Quotation of the Day

The following quotation is from Akhmed Bairakhtov, a Meskhetian Turk veteran who fought in the Soviet army against Nazi Germany. In November 1944, while he was fighting against the Germans, the Stalin regime deported his family along with the rest of the Meskhetian Turk population to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. The quotation is from The Forced Migration Projects of the Open Society Institute, Meskhetian Turks: Solutions and Human Security (NY: The Open Society Institute, 1998), p. 5.

Along with a small group of demobilized Meskhetian Turk soldiers, I went to search for my family in Central Asia. We had no addresses, nothing. In December of 1945, I finally located my mother in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. She told me that my sister was living in Samarkand...I remember conditions during the first year in Uzbekistan were dire. There was nothing to eat. People were forced to eat cattle fodder in order to survive.