Circassian Elders Warn Against Provocateurs Calling for Military Action

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 9 – One of the easiest ways for outside powers who want to manipulate a people is to pose as its most radical defenders and call for members of the group to take part in military actions of one kind or another in order to advance the cause. Such provocateurs often escape censure because they denounce their critics as insufficiently committed.

            Guarding against such tactics especially in the Internet age is both extremely difficult and extremely important, difficult because the enormous flow of information makes it easy for such provocateurs to operate and important because if members of the targeted group fall for their siren song, they may put their people at risk.

            One of the nations against which such provocations are now coming in large numbers are the Circassians, and a large group of senior Circassian activists is warning young people not to fall for their false arguments but to devote themselves instead to the survival of their people until better days ahead.

            In an appeal they have disseminated via Facebook, the senior members of the Circassian national movement say that these provocateurs often disseminate information which in a different context would be of a kind that a people whose past has so often been taken from them should only welcome (natpressru.info/index.php?newsid=12391).

            Stories about Circassian manluks, about abreks and about Abkhazian volunteers at one level can only be welcomed. “One must know one’s history,” but many of those disseminating such materials now are doing so not to build up the Circassian nation but to lead its younger members astray in ways that put the nation at risk.

            When the Circassians were a large nation concentrated in a single place and were thus able to force the powers of the world to take them seriously, such stories inspired the nation to justified resistance. But today, the Circassian nation “has lost the opportunity to defend its national interests” by violence “even on the territory of its historical Motherland.”

            “For Circassians at this historical period, there is nothing more important than the restoration of the Circassian People, its language, culture and demography and, as a people which has experienced genocide to refuse to take part in any military conflicts in whatever places they are occurring.”

            According to this declaration, “the Circassian people and its leaders must be concerned with only one problem – the preservation of the Circassian ethnos and its security,” and “any individual … who calls out youth to fulfill its ‘international’ or so-called ‘fraternal’ duty by propagandizing war … must be declared an enemy.”

            This position will no doubt be denounced as defeatist by the provocateurs. But there are two reasons why the position the elders take is in no way that. On the one hand, the rising number of provocations is an indication of the growing strength of the Circassians and the desire of their enemies to lure them into destruction.

            And on the other, such a recommitment to nation building by the Circassians not only in the Motherland but across the diaspora in which most Circassians now live will lay the foundation for achieving the national goals of that nation far firmer than any short-term military “victories.”