By Ralf Hoppe
Officially, discussion of the Armenian genocide is taboo
in Turkey, even 100 years after the crimes. But the issue is becoming harder
for the country to suppress and many Turks are rediscovering their long-lost
Armenian identities. A church like that can help a person, says Armen. It can
help them from giving up hope -- and that is indeed something. The fact that the church is even standing here --
beautiful and steadfast in a place that was only recently the site of ruins --
instills a sense of courage, says Armen. And courage is something that is badly
needed in these parts, especially in Diyarbakir.
The city is located in southeastern Turkey, deep in the
Anatolian mountain region. Diyarbakir is gray, loud and lackluster. But it does
have one special landmark -- the stylishly restored St. Giragos Church, located
in the Old Town, a labyrinth of crumbling homes and alleys that reverberate
with children's shouts as they kick around a soccer ball.
It's a Christian-Armenian church, the first of its kind
to be rebuilt and highly symbolic in a city like Diyarbakir. The builders say
that attempts were made to prevent the reconstruction, hinting that they may
have been linked to some of the politicians involved in the project. Indeed,
some felt provoked by the restoration of the church.
For others, the church is a symbol of a major political
shift that has gripped Turkish society, a symbol of a willingness to confront
its history. The church also helps people to remember and reaffirm their true
identity. People like Armen.
Armen Demirjan first trained to become a baker, then a
truck driver, then a newspaper deliveryman and now as a parish clerk. In his
early life, Armen had a different name: Abdulrahim Zarasaln. But one day he
found out that he is really Armenian and that the few members of his family who
survived had been forced to convert to Islam. Armen then began a new life --
one that consumed a lot of his energy.
He walks through the church nave. He says construction of
the church cost around €2 million ($2.14 million). The architects restored the
original, almost minimalist look. They put in a roof using wood with a deep,
velvety gloss. The columns, floors and walls were built using dark volcanic
stone. Sunlight floods the church through the high windows.
Crocuses and violets blossom in the churchyard and
there's a café that sells dishes and T-shirts. The café is well attended, with
guests speaking Kurdish, English, Turkish and Armenian. In the very back, two
men play chess at a table. Armen lights a cigarette. The scene is a peaceful
one.
But there's also a palpable tension that can be felt in
even the most basic conversations -- one that can be felt all the way from
remote villages to cities like Diyarbakir and Istanbul.
The Armenian Genocide
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the decision by
the Ottoman Empire to deport the Armenians. Between 800,000 and 1.5 million
people died violent deaths between 1915 and 1918. The European Parliament just
passed a motion calling on Turkey to recognize the atrocities as genocide. A
total of 22 countries officially define the massacre that took place as such,
although Germany, which is home to a large Turkish population, is not one of
them. Historians consider the events to be the first genocide to have been committed
during the 20th century. It's a view shared by Pope Francis. "Concealing
or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging
it," the pope said last week.
There are only rough estimates of the number of
Armenians, Jews, Greeks and Yazidis who converted to Islam in order to prevent
death or oppression at the time. What is certain is that Armen Demirjan's own
tangled history is in no way an isolated case.
That history begins at the end of the 19th century, the
time of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which until then had been a multiethnic
and multireligious society. But the people no longer wanted to accept the
empire's power and demanded national independence. It was an exciting idea, but
it also proved to be deadly.
At the time, Russia was standing in wait at the borders.
The Ottomans, led by the Germany military, suspected the Armenians were
collaborating with the Russian enemy. The Ottomans reacted with a brutality not
previously associated with them.
The Armenians were expelled. Officially, it was called
deportation, but the reality is that the Armenians were sent on death marches
into the desert where they starved, were attacked and murdered.
Armen says he recalls hearing about these things somehow,
of course, but that he had never thought he had any personal connection to it.
A Dark Family Secret
His family is from Lice, a small city located about 70
kilometers (43.5 miles) from Diyarbakir. Armen grew up there and married Leila,
a Kurdish woman, when he was in his mid-twenties. They had four children. Armen
worked as a driver for the city administration and life felt settled. But then
his father died and an uncle revealed the family secret to him -- that the
family was of Armenian origin.
Abdulrahim then changed his name to Armen and began
researching his family history. A friend in the city administration who owed
him a favor, obtained secret documents for him. Armen spent his nights at the
kitchen table reading. His old life slowly unraveled, piece by piece, and a new
identity took shape.
His brother and his wife Leila were worried. Why did he
want to bring up ghosts of the past and reopen old wounds?
"But I think it is my right to live as the person
who I am," he says.
He knows that his grandfather and three of his sons were
murdered, and that his father was rescued by a Kurdish family. Armen says he
had a tough time coming to terms with the information. Without the church,
Armen says, he might not have succeeded. He converted to Christianity.
Construction of the church was made possible by Armenian
business people in Istanbul and the city of Diyarbakir, which provided funding.
One local man who helped was Abdullah Demirbas, a 49-year-old who until only
recently served as mayor of Diyarbakir's historic city center district.
Demirbas says he helped even though he isn't an Armenian. "I'm a genuine
Kurd going back three generations," he says.
And that's exactly why he made the effort, he says. It's
also the reason he helped the Armenian developers push the project through all
the bureaucratic barriers and approved €300,000 in grants from the city. At the
opening of the church, Demirbas gave a speech and personally apologized for the
genocide.
Demirbas sits in the back room of a tea house Indian
style on a deep cushion as he is asked why he decided to assist. He stares into
his cup of Turkish coffee. "The Kurds back then eagerly followed the order
to expel and kill," he says. My grandfather was a part of it. He was a
perpetrator. My mother told me about -- the stories were terrible. But also a
historic reality. Then, when we Kurds were persecuted and killed ourselves and
were declared outlaws, my mother said it was our punishment, that it was divine
retribution for what we had done to the Armenians. It got me thinking."
Demirbas says the Turkish government has difficulty
recognizing its multicultural past. The doctrine of the founding of the Turkish
nation, after all, says it is one nation with one language. He says President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan refers frequently to that line, even more so now that he
has failed to create a Sunni Islamist axis of power that might have stretched
from Libya to Egypt and Syria, with Turkey in the leadership role. Demirbas
says that's why Erdogan has now retreated into the kind of nationalism that
denies what happened to the Armenians was genocide. But he says the anniversary
will need to be commemorated somehow, be it with a ceremony or something else,
and he's trying to come up with an idea. He says the unspoken knowledge of the
guilt is always present and that it poisons society from within.
Like an infection? the journalist asks.
"Like demons," he says.
Fighting for Society
Around the same time that Diyarbakir politician Demirbas
mulls a commemorative event and as Armen, the parish clerk, learns Armenian,
1,020 kilometers away, two young journalists, a man and a woman, are working in
an open plan office in Istanbul. They sit at two desks next to each other as
they fight against the suppression of the genocide their own way. They say they
are fighting for their country and a society that they would one day like to be
proud of. Those words might sound heated in another context, but here they seem
perfectly reasonable.
The young man, Gökhan Diler, is a Turk. The young woman
is Maral Dink, an Armenian. Dink is a pretty famous name in Istanbul and even
one that is known to people across Europe. Maral's uncle, Hrant Dink, was one
of the best known journalists and authors in Turkey until his assassination.
The two work for the weekly Agos, the newspaper that
Maral's uncle co-founded. The bilingual publication is printed in both Turkish
and Armenian and has a circulation of 5,000. Although Agos is one of Turkey's
smallest newspapers, it compensates by being one of its most courageous.
Diler and Dink are the editorial team's youngest stars.
They often collaborate on stories that tackle topics like terrorism, women's
rights and subcultures. But their primary concern is the history of the
Armenian genocide.
It's just after 9 a.m. when Gökhan arrives at Agos. The
young journalist lives in eastern Istanbul, where apartment rents are cheaper.
During his commute, he has to take a 22-minute ferry ride across the Golden
Horn, time he uses to read two newspapers and check his emails.
When asked what it's like as a Turk to work together with
Armenians, he responds, "I have to admit, on the first day I was anxious.
Would the Armenians hate me? Would there be harsh words? But that wasn't the
case. We work very objectively, we have the same goals and these days I often
forget whether a person is Armenian, Kurdish or Turkish."
A Murder Raises a Paper's Profile
Eight years ago, on the afternoon of Jan. 19, 2007, Dink
was murdered by a 16-year-old, who shot him in the head and neck. The men
behind the assassination had connections to the "Deep State," the
clandestine network that had long influenced politics in Turkey and may still
do so today. Dink died on the street at the age of 52.
At the time, it would have been easy to assume that his
death would spell the end of Agos and all that Dink stood for. But it didn't.
The murder drew attention to Agos and created widespread
sympathy that the newspaper might never otherwise have gained. On the night of
the murder, thousands gathered in downtown Istanbul and his burial later became
a politically symbolic event.
Hrant Dink's killing marked a major turning point in the
lives of Gökhan Diler and Maral Dink.
Gökhan had been about to complete a doctoral degree in
economics. He wanted to become a professor one day and "lead a nice life
in a lovely ivory tower." Maral had just been accepted to study
mathematics at a university in London. But the murder deeply traumatized her
family and continues to do so to this very day. There have been numerous death
threats against members of the Dink family.
Independent of each other, both abandoned their plans and
applied to work at Agos. They now work for a fraction of what they might be
making elsewhere. But that doesn't bother them.
Maral, an attractive woman with large eyes, arrives at
the office soon after Gökhan. She beams, hangs her scarf over the back of the
chair and heads over to the coffee kitchen, where she hugs a colleague. Gökhan
looks up from his notes.
Optimism
Maral says she's optimistic about the changes taking
place in Turkish society. She says many Turks now understand that their country
has a need to address its past.
"Maral's right. The suppression sucked up a lot of
energy," says Gökhan.
The societal change that Maral and Gökhan are speaking of
began right after the election victory in 2002 of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his
Justice and Development (AKP) party, as odd as that may seem today. The party
has since become considerably more conservative and religious, but during its
first years in power, AKP pushed through reforms, modernized the country and
also promoted a more liberal climate. In 2005, a conference of historians took
place in Istanbul focusing on the issue of the genocide, despite angry protests
by the nationalists. For the first time in Turkish history, critical researchers
were allowed to express their doubts publicly about the official government
line that there had been no genocide.
The same year, novelist Orhan Pamuk, who would later
receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, said, "30,000 Kurds and 1 million
Armenians were killed in these lands, and no one but me dares to talk about
it."
Protests took place and Pamuk was charged with insulting
his country. But the issue could no longer be suppressed -- the genie was out
of the bottle and the Turks began discussing it.
The expulsion and the genocide displaced Armenians to
faraway places, including Moscow, Los Angeles, Paris and Beirut. Today,
Istanbul is home to only around 65,000 Armenians. Having to persevere in a
hostile environment, the Armenians who stayed behind often had a harder time
than those who left.
This makes it all the more important that the taboo has
been broken and the issue of the genocide is now discussed. And it is a change
that is visible not only in Istanbul or the Armenian church in Diyarbakir, but also
in the distant villages of Anatolia. Like Armen, the parish clerk, other
Armenians are also discovering their true identities and rethinking their
lives.
A Life-Long Secret
But it isn't easy, as the story of Asiya Altai shows.
The village of Cüngüs is about a one and a half hour
drive from Diyarbakir. The landscape is rugged and mountainous and the gaps in
the hills are filled with almond and pistachio trees. Perched on the hillside,
the houses in Cüngüs are painted yellow, green and ochre.
Altai's house is at the edge of the village. She sits
there in a small wooden chair. She's a diminutive elderly woman, but her hands
are heavy, strong and accustomed to hard work. Her grandson, who is five or
six, sits next to her. Altai is around 98 years old, although she's not certain
of her exact age.
When a car pulls up and two unknown people get out and
start moving toward her, she stands up. She protectively puts her hands over
the forehead of the boy, who is standing in front of her. Her son-in-law Recai tries
to calm her. She insists she doesn't want to talk about her past. But it's
important, her son-in-law says.
Altai was born during the time of the decimation. She
knows that her mother's name was Safiye, an Armenian-Christian name that is the
equivalent of Sophie. Safiye had been on a death march with her parents in the
Syrian desert when a Kurdish guerrilla caught sight of the 12-year-old girl and
either fell in love with or wanted to rape her. In any case, by wrestling
Safiye away from her parents, the man saved her life.
This man was likely Asiya's father, but it appears that
he died shortly after her birth. Asiya never got to know him. She grew up in
Cüngüs. It's likely that her mother was unable to really trust the other women
in the village, so she made her daughter one of her earliest confidantes. She
also made her daughter promise never to reveal the terrible secret of her
roots.
Altai still feels bound to that pledge today. Her
daughter and her son-in-law have to coax each word out of her. Her mother had
probably also been warned never to utter a word about what had happened.
"But that no longer applies today!" says
son-in-law Recai.
"It's OK to talk about it," her daughter Ayse
says.
'The Armenians Just Disappeared'
"There were many Armenians living here," says
Altai. "There was a church and a cloister -- the ruins are still standing.
Then the Armenians just disappeared one day, just like that."
When the interview ends, Recai suggests driving back
along the Dudan River, which is about 15 minutes away.
He says many people were killed there -- that they were
pushed there and then flung into the gorge. Older people in the surrounding
villages, he says, knew what was happening and even talk about it among
themselves. Recai says that people in the village avoid the site, believing it
is cursed.
Green mountain water foams as it makes its way down the
Dudan, first through a gorge and then tumbling into a crevice. It's like an
underground waterfall. There's a drop of 15 or 20 meters (49 to 65 feet) -- a
thunderous, dark hole from which wafts of mist rise.
The driver, quiet up until this moment, says it's time to
leave. He doesn't want to stay here. No, he says, it's not that he believes in
ghosts, not really. But you never know.
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