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COPYRIGHT 2001 JAI Press, Inc.
Since the end of the Cold War, Turkish diplomacy has been active a tous azimuths, not least the northeastern. In the many, often contentious republics that arose in the Caucasus after the Soviet crack-up, Turkish leaders perceive opportunities to expand trade, strengthen security, and participate in the anticipated oil boom. So far, their success has been mixed, because long historical shadows still dance over the region.
A Checkerboard of Peoples
Long before the creation of the modern Turkish state, extensive links existed between the Caucasus and Anatolia. Some of the most ancient peoples of the region are believed to have entered Anatolia from the Caucasus, while Roman armies reached deep into what is today eastern Turkey and penetrated Georgia and Armenia. The Byzantine Empire enjoyed close ties to the Christian civilizations of the Caucasus, and its borderlands were an arena of competition among Rome, Byzantium, and Persia for centuries. Turkic mercenaries fought in Byzantine armies before the Battle of Manzikert (1071), when Seljuk sultan Alparslan defeated the Byzantines and captured Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes himself. [1] Once firmly established in Anatolia, the Turks moved steadily westward into Europe, but continued to be deeply involved with the Caucasus to the east. After the Ottomans captured Trabzon in 1461, another period of competition with Persia ensued. For long periods, the Ottoman Empire exercised control over Georgia, the Circass ian coast, and the entire north shore of the Black Sea. The Crimean khans were vassals of the sultan, and Ottoman emissaries penetrated into the North Caucasus to establish contacts with Kabardans, Chechens, and Dagestanis and to trade with Azerbaijan. Most Caucasian Muslims looked to Turkey as the center of their civilization and their potential protector. After the Russian conquest of Crimea in 1783, the Ottomans began their gradual retreat eastward along the Black Sea coast, although they did manage to win occasional victories over Russia. They did not lose Anapa, near the outlet of the Sea of Azov, until 1829, and, with initial encouragement from Britain, continued covert support of the Circassians until their final conquest by the tsar's armies in 1864, five years after the defeat of the great Caucasian resistance leader Shamil. [2]
Turkey's struggle with Russia in the Caucasus throughout the nineteenth century is essential to understanding Turkish attitudes and policies toward the Caucasus at the end of the twentieth. [3] Each Russo-Turkish war brought a resurgence of Turkish efforts to support Caucasian peoples against the Russians, but in the end the tsarist armies won out and engaged in ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. The northeastern Black Sea coast was practically cleared of Circassians, Abaza, and Abkhaz, and historians believe that well over a million of these peoples were deported to the Ottoman Empire between 1860 and 1875. [4] They were parceled out among the lightly populated parts of Anatolia and more distant provinces of the empire, forming the core of the so-called Circassian communities in Syria, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. [5] Simultaneously, Chechens, Dagestanis, and Azeris from the eastern side of the North Caucasus made their way to Turkey in smaller numbers in the wake of Shamil's defeat. Still other refu gees arrived after the Ottomans had to cede the cities of Batum, Ardahan, and Kars to Russia after losing the war of 1876-78, because the Ottoman Empire, like the modern Turkish republic, maintained liberal immigration policies for persons of Turkic blood.
After World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a new wave of defeated Caucasians found refuge in Turkey, augmented by Muslims fleeing communist rule in the Volga-Ural region and Central Asia. The long Russian effort to break the "North Caucasus barrier" entailed exploitation of the Christian peoples of the Caucasus (Georgians, Armenians, Ossetes, and a few smaller groups) in order to counter the Muslims. During each Russo-Turkish war from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, Russia sought to use Ottoman Armenians and other eastern Anatolian Christians as a fifth column. The practice had disastrous consequences for all these ancient communities during the upheavals of 1917-22, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians as well as other Christians and Muslims.
The southern Caucasus experienced foreign intervention from several directions after...
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