By Rick Gladstonemay
A lawsuit in Turkey filed by the Armenian Church to
recover its ancient headquarters, seized a century ago during the Armenian
genocide, is the “first legal step” of a goal to reclaim all Armenian property
seized by the Turks, a worldwide leader of the church said Monday. The leader,
Aram I, Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia, also said that if the Turkish
legal authorities rejected the lawsuit, it would “deepen the divide” between
Turkey and the 10-million-member Armenian diaspora. Aram I spoke in an interview at The New York Times while
on a visit to diaspora communities in the Northeast after having participated
in genocide centennial events in Washington.
Artemiss, left, and her second husband, Ghoulst, with
their daughter, Katerina, in Kiev in 1934.Remembering the Armenian
GenocideAPRIL 24, 2015
He is a leading advocate of the effort to increase global
recognition of the 1915-23 killings of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks
as a genocide, a description embraced by Pope Francis, the European Parliament
and legislatures of more than 20 nations but angrily rejected by Turkey’s
government, which calls it a distortion of history.
Legislatures of many American states also have called the
killings a genocide. The White House has yet to do so, but Aram I said, “I am
sure President Obama, in his heart, knows that this was genocide.”
On April 27, lawyers for the church filed a suit with the
Constitutional Court of Turkey asserting that the headquarters of the
Catholicosate in Sis, part of the Kozan district in southern Turkey’s Adana
Province, was wrongly seized and should be returned.
The headquarters, which dates to 1293 and included a
cathedral and monastery, was once the epicenter of Armenian Christian life. It
was among the tens of thousands of Armenian properties commandeered and
plundered during the last days of the Ottoman Empire and the scattering of
Armenian survivors. The headquarters was re-established in 1930, in Antelias,
Lebanon.
Aram I, who at 68 is the first Lebanese-born leader of
the Catholicosate of Cilicia, said he had decided to proceed with a lawsuit
after having consulted with 30 legal experts, including some from Turkey. While
the church’s efforts to achieve an international acknowledgment of the genocide
were important, “after 100 years, I thought it was high time that we put the
emphasis on reparation,” he said.
“This is the headquarters of the church,” he said. “This
is the first legal step. That will be followed by our claim to return all the
churches, the monasteries, the church-related properties and, finally, the
individual properties. We should move step by step.”
There has been, as yet, no response by the Constitutional
Court to the suit, and the Armenian Church leader speculated that its judges
may be ignoring it. But the mayor of Kozan, Musa Ozturk, signaled within days
of the suit that the church would have a fight on its hands.
“Not even an iota of land is to be handed over to
anyone,” Mr. Ozturk said in remarks quoted by Turkish news media. The mayor
said the church had no proof of ownership.
Aram I acknowledged that the church did not have deeds,
but said he considered that level of proof to be absurd considering the obvious
nature of the properties. “The ownership is clear,” he said. “They are
Armenian. Nobody can question the ownership or identity or history of those
properties.”
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The church’s lead international lawyer in the suit, Payam
Akhavan, a McGill University professor and legal expert on genocide issues,
said in a recent telephone interview that he planned to take the case to the
European Court of Human Rights if the Turkish court rejects it. Under the
European convention on human rights, all domestic remedies must be exhausted
before such a case could be heard.
Mr. Akhavan said the lawsuit had been carefully framed to
avoid antagonizing the Turkish authorities over the genocide issue. “We have a
property claim,” he said. “We’re not asking for recognition of the Armenian
genocide. We have a very pragmatic claim.”
Aram I said he had never been able to visit the ancient
headquarters and feared that the local authorities had made efforts to erase
its Armenian identity. He also expressed impatience with a view that the
church’s confrontational stance, as seen in the lawsuit, is inconsistent with
the principle of forgiveness, a basic Christian value.
“Forgiveness comes when there is confession, repentance,
acceptance of sin,” he said. “Reconciliation is part of our human faith and
values, but first of all, Turkey must reconcile with its own past.”
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