The 1989 Fergana events and the expulsion of the Meskhetian Turks
From 3 to 12 June 1989, mass violence against Meskhetian Turks erupted in the Fergana Valley. According to the official count, 103 people were killed, more than a thousand were injured, and hundreds of houses were burned. In the aftermath, roughly 90,000 Meskhetian Turks left the Fergana Valley. Sourced history with exact dates and figures.
In June 1989, mass violence against Meskhetian Turks — the tragic events remembered as the 'Fergana events' — broke out in the Fergana Valley. They were among the largest interethnic clashes of the late Soviet period and caused an entire community to leave the country. Below the events are set out with exact dates and official figures, on the basis of sources.
Who the Meskhetian Turks were
The Meskhetian Turks are a Turkic-speaking people who historically lived in the Meskheti region of southern Georgia. In 1944 the Soviet government forcibly deported them from their homeland to Central Asia, including the Uzbek SSR. By 1989, about 100,000 Meskhetian Turks lived in the Uzbek SSR, most of them in the Fergana Valley.
How the events began
The first clashes occurred in Quvasoy on 16–18 May 1989. The large-scale violence lasted from 3 to 12 June. Many sources cite a market quarrel — a dispute over strawberries between a Meskhetian Turk and an Uzbek vendor — as the immediate trigger. Historians, however, point to high unemployment, population density and economic distress in the valley as the underlying causes.
Casualties and destruction
According to the official count, 103 people died (52 Meskhetian Turks and 36 Uzbeks). Other estimates put the death toll at between 112 and 150. More than a thousand people were injured, among them 137 servicemen and over 110 police officers. 757 residential buildings were burned or looted, 27 government facilities were damaged, and 275 vehicles were destroyed.
The military intervention and the evacuation
USSR internal troops and police were deployed to restore order; the Meskhetian Turks in Kokand were evacuated by Soviet helicopter. The bulk of the evacuation took place between 9 and 18 June. The Soviet government issued an official ruling to immediately airlift virtually the entire Turkish population of the valley — about 17,000 people — to Russia.
The exodus and a new diaspora
First, 17,000 people were airlifted out, and then roughly another 70,000 left the valley. The largest share of those who left — about 70,000 — went to Azerbaijan; the rest dispersed to Russia (especially Krasnodar Krai), Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine. The Meskhetian Turk community of the Fergana Valley thus almost entirely came to an end, and this people once again became a scattered diaspora across the former USSR.
Historical significance
The 1989 Fergana events were one of the first major eruptions of interethnic violence during perestroika; a year later, in 1990, clashes between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz also broke out in the Osh region of neighbouring Kyrgyzstan. The departure of the Meskhetian Turks remained one of the largest forced-migration episodes in the history of Uzbekistan. Later, in the early 2000s, part of the Meskhetian Turk community in Krasnodar Krai was resettled to the United States under its refugee admission program.
