You could recently appreciate the preparations and promises of the town of Sochi, candidate for hosting the 2014 winter Olympic Games. During your visit, you must have been surely able to travel without any infringement to admire the natural beauty of that region. That is very lucky of you, because it is not the case for a great number of inhabitants of Caucasus where Sochi is situated. Those who want to travel to a nearby district where they are not registered need a special permit which may take up to 7 days to get!
When USSR collapsed in 1991, all those nations that got away from it could find a certain freedom of movement, except for Caucasians. Their situation as hostages of Kremlin got worse and worse each year. Unfortunately, they cannot even hope that the possibility of Olympic Games' being held in Sochi bring them a small pouch of air to breath. Such an event might have been indeed the promise of peace finally coming to the region. It could have been the promise of a window opening for inhabitants towards the external world. Unfortunately, the possibility of appointing Sochi for Olympic Games has already been acting as a nightmare because it is already serving as a pretext for more security measures, which mean more and more unbearable repression covering the Caucasus.
No, we are not talking about that far away (!) Chechnya torn apart by violence, we are talking about highly touristic nearby places like Dombai or Arkhiz, just behind Sochi. Do you know that those beautiful highlands are now banned to the local population of Circassians and Karachay? Only tourists having got a special permit from the FSB can have access there to admire the beauty of the blue mountain lakes, the green pine forests and to breathe the pure mountain air.
Caucasians themselves are kept away from their traditional highlands. Just like the blockade in the 19th century which isolated them from the external world, they are now tightly held in a new vice and separated from today's world.
The fragile economy of mountain people has shattered with those repressive measures. Their ancestors were already forced by the Russian invaders in the 19th century to come down from their highlands where they had been living since time immemorial. Many of them were massacred, and the survivors were forced to leave definitely the Caucasus, their motherland, to get refuge in Turkey, at the end of a very tragic exodus starting in 1864. Sochi and its surroundings are the native lands of Ubykh nation that do not exist any more. They were almost totally exterminated after their last battle of resistance in Krasnaya Polyana in May 1864.
No, we do not want to believe that such a thing is possible. The Olympic flame cannot shine on a vast graveyard of nations. The Olympic spirit cannot be compatible with the spirit of a genocide. And we are sure that no Olympic sportsman would be happy to see the perspective of Olympic Games transformed into a hell for the local people. The vice which compresses those people today will not loosen with the approaching of Olympic Games; it will be just the opposite.
In these conditions, the Russian government should decide: whether the surroundings of Sochi are a dangerous region where it is necessary to multiply "cleansing" operations against " wahabi terroristes" in order to prevent bloodful events like those of Beslan or Nalchik, and in this case it would be totally insane to invite Olympic sportsmen and thousands of spectators to such a dangerous area where they would be a direct target, or the Caucasus is a calm and peaceful place without any ethnic tension, without any conflict, violence or confrontation, and in that case, the Russian government should explain the reason for all that repression, for all those "cleansing" operations, all those restriction on freedom of movement, all those check-points on roads which are becoming more and more unbearable for the local people. We hope that the honorable Members of the Olympic Committee will ask Russian authorities some explanation on those two questions and examine the whole thing in the light of the existing dilemma.
We absolutely do not want to mix up sports and politics, and we absolutely are not against Olympic Games taking place in another region of the Russian Federation, but we are against the games in the Caucasus stricken by blood and fire since many centuries already as well as today!
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