User:DMDonahue

My ethnic identity is Kekistani, which comes from an ancient Indo-Aryan tribal people from the foothills Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan. The Kekistani people suffered from regular attempts at sectarian ethnic cleansing as they hold a non-Islamic pagan faith, and under the Soviet Union their history was effectively scrubbed clean after the Kekistani Uprising in 1952. This liberation movement was heavily persecuted by the Soviets, who branded it a "threat to the workers" and removed almost all references to Kekistan and its people from their history books. As Western journalists could not access the region, the word "Kekistani" is almost entirely absent from the English language, and even in Russian there only a few sparse references.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Tajikistani Government resumed the persecutions, so many Kekistanis fled to the West, adopting Anglicised names and marking their ethnic status as the dominant ethnic group in the host country as to avoid any possibility of future persecution.

I learned all of this from the oral traditions of my people, as told by my Grandfather before he died, himself a refugee from Tajikistan, who knew that many thousands of Kekistanis had fled to Britain, Europe and the United States and retain their ancient tribal traditions in private. Now the world is more open, accepting and diverse, many in my family believe it is the right time to finally become the people we have always had the right to be, but been denied under state persecution. We look to the British government to help us re-connect with our roots and our people, in the name of tolerance and diversity.