It’s Saturday morning and it’s usually a slow day at RRW, and I have chores to do, but couldn’t resist writing one more post when Judy sent me a Steve Sailer post from VDARE on Meskhetians (Muslim Russian/Turks).

For new readers, we got our start writing Refugee Resettlement Watch in 2007 because of those three things in my title above.   Funny how things work!

You see, we had never heard of Refugee Resettlement until Church World Service’s subcontractor, Virginia Council of Churches, quietly began resettling the Meskhetians in our rural county in western Maryland.  The story at the time was that Lancaster, PA was overloaded with refugees, specifically the ‘Russians,’ and CWS needed to off-load some within a reasonable geographic distance from their friends in Lancaster, PA (yes, that is the home of the Amish).   Our Chief of Police reported that he called the authorities in Lancaster at the time and was told there were some crime issues and the Muslim Russian flow needed to stop for awhile.

Bottomline for Washington County, Maryland is that about 200 were resettled here in the mid-2000’s (Bush Administration), but the State Department halted the resettlement when some bad PR about CWS and VCC reached the media.

Needless to say, it’s a long story and I don’t know what happened to the original group.  More recently I met a real estate agent in Hagerstown (our county seat) who told me the Russian “refugees” had money to buy houses which makes us all wonder how they became “refugees” in the first place.

Now, 6 years into writing this blog comes an answer from a Russian-speaking writer to VDARE.

(Here is one post we wrote in 2008 trying to sort out why the US was resettling 18,000 Meskhetians.)

Before we quote liberally from the writer, first visit the post by Steve Sailer (also at VDARE) that prompted the Russian-speaking commenter.

A Meskhetian Turk was arrested in Lancaster (where Church World Service is the primary resettlement contractor) in July for running down a young woman and three children in Philadelphia, and killing them.  A fourth child survived.

Read the whole post.

Then this is a portion of what a reader of VDARE sent in response (emphasis is mine):

I read the Steve Sailer’s  post about the Meskhetian Turks. I know a little of them, because I worked closely with them for a couple of years.

I learned that a program was looking for volunteer tutors who could speak Russian. Remembering my elders from Russia, and their neighbors, (Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians), I looked forward to helping people from Europe.

The refugees were not the Europeans I expected to meet. Instead of being European and Christian, they were Muslim Turks. With individual exceptions, the impressions I left with were not very favorable.

Because we could understand one another, they spoke very freely. Their most common sentiment, which they expressed shamelessly, was that America owed them a living; that we should support them for the rest of their lives, for all that they had been through.

This is what Meskhetian Turks have been through:

Stalin, a Georgian, ordered them deported from Georgia, once the German threat had receded. He accused them of collaborating with the Nazis. This was most likely not the reason, for the Germans never got close enough to the Meskhetians to be able to recruit them.

The Meskhetians were banished to Central Asia, to places like Tadjikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and so on, where their Muslim co-religionists live. However, even the Muslims of those regions grew to hate them. You see, the reason they were persecuted (contrary to the reason offered by the U.N., that they are “very industrious”), is that they are lazy. And indeed, natural selection has sharply honed these instincts in them. Lying and stealing are virtues. 

By 1990, the Muslim republics in which they resided had had enough of them, and began expelling them. So they became “internal refugees” in the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union broke up, and the Muslim republics became independent, the Meskhetians became stateless, because the Russian Federation would not grant them citizenship. More intolerable for these Turks was the fact that the Russian government forced them to work, in exchange for food and supplies. Their very notion of “persecution”!

So began their campaign to be recognized by the UN as “internal refugees”, who could apply for asylum in other countries—and Russia was more than happy to rid themselves of the Meskhetian Turks. Turkey offered to take them, but they refused, because Istanbul would have required the men to serve in the army. The Meskhetians wanted no part of that!

There is more, plus links, read it all!

So it seems they really weren’t “refugees” in the way most people think of refugees, and I’ve wondered aloud on these pages many times if they weren’t just brought here to help Russia—-to remove a thorn from its side.  In fact, I testified two years in a row to the US State Department and said Congress should stop the State Department from using the refugee program for unrelated foreign policy reasons.  Here is what I said:

Congress needs to specifically disallow the use of the refugee program for other purposes of the US Government, especially using certain refugee populations to address unrelated foreign policy objectives—Uzbeks, Kosovars, Meskhetians and Bhutanese (Nepalese) people come to mind.

We’ve had a run on refugee stories from PA over the last few days, if you didn’t see them go here and here.

For more on Lancaster, PA, go here.