Robert Fisk
Gaziantep
The ‘Liberation’ Mosque is a fine, neo-classical, almost
Gothic construction with striped black-and-white stone banding, unusual for a
Muslim holy place but a jewel in the Tepebasi district of the old town of
Gaziantep. Its stone carvings and mock Grecian columns beside the window frames
are a credit to another, gentler age. The minarets perch delicately – and I had
never seen this before – on square towers that might have been church towers
had there been Christians in this ancient city.
But of course, there were. What no-one will tell you in
Gaziantep, what no guidebook mentions, what no tourist guide will refer to, is
that this very building – whose 19th century builders were none other than the
nephews of the official architect of Sultan Abdulhamid II – was the Holy Mother
of God cathedral for at least 20,000 Christian Armenians who were victims of
the greatest war crime of the 1914-18 war: the Armenian genocide. They were
deported by the Ottoman Turks from this lovely city, which had been their
families’ home for hundreds of years, to be executed into common graves. The
murderers were both Turks and Kurds.
Altogether, up to 32,000 Armenians – almost the entire
Christian population of 36,000 of what was then called Antep – were deported
towards the Syrian cities of Hama, Homs, Selimiyeh, to the Hauran and to Deir
Ezzor in 1915. The Muslim citizens of Aintep then apparently plundered the
empty homes of those they had dispossessed, seizing not only their property but
the treasures of the cathedral church itself. Indeed, the church, ‘Surp
Asdvazdadzin Kilisesi’ in Armenian, was turned into a warehouse – as were many
Jewish synagogues in Nazi Germany and in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe during
the Second World War – and then into a prison.
Read more
Prowling around the church-mosque enclosure, I found some
of the prison bars still attached to the window frames, although the building
has been functioning as a mosque since 1986. The main gate was closed but I
pushed it open and found not only that the structure of the magnificent
building is still intact but that scaffolding has been placed against the walls
for a renovation. Behind the church – and separate from the building – was an
ancient stone cave whose interior was blackened with what must have been the
smoke of candle flames from another era, perhaps a worshipping place because
the cave appears to have been a tomb in antiquity. The caretaker came fussing
up to us to tell us that the mosque was shut, that we must leave, that this was
a closed place. But he was a friendly soul and let us take pictures of the great
façade of the church and of the minarets.
The only sign of its origin is the date “1892” carved in
stone on the east façade of the original church, marking the final completion
of the work of the great Armenian architect Sarkis Balian – he was the official
architect of the 19th century Sultan Abdulhamid II, a terrible irony since
Abdulhamid himself began the first round of Armenian massacres of 80,000
Christians (the figure might be 300,000) in Ottoman Turkey just two years after
the Armenian stonemason Sarkis Tascian carved the date on the façade. In the
later 1915 Armenian Holocaust – even Israelis use this word for the Armenian
genocide – a million and a half Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks. It is
a shock to realize that Aintep’s vast toll of dead were only a small fraction
of this terrifying war crime.
Outside the church, I found an elderly Syrian refugee
sitting on the pavement by the closed gate. He greeted us in Arabic and said
that, yes, he knew this was once a church. Just over a century ago, the Arabs
of northern Syria – the land now occupied by Isis – were among the only friends
the Armenians found in the vast deserts into which they were sent to die. Some
took Armenian children into their homes. Others married Armenian women – the degree
of coercion involved in this ‘charitable’ act depends on the teller — although
more than twenty years ago I met a Syrian man and his ‘converted’ Armenian wife
near Deir Ezzor, both around a hundred years old and both of whom has lost
count of their great-great-grandchildren.
A Turkish man in a shop below the cathedral was less
generous. Yes, it had been a church, he said. But when I asked him if it had
been an Armenian church, he chuckled – dare I call it a smirk? — and looked at
me, and said nothing. I suppose a kind of guilt hangs over a place like this.
So it is a happy thought that some Armenian families have in recent years – as
tourists, of course – visited the city that was once Antep and have spoken with
warmth to members of Turkey’s leftist parties and celebrated the work of
American missionaries who cared for both the Armenian and Turkish Muslim
population here before 1915. One Armenian identified his old family home and
the Turkish family who lived there invited him in and insisted that he should
stay with them and not in a hotel. For this was also his home, they said.
But tears of compassion do not dry up the truth. For when
the First World War ended, Allied troops marched into Antep. First came the
British, led by the execrable Sir Mark Sykes – of Sykes-Picot infamy – and then
the French in October 1919, who brought with them, alas, elements of the
Armenian volunteers who had joined their ‘Legion d’Orient’ in Port Said. The
Muslim elites who had taken over the town – and the Armenian homes and properties
– feared the newcomers would demand restitution. Fighting broke out between
Muslims and the French and their Armenian allies and the Muslims discovered a
new-found enthusiasm for the independence struggle of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Thus began the false history of the city.
Perhaps the greatest font of knowledge on this period is
a young Harvard scholar, Umit Kurt, of Kurdish-Arab origin, who was born in
modern-day Gaziantep. Mr Kurt is now an academic at Harvard’s Center for Middle
East Studies and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Armenians of Antep from
the 1890s with a special focus – this is the important bit for readers – on
property transfers, confiscation, deportation and massacres. Mr Kurt’s
conclusion is bleak.
“The famous battle of Aintab [sic] against the French,”
he says, “…seems to have been as much the organised struggle of a group of
genocide profiteers seeking to hold onto their loot as it was a fight against
an occupying force. The resistance…sought to make it impossible for the
Armenian repatriates to remain in their native towns, terrorising them [again]
in order to make them flee. In short, not only did the local…landowners,
industrialists and civil-military bureaucratic elites lead to the resistance
movement, but they also financed it in order to cleanse Aintab of Armenians.”
They were successful. The French abandoned Antep in
December 1919 and the Armenian volunteers fled with them. The new Turkish state
awarded the Muslim fighters of the city with the honourific Turkish prefix
‘Gazi’ – “veterans” – and thus Antep became Gaziantep and the great church of
old Sarkis Balian would eventually be renamed the ‘Liberation Mosque’ –
“Kurtulus Cami” – to mark the same dubious victory over the French and
Armenians, the latter being defamed as killers by those who had sent the
Armenians of the city to their doom in 1915.
Not much justice there. Nor in the official Turkish
version of that terrible history of the Armenian Holocaust in which – this is
the least the Turkish government will concede – Armenians died ‘tragically’ in
the chaos of the First World War, as did Muslims themselves. German military
advisers witnessed the genocide. Hitler was later to ask his generals, before
the invasion of Poland and the destruction of its Jews, who now, in 1939,
remembered the Armenians. The official Turkish account of the fate of
Gaziantep’s original Armenians refers to their “relocation” – a word used by
the Nazis when they sent the Jews to their extermination in eastern Europe.
No, we shouldn’t contaminate the Turks of modern Turkey
with the crimes of their grandfathers. Umir Kurt wrote his dissertation for the
brilliant and brave Turkish historian Taner Akcam, whose work on the Armenian
genocide has revolutionised historical scholarship in Turkey. Last year,
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan deliberately moved the date of the 1915
Gallipoli commemorations to the very day of the anniversary of the start of the
Armenian genocide in an attempt to smother any memory of the crime – but the
government allowed Armenians to parade through Istanbul in honour of their 1915
dead. Yet if the historical narrative from the 20th century’s first holocaust
to its second holocaust is valid, then the path upon which the first doomed
Armenians of Antep set out in their convoy of deportation on 1st August 1915
led all the way to Auschwitz. The ‘Liberation’ Mosque is a milestone on the
journey.
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder
Not: Yalnızca bu blogun üyesi yorum gönderebilir.