held a conference in memory of the deportation of the Balkar people.

Invitations for the participants of the conference were published on the page forumsaucas on Facebook. Buzzhigit Kuchmezov, the Balkar writer residing in Nalchik, introduced the history of deportation of Balkar and Karachay people to the participants of the conference via telephone.

"On this day, March 8, 1944, tens of thousands of Balkar people were deported to the republics of Central Asia. While representatives of the Balkar people were dying in the fields of the Great Patriotic War, their mothers, wives, children and fathers were dying of starvation. How many people died during deportation from cold, hunger and other deprivations? We are still conducting investigations," Buzzhigit Kuchmezov told the Georgian audience.

The organizers of the conference held a minute's silence in memory not only the Balkar people, who died in exile, but also representatives of other deported peoples Karachay, Ingush, Kalmyk, Chechen people, and Germans from the Volga region.

"In general, we would like to see today's event to have been dedicated not only to the Balkar people, but all to other repressed peoples," said Georgy Sharashenidze, the head of the "Free Caucasus", in his interview to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

According to Merab Chukhua, Professor of the Sukhumi State University, the head of the Circassian Cultural Centre in Georgia, the deportation of Karachay, Balkar, Chechen, and Ingush people was the part of Russia's policy to destroy the peoples of the Caucasus, which began yet during the Russian Empire.

"The empire destroyed and evicted from their places of habitation Circassian tribes of Ubykhs Shapsugs. Later, Turkic-speaking Balkar and Karachay people were evicted, and they returned in the 1960s," said Professor Merab Chukhua at the conference.