For Kazakhstan, this date has a special meaning. Today, Kazakh people also honor the memory of the Great famine and mass starvations victims of late 20s and early 30s of the 20th century. More than 2 million people died and more than 1 million were forced to leave the country as a result of the criminal Stalinist national policy.
The mass famine was followed by an unprecedented political repression and the organized holocaust of the Kazakh society elite. Thousands of people were convicted for political reasons and 25 000 of them were sentenced to death. Throughout the territory of Kazakhstan 11 camps were established to keep imprisoned the repressed and their family members in detention and the most terrible conditions.
Not only Kazakhs were subjected to repression. 1.5 million representatives of other ethnic groups were forcibly deported to Kazakhstan. Only compassion and help from the Kazakh people helped them survive and find hope in a new home. Peoples of other republics of the former Soviet Union also died of mass starvation and repression, primarily Russians and Ukrainians.
These were the results of the tragic Communist experiment of the Soviet regime. The Kazakh people lost the most of their gene pool. Only in the 90s, Kazakhstan managed to restore its number of people as it was in 1915, which was up to 8 million people according to various sources. No modern nation in the world has experienced such a tragic fate.
President of Kazakhstan H.E. Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev recently instructed to create a State Commission for the rehabilitation of political repression victims. This is an accurate decision, as the history is only valuable when it is evaluated and judged properly by the new generations, in order to enable us to take decisions to prevent such tragic events in the future.
The Turkic Council fully supports this step by the Kazakhstan government. Members of the Turkic Council hope that the results of the Commission's work will be useful to the fully disclose this crime, restore the historical justice and adopt the important decisions to prevent such a tragedy anywhere in the world.
The Turkic Council and all the Turkic peoples wish to the brotherly Kazakh people and all citizens of the Cradle of the Turkic world - the Kazakhstan, to have a peaceful life, harmonious social development, economic prosperity and a worthy place in the world community.
Baghdad Amreyev
Secretary General of the Turkic Council
