Türkçe TercümeToday is the 96th anniversary of the death of Ahmed Tsalykkaty, one of the main actors in the struggle for independence and statehood of the North Caucasus. We will commemorate him with the protest note he sent to the representative of the Entente as the Speaker of the Parliament of the exiled North Caucasus Republic in Tbilisi 105 years ago today.
While all diplomatic paths were blocked in the Paris Peace Talks and Haydar Bammat, Aziz Meker, Ibrahim Haydar, and Hasan Khadzarag were on their way from Paris back to the Caucasus, the British Army was withdrawing from the Caucasus, handing over the North Caucasus, which it had messed up and plunged into chaos in 9 months, to the terror created by the White Volunteer Army, which it had strengthened with money and arms. The Allies appointed Colonel William Nafew Haskell, one of the junior officers of the American Relief Commission, as High Commissioner in the Caucasus. In this atmosphere, General Denikin, whose hands were left completely free, escalated his massacres to an upper level in the North Caucasus and recklessly terrorized.
While most of the members of the North Caucasus Parliament that had moved from Temir-Khan Shura to Tbilisi, continued their work in exile also with the participation of Bolshevik Mountaineers, the following note of protest was presented to Colonel William Nafew Haskell on September 10, 1919, undersigned by Tsalykkaty and Najmudin Samurski Effendiev.
From the fall of 1919 until the beginning of 1921, Ahmed Tsalykkaty worked as the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Free Mountaineers (Volny Gorets) published in Tbilisi. During his years of immigration in Turkey, he was active in anti-Soviet resistance organizations. Later on, he settled in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, and founded the political organization of political emigrants, the Union of Caucasian Mountaineers (Soyuz Gortsev Kavkaza). He then founded the Democratic Party of the Free Mountaineers of the Caucasus (Narodnaya Partiya Vol'nykh Gortsev Kavkaza), also in Prague. When the party cadres moved to Poland in 1926, Said Shamil reactivated the party under the name of the Popular Party of the Caucasian Mountaineers (Narodnaya Partii Gortsev Kavkaza). During his time in Prague, Tsalykkaty launched the periodical Kavkazskiy Gorets (Caucasus Mountaineers), but financial and health problems did not allow it to last long. When it became politically difficult for Tsalykkaty to find political asylum in Czechoslovakia, he moved to Poland, where he spent the last days of his life in the small town of Otvotske and died at the age of 46 in Praga, a suburb of Warsaw.
You can also access the Turkish translation of Tsalıkkatı's 1919 ultimatum, originally in French, which you will find below in English translation, from the link at the top of the page. Our followers who have registered as members of our page can access the original document by clicking on the below page image or from our Primary Sources archive.
Cem Kumuk
Istanbul, 02 September 2024
Handed over to the Representative of the Allies in the Caucasus
September 10, 1919
Delegates from the North Caucasian Parliament had an extended meeting with Colonel Haskel to discuss the situation in the territory of the North Caucasus Republic.
The Colonel was handed a protest with the following content:
The Parliament of the Union of Peoples of the North Caucasus takes the liberty of drawing your attention, as representative of the Entente Powers, to the extremely serious situation of the North Caucasian population because of the invasion of the Republic's territory by the Volunteer Army.
The fate of the North Caucasian peoples is a striking illustration of how the spheres surrounding Generals Denikin and Kolchak intend to resolve the problem of small nationalities.
The Parliament of the Union of the Peoples of the North Caucasus believes it must declare that the restoration of a united and indivisible Russia is being carried out through these spheres, over the ashes of villages and the bones of exterminated populations.
The Voluntary Army passed through with iron and blood, leaving behind the ashes of villages, executions, looting, gallows, raped women and defiled mosques. Under the threat of being hanged and shot, all honest workers among the Caucasian peoples, dedicated under the national flag to the rebirth of their country and the security of their people, were forced to leave their homeland.
In place of these patriots, at the head of the North Caucasian peoples, reactionary generals from the era of Czarism have been placed. To shed full light on the character of the actions of the volunteer army on the territories of the North Caucasus Republic, its barbarities and cruelties, the Parliament of the Union of the Caucasus Peoples has begun an investigation into these acts, which will serve as a sufficient indictment against those who, on the road to the restoration of their united and indivisible Russia, leave traces of unheard-of crimes.
All the material gathered by this investigation will be presented, in due course, to the Peace Conference and the League of Nations. At present, the Parliament of the Union of North Caucasian Peoples deems it necessary to form, without delay, an international commission, which could investigate on the spot the actions of the volunteer army on the territory of the Republic. At the same time, Parliament categorically protests against the fact that the volunteer army, which has violently seized our territory, is ordering the mobilization of all Caucasians fit for military service; those sections of the population who declare that they do not wish to become involved in the Russian civil war, because they consider that the overthrow or support of the Russian Central Government is a matter for the Russian people themselves, are doomed to implacable extermination. Thus, for example, in recent days, two of Ingushetia's most flourishing villages, Ekajewskaia and Sourkhakhi, have been destroyed from top to bottom, not to mention the 30 other villages in Kabarda, Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan devastated and destroyed during the Voluntary Army's invasion of our territory.
We also protest taxes and requisitions such as these, which turn the wealthiest inhabitants into paupers and the less well-off into beggars. The unbearable severity of these taxes can be judged from the following data. In Ingush Canton, for example, the following contributions have been imposed: each family must pay 2,000 rubles in cash, a horned cattle (cost 3 & 4,000 rubles) 4 sheep (average value of a sheep 800 rubles) 25 poods of corn (a pood costs 40 rubles) a Russian war rifle (1.300 rubles) with 200 cartridges (750-1000 rubles) one system revolver (price 1000-1200) with 50 cartridges (500-1000 rubles) each 3 families must pay for a saddle horse conforming to cavalry regulations with all accessories (price 12-15 rubles), Some villages, for example, Nassir Kort, were taxed twice.
The same applies to the villages of Greater and Lesser Kabarda, parts of Ossetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan. In addition, each Kabardian family is taxed 11,000 or 12,000 rubles in the interest of the Kabardian Princes. In addition to the above-mentioned contributions, the peoples of the Republic were obliged to equip regiments for the volunteer army. Given the poverty of the cavalrymen mobilized for the Caucasian regiments, each commune was obliged to contribute a sum varying from 10,000 to 30,000 rubles to equip them, depending on the financial and economic situation of those mobilized. If we add up the total of all these sums, we can see that the imposed contribution amounts to several billion.
At present, the Voluntary Army is making new formations of Caucasian detachments, not to mention the need to replenish regiments already at the front. Parliament believes that these measures by the Volunteer Army among the North Caucasian peoples are nothing more than the realization, under an honorable and acceptable pretext (war against Bolshevism), of the premeditated plan for the complete extermination of the peoples of the North Caucasus.
The peoples of the North Caucasus, instinctively sensing these Machiavellian and macabre plans devised against their existence, are irresistibly rising en masse, as has happened in Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan, preferring rather die under the native Caucasian sky defending their homes, their freedom and their independence, than to perish somewhere, in some unknown Russia, amid the conflagration of civil war.
And now we are witnessing new popular outbursts and national uprisings against the Voluntary Army, led in Chechnya by Sheikh Uzun-Hadji. The Chechens of the Vedeno district, after seizing the Vedeno fortress and the towns of Chatoi and Chali, continued to advance. The Sheikh's armies are made up of Chechens, Dagestanis, Kabardians, Balkars, Ingush, etc... A second uprising began in Dagestan, led by the Republic's Sheikul Islam, Ali Khadji Akushin.
The revolting population, having driven out the administration appointed by the violence of the Voluntary Army in the districts, having disarmed the garrisons of conquered fortresses such as Deschlagar, Madjaliss, Achti, Gounib, etc., pushed the Voluntary Army towards Petrovsk, Temir-Khan-Shura, and Derbend.
The peoples of the North Caucasus, who for 50 years, with Schamyl and his predecessors in the lead, waged war against the Russian autocracy for their independence and freedom and were defeated by the brute force of arms only in 1864, will never obey the Voluntary Army but will continue with arms to the mam to cleanse their territory of invaders. They could never accept the forced mobilization of the Voluntary Army, because they had never experienced military service, even in the darkest days of the Czarist regime. Even the Russian autocracy, considering the history and love of freedom of the North Caucasus peoples on the one hand, and fearing armed uprisings on the other, has not dared to subject the warlike peoples of the North Caucasus to compulsory military service.
In protesting before you against the actions of the Volunteer Army, the Parliament of the Union categorically declares that until the territory of the Republic is cleansed of the Volunteer Army and the independence of the Republic is re-established, there will never be peace in this territory, which will become an arena of bitter and continuous fighting between the invading armies and the peoples of the North Caucasus fighting for their national liberation.
The Union Parliament believes it must draw the attention of Your Excellency, group representative of the Entente Powers, to the necessity of taking the following measures:
- Evacuation of the territories of the Republic by the volunteer army and re-establishment of a provisional demarcation line, half of which is formed by the middle and lower course of the Terek and the course of the Malka up to its mouth, until the definitive settlement of the borders of the Republic by the Peace Conference.
- The earliest possible appointment of the international commission to investigate the actions of the Voluntary Army in these territories.
- Immediate cessation of forced mobilization of Caucasians and their enlistment in the Volunteer Army troops.
- The immediate cessation among Caucasians of requisitions and taxes.
The President of the Parliament, Tsalik[ov]katy
The Secretary, Effendiev