[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 16364]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    PUTIN OPPRESSION OF AHISKA TURKS

  (Mr. KINZINGER of Illinois asked and was given permission to address 
the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. KINZINGER of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I was stunned to see Russian 
President Vladimir Putin disparage American exceptionalism a few weeks 
ago. Simply put, Mr. Putin's human rights record leaves much to be 
desired, including his treatment of Ahiska Turks. A distinct minority, 
they are severely persecuted by top Russian authorities in Putin's 
government solely for their ethnicity and religion.
  During Mr. Putin's first term, the State Department designated Ahiska 
Turks as a group of special humanitarian concern. Since then, 12,000 
Turks have resettled in America, including many in Illinois and in my 
district. However, 80,000 Ahiska Turks remain in Russia, and they 
routinely face discrimination and persecution in areas of their lives 
that we often take for granted. In an ethnic cleansing campaign, Stalin 
uprooted and resettled Ahiska Turks to central Asia from their 
ancestral lands in Georgia in 1944. Unable to return, they have since 
been perennial refugees in Central Asia and Russia.
  This is the reality of Putin's Russia: in Russia, people are 
routinely and severely discriminated against, tortured, even killed, 
and are economically and financially repressed.
  When given the freedom to chase the American Dream, these same Ahiska 
Turks have fulfilled their potential in less than a decade. I will let 
my colleagues make their own determinations about which nation is 
exceptional.

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