Armenian mass a sign of growing tolerance
By Delphine Strauss in Van
FT
September 19 2010 20:14
Bells rang and the liturgy echoed from inside an Armenian church in
eastern Turkey for the first time in nearly a century at a Sunday
service symbolising Turkish efforts to overcome its troubled history
with ethnic and religious minorities.
The Holy Cross church on Akhtamar island, a rocky outcrop in Lake Van,
is one of the few visible remnants of the Armenian communities that
were settled across eastern Anatolia until the Ottoman-era massacres
and deportations of 1915, in which an estimated 1.5m died. Most
Armenian churches were destroyed.
It is also part of a broader effort by the ruling Justice and
Development party (AKP) to end the ethnic and religious divisions that
have shadowed Turkey since the creation of the modern republic. The
Greek Orthodox monastery at Sumela, near the Black Sea coast, was
permitted one day of worship this summer, and the government has also
taken tentative steps to broaden language and cultural rights for the
large Kurdish minority.
`Turkey is going back to the good side of the Ottoman Empire, said
Baskin Oran, an academic who launched a petition apologising for the
killings of Armenians in 1915. The Kemalist state, created after the
Armenian massacres and population exchange with Greece, assumed
non-Turks would be assimilated and non-Muslims expelled. But `if the
Armenian taboo is broken, the rest will follow suit,’ Mr Oran said.
Boats shuttled about 1,000 worshippers, including visitors from
Istanbul, Yerevan, Iran and the US, to Akhtamar on Sunday, where
tearful women lit candles and knelt to pray.
`This land has created a lot of Armenian culture. It means a lot,’
said Hayk, a 26-year-old from Los Angeles. `It’s a good first step
[from Turkey] and I’m hopeful there will be more.’
Paul Shahinian, from New Jersey, said the service was a `bittersweet’
reminder of his family roots in Van. `Ethnic hatred runs deep, and it
runs through generations. I think Armenians need to have
reconciliation and move on?.?.?.?but it’s impossible,’ he said.
Many diaspora organisations called on Armenians to boycott what they
saw as a publicity stunt by a government that denies the 1915
massacres constituted genocide. Ankara says thousands of Turks also
died in the empire’s disintegration.
Others cancelled trips at the last moment when the authorities failed
to place a cross on the roof.
Minorities living in Turkey still face prejudice ` including, in the
case of Christian converts, from their own families. The European
Court of Human Rights ruled last week that Turkey had failed to
protect the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink before his murder
in 2007. And the government has still not acted on promises to reopen
the Greek Orthodox Halki seminary in Istanbul.
But many acknowledge that the AKP, whose religious members also faced
pressure in the past from an establishment fearful of radical Islam,
has done more to promote tolerance than any previous government.
`Government action is very slow and timid, but it is happening.
Comparing it with the Kemalist period is like night and day,’ said
Cengiz Aktar, an academic at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir university.
Although politicians still tread carefully for fear of reprisals by
nationalists, attitudes in Turkey have changed radically in recent
years, with new books, films and seminars opening to discussion issues
once fixed in stone in the school curriculum.
Moreover, many Turks are becoming aware that their own roots are more
mixed than the `Muslim’ listed on the identity cards of most would
suggest.
`I came to see because my father was one of them,’ said Bahar, a local
woman in her 70s whose Muslim grandparents adopted a 12-year-old
Armenian boy when his family was killed. `I came to see my relations.’
Additional reporting by Funja Guler
From: A. Papazian