Al-Jadaliyya
April 24 2014
#SaveKessab, #Save Aleppo, and Kim Kardashian: Syria’s Rashomon Effect
by Elyse Semerdjian
A historic Christian Armenian town situated just a mile from the
Turkish border in northwest Syria, Kessab is now among the war’s many
casualties. On the morning of 21 March, the town was seized by
opposition fighters from three Islamic militant groups: Jabhat
al-Nusra, Sham al-Islam, and Ansar al-Sham. For Armenians around the
world, the event conjured memories of past traumas as one of two
remaining Armenian areas that survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915
was depopulated. The last remaining Armenian village in Turkey,
Vakıflı, located across the border, is now a safe haven for some of
Kessab’s former residents. Three weeks after the capture of Kessab,
the event continues to take on a life of its own as various factions
in the conflict seek to instrumentalize the tragedy to construct their
own versions of reality, a phenomenon that could be called Syria’s
Rashomon effect.
[View of Kessab and Surrounding Environs (Photo courtesy of Stefan Winter)]
Kessab was relatively quiet over the last three years but has new
value as a launching point for an opposition campaign against the
coastal town of Latakia, which lies within the regime’s Alawite
heartland. Militants call this campaign al-Anfal (`The Spoils’), a
label taken from a chapter title of the Quran connoting the hope of
defeating Asad against changing odds after a recent opposition defeat
in Yabrud near Damascus. Since the uprising, Kessab’s grassroots
militias took up arms to repel militants who sought to enter the
mountains. The morning of the raid, Turkey opened the border allowing
militias to cross into Syria perhaps to tip the balance against recent
Asad gains in the south. However, many Armenians, including the
Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) and subsequent Armenian
activists quickly linked Turkey’s role in Kessab three weeks ago to
the 1915 Armenian Genocide’an event commemorated later this month on
24 April.
While dismissed by the opposition, Armenian fears are not completely
baseless. Some Islamist opposition militias carry their own unique
brand of takfiri sectarianism evidenced by videoed beheadings and
forced conversions of Shiites and Christians. Events like the
depopulation of Kessab do little to assuage Armenian fears of
annihilation that remain alive after a century. Although guerilla
groups are often in conflict with one another, they have in common
attacks Christian villages, conversion of churches into militia
headquarters as in Raqqa, desecration and looting of religious
objects, kidnapping and forcibly converting Christians to Islam, and
summarily executing minorities and even fellow Sunni Muslim fighters
by mistake in the streets. Yet, aside from the removal of a cross from
a church rooftop, there was no mass destruction in Kessab when it was
captured.
[Photo of Alleged Cross Destruction Within a Church in Kessab]
The Armenian community continues to protest Kessab’s capture. The
#SaveKessab campaign launched via social media contains many important
facts about Kessab, but the nature of circulation on the internet also
afforded the spreading of erroneous information. True, the current
depopulation of Kessab echoes two other evacuations in the last
century’1909 and 1915’and Turkey was involved in each instance. But
what has not been clarified is that although eighty people were
reported as killed in the raid by Asbarez, an Armenian news service,
only two casualties are confirmed as Armenian to date. While those
deaths are important, diaspora Armenians continue to publish
exaggerated articles claiming `a NATO-backed second genocide’ is
taking place in Kessab. Other Armenian news services have offered more
balanced coverage, The Armenian Weekly focused on the two thousand
Armenians evacuated to Latakia where they are sheltered in the Virgin
Mary Mother of God Armenian Church and given humanitarian assistance
by the Armenian Red Cross. The news service has also focused on the
search for ten missing Kessab Armenians who never made it to Latakia.
So, why did Armenians evacuate Kessab? Here it is useful to examine
al-Nusra’s capture of the Aramaic-speaking town of Maaloula outside
Damascus in September 2013’a place of little to no strategic military
value. Symbolism trumped strategy in Maaloula as the Mar Taqla
monastery, named after an early Christian saint who fled Roman
persecution interned within its walls, was seized and thirteen of its
nuns were held captive for three months. The nuns were released on 9
March after Qatar reportedly ransomed them for sixteen million
dollars. Over the last two years, the depopulation of Christians in
Homs (reduced to ten percent of its original prewar size), Maaloula,
and Kessab have magnified existing fears that Syria’s Christians may
not survive Syria’s war.
[Kessab Armenians attend mass after arrival in Latakia]
Considering the deep connections between Armenian communities over
several centuries, many recently exiled residents who fled Kessab were
internally displaced Armenians from Aleppo who fled the fighting in
August 2012. Now triple exiled, these refugees huddle in the Armenian
Church in Latakia on the coast awaiting their fate, joining over seven
million displaced Syrians internally and regionally. Certainly, the
disappearance of two thousand Armenians in Kessab may mean little
numerically in the larger tragedy of 140,000 dead over the last three
years. What it does offer is another way of viewing a conflict that
threatens to erase century-old communities that comprise Syria’s
mosaic of over sixteen religious and ethnic communities.
A Brief History of Syria’s Armenians
When the conflict began three years ago, I was in the process of
writing a history of Syria’s early Armenian community. The Armenian
community in Syria is divided between a smaller minority of Armenians
(arman qadim) who arrived during the Cilician Kingdom of Armenia which
fell in 1375 and a majority of Armenians who are descendants of
refugees from the Genocide. Aleppo’a major deportation hub during
World War I’houses most of Syria’s Armenian population. Despite the
ongoing presence of Armenians in Syria Fawwaz Tallo, a Syrian
opposition figure, erroneously asserted, `Kessab is a Syrian town and
not Armenian. The Armenians are guests whom we received one hundred
years ago on our Syrian land, and today we liberate our land.’ Tallo’s
claim is pure hyperbole that seeks to alienate Armenians from Syria’s
broader history during a time of national struggle. Historical
documents tell a different story’Kessab is among the most ancient
Armenian settlements in the entire region and among the last to
survive the ethnic cleansing and wars of the last century.
As I write this essay, placed on my desk are Ottoman fiscal records
(called Mufassal Tahrir Defteri) that document the steady growth of
Armenians from the sixteenth century forward as they fled a rebellion
(celali) in the east where Armenians lived and crop failures brought
on by the Little Ice Age in the 1590s. The Armenian community was
quite visible in sixteenth century Aleppo as the historic Christian
Judayda quarter took shape in the city, eventually housing nearly a
quarter of the city’s population by the eighteenth century. That same
survey charts Kessab’s expansion in the first decades of the sixteenth
century: 1526: twenty-six families, 1536: thirty families, 1550:
sixty-one families. As violence intensified in the Ottoman Empire,
beginning with the Hamidiye Massacres (1894-1896), Armenians fled more
frequently to nearby Syrian lands.
During the genocide, Syria housed the killing fields where mass
unmarked graves can be located along the deportation route in Ras
al-`Ein, Raqqa, Der ez-Zor, and Shaddadeh. As Der ez-Zor lay in ruin
after three years of war, it was hard to forget that almost every Deri
has an Armenian `hababah’ (`grandmother’ in the local dialect) and
therefore have familial links to events of 1915. After World War I,
Syria was overrun with refugees numbering 100,000 Armenians by the
1920s. Originally refugee camps, Armenian neighborhoods developed in
Suleymaniyah, Azziziah, and Maydan (Armenian: `Nor Kyugh’) in Aleppo,
while the old harat al-arman outside Bab Sharqi in Damascus still
sports the original barakat design of the Armenian refugee camp with
stucco walls and tin roofs.
In 1928, Armenians were naturalized as Syrian citizens by French
colonial powers with the hope of thwarting nationalist stirrings
during an election year. The result of French meddling with the
Armenian minority was a category historian Keith Watenpaugh calls `not
quite Syrian.’ In an environment of colonial `divide and rule’
policies, Syria’s minorities were considered collaborator classes
while the Sunni bourgeoisie agitated for independence from French
rule. Early experimentation with liberal democracy showed some signs
of political inclusion as Armenians were elected to the constituent
assembly. During the instability of the 1960s and subsequent
ascendancy of Hafiz al-Asad, Armenians showed a decline in political
participation that continues today.
Analyst Andrew Tabler adopted the regime’s myths when he told NPR
`[Syrian Christians get] very good business contracts, positions in
government and the Syrian military¦.They get preferential treatment
and protection of their places of worship.’ In this line of thinking,
Armenians and other Christians are protected minorities who reaped
financial and political benefits from the state. Yet the facts do not
support this claim entirely. Armenians were seldom elected to
parliament and when they were present in government they held
appointed rather than elected positions. As recently as 2012, Bashar
al-Asad appointed a woman, Dr. Nazira Farah Sarkis, as Minister of the
Environment. One could read this singular appointment in 2012 as an
effort to garner the support of Armenians during a period of
protracted fighting when Armenians took the formal stance of
neutrality during the uprising.
The myth of minoritarian rule as beneficial to minorities has had
devastating effects for everyday Syrians, who are targeted for
reprisal as the primary collaborators with the Assad regime when, in
reality, every community has been coopted to some degree within
complex webs of collaboration that bear a distinct colonial design.
Importantly, the minority myth detracts from the highest proportional
beneficiaries of the regime, for, as Bassam Haddad’s research has
shown, Sunni entrepreneurs are the backbone of the new bourgeoisie
created under Bashar al-Asad’s rule over the last decade. Sunni elites
have historically obtained higher and more influential offices in both
Asad governments as Defense Minister (Mustafa Tlas), Prime Minister
(Mustafa Miru), Foreign Minister (Faruq al-Shar’), and Vice-President
of Foreign Affairs (`Abd al-Halim Khaddam). It is important to bear in
mind, for every accusation that minorities are regime collaborators,
Sunni complicity is being erased. To ignore this fact is by omission
upholding a sectarian discourse.
The invisibility of Armenians historically in Syrian politics is
paradoxical considering the century-old durable political
institutions’clubs, political parties, churches, and social
committees’that have long survived in the shadows under both Asads.
One would surmise that Armenians would have been predisposed to
political participation, but the numbers show that they did not
flourish under the authoritarian model. Instead, they voted with their
feet, leaving Syria to avoid conscription and to look for better
economic opportunities. In fact, historian Simon Payaslian has shown
that the Armenian population dropped from 100,000 in the 1960s to
58,000 on the eve of the 2011 uprising underscoring how drastically
the community has declined under authoritarianism.
While Hafiz al-Asad was hostile toward Turkey, Bashar al-Asad forged
close ties that eventually stifled freedom of speech for Armenians on
the subject of the Armenian Genocide. Those of us on the ground
experienced intimidation in the form of monitoring our writings and
emails, the banning and confiscation of books from bookstore shelves,
and harassment by the secret police of authors who published on the
Armenian Genocide. Under Hafiz al-Asad, Armenian processions for 24
April commemorations featured deafening displays of drumming and
chants, Bashar al-Asad ordered more quiet displays of mourning with a
quiet procession only within the church walls and Armenian cemetery in
the years before the uprising. The policies of 2005-2011, stood in
stark contrast to the encouragement Syria’s Armenians now have to
criticize Turkey showing how Armenian speech is silenced or fostered
at the whim of Syrian foreign policy.
Taking cues from the Lebanese civil war, Syria’s Armenians have
maintained an official stance of `positive neutrality’ since the
revolt began in March 2011. This strategy has largely preserved
Armenian areas of Aleppo while other areas in a state of rebellion
were flattened by Syrian forces. The strategy saved Armenians in
Lebanon, but studies have shown that it also marginalized them when it
came time to forge the Ta’if peace agreement in 1989.
Kessab: Syria’s Rashomon Effect
The Opposition’s Story
After capturing Kessab, the conquering militias launched a slick
public relations campaign uploading numerous videos on YouTube showing
unscathed Armenian churches and gentle interactions with remaining
elderly inhabitants. One photo circulated frequently by pro-opposition
activists on Facebook featured an elderly Kessab Armenian woman
carried by an opposition fighter captioned `Is this a terrorist?’ In
yet another video, we are given a tour of one of Kessab’s churches by
a man with immaculate English as he imagines how each area of the
church was used by the vacated residents. At one point, he grabs a
Bible erroneously telling the viewers that it is written in Aramaic,
but his larger point is that the Bible has not been destroyed by the
fighters. The video shows `fixable’ damage to the church’s plaster
walls, attributed to the fighting between regime forces and rebels
currently underway. The tour guide mentions at one point that the
video was created specially `for Kim,’ a reference to American reality
TV star Kim Kardashian.
[A Widely-Circulated Image on Social Media Asks: Is This the Face of a
Terrorist?]
The Armenian Diaspora’s Story
In an attempt to draw international attention to the plight of Kessab,
the Armenian diaspora quickly latched onto the #SaveKessab viral
Twitter and Facebook campaign to place international attention on
Turkey just weeks before Armenian Genocide commemoration day on 24
April. After a century of denial by the Turkish government of the
killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians during World War I,
genocide recognition continues to be the top priority for the Armenian
Diaspora composed of its victims. While many facts about Kessab were
correct, amid the internet frenzy, activists circulated erroneous
photos falsely claiming that a large number of Armenians had been
murdered in the assault and shared faulty claims by Armenian
celebrities Kim Kardashian and Cher that a second genocide was taking
place in the town. Kardashian’s perspective on Kessab was amplified by
the press when she retweeted these charges: `Please let’s not let
history repeat itself!!!!!! Let’s get this trending!!!! #SaveKessab
#ArmenianGenocide’ despite the fact that Armenian deaths in Kessab
remained undocumented at that point. Kardashian’s involvement in
particular put her on the radar of opposition activists who slandered
her as an Asad supporter although she never made any specific
reference to the regime. A punned headline from the Daily Beast read
`Kim Kardashian Butts Into Syria’s Civil War,’ yet Cher retweeted
something far more caustic when she wrote `Please check out what’s
going on in Kessab, Syria. Innocent Christians and Armenians being
killed by Turks #SaveKessab.’ None of these high profile figures have
retracted the misinformation that left opposition activists fuming at
the double standard of calling what happened in Kessab a genocide
while staying silent on Aleppo, Homs, and other parts of Syria
decimated by war.
In the days after Kessab’s capture, an image of a mutilated woman on a
bed with a cross shoved down her throat that circulated months ago
among Syrian Christians on Facebook resurfaced during the #SaveKessab
campaign. Snopes published the image with a clip from the original
Canadian film by special effects filmmaker Remy Couture to verify that
the woman featured was a gore film actress not a Kessab Armenian.
Surely, this was not the first internet hoax, but with distrust of the
Armenian position in Syria’s war, opposition activists quickly rushed
to discredit what they called `Armenian lies’ about Kessab and promote
their own hashtag #SaveAleppo as a counterpoint to the #SaveKessab
campaign. At this point there are several emotionally-charged videos
that capture the civilian toll of ongoing barrel bombings in Syria’s
northern city to deflect attention given to Kessab.
[Facebook Profile Image for the #SaveKessab Campaign]
The Armenian Catholicos’s Story
On 9 April, the hyper-reality of internet discourse on Kessab was
corrected by the Armenian Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia his
holiness Aram I in Antelias, Lebanon. His interview with Civilnet was
a reissuing of an earlier position formulated by the Armenian leader
two years ago. He stated, `What happened in Kesab (sic.) must not be
isolated from the rest of the Syrian conflict.’ With this statement,
his holiness put a kibosh on efforts of the Armenian diaspora to
situate the events in Kessab only within the realm of Turkish-Armenian
relations. He added, `Syrian Christians and Muslims have accepted us
as part of their society, they shared with us their homeland, and we
became an inseparable part of Syrian society, and in the last decades
after the Genocide, we actively participated in the building and
rebuilding of Syrian society…We believe that the Syrian conflict
must be solved through a political process; the conflict must be
`Syrianized’ and also the process aimed at the solution of this
conflict must be Syrianized.’ His Holiness Aram I reiterated the
position of `positive neutrality’ when he stated, `As a community, we
should not associate ourselves with any given regime, political
ideology, or person, they are provisional¦we remain attached to the
supreme interests of Syria.’ The statement was quickly translated into
Arabic in hope that opposition activists would not prejudge all
Armenians for the sins of a few.
The Syrian Regime’s Story
Many Armenians have understood the unleashing of jihadists onto a
surviving Armenian village a stone’s toss across the border as an
attempt to finish what was started in 1915. Armenian fears were
aggravated by a recent video showing militias crossing the Turkish
border absent any Turkish border police. These fears have been
capitalized on by Syrian state media positioning the regime as
protector of Armenians. Pro-regime commentators have made overt
connections between the depopulation of Kessab and the 1915 genocide,
stating `this attack on Kassab [sic.] is a reflection of Erdogan’s
anger towards Armenia’s stand against his terrorism in Syria, and a
reminder of the 1915 massacres and the historical Turkish animosity
towards the Armenians.’ Such statements have exploited Armenian fears
for regime support. Even a military-garbed Lebanese artist, Ali
Barakat, known for his anthems to Hizbullah fighters quickly launched
a music video to support the regime’s campaign called `Seal Your
Victory in Kessab.’ While the song is just a variation of an earlier
tune he wrote for the campaign in Yabrud, it attempts to harness anger
and fear over Kessab as the regime works to repel opposition forces
from Latakia province.
Turkey’s Story
Armenians cannot take the blame alone for Syria’s Rashomon effect, the
Turkish press presented itself as the rescuers of Kessab’s Armenians
offering them safe haven in Turkey. Hürriyet reported on two sisters,
Sirpuhi and Satenik Titizyan, both in their eighties who were
`rescued’ claiming `they were now in `paradise.’ Escorted by
opposition fighters into Turkey, the elderly sisters stated, `Farmers
and officials in the Turkish town are now taking care of their
guests.’ However, a very different account appeared when the women
were interviewed in the Armenian Istanbul-based Armenian daily Agos.
After arriving to Vakıflı, the last remaining Armenian village in
Turkey in the Musa Dagh Mountains’a place known for its heroic
resistance against deportation during the Armenian Genocide’journalist
Lora Baytar reported that `ten bearded men entered and ransacked their
home, saying that they were told not to be frightened and that the men
were speaking Turkish, not Arabic. The two women reported that they
were deported to the Turkish border, even though they told the men
that they wanted to leave for the Syrian port city of Latakia.’ As for
their reaction to living in Turkey, rather than refer to it as
`paradise’ the women offered something less praising saying that `they
needed to go `somewhere’ because nobody was left there (in Kessab).’
The women then compared relocation to Turkey to a morsel of bread. `If
there is only one morsel of bread left in the entire world, we will
eat that too.’
Instead of a story of rescue Agos told one of two women forcibly
removed from Syria wherein Turkish-speaking militants played the role
of perpetrator. In both accounts, the women related handing over their
house keys to `bearded men’ while Agos offered details about the
ransacking of their home in Kessab. When the Agos interview was
reprinted in yet another venue, Aydınlık, the interview was reframed
as `Syrian Armenians Declare War Crimes of ErdoÄ?an’ sending a clear
message, from its perspective, of who was to blame for the
depopulating of Kessab.
While #SaveKessab intended to draw attention to the dramatic
depopulation of Kesab and Turkey’s role in the event, as a social
media campaign, it fell prey to `hoaxes’ that typically spread viral
on the internet’think Bonzai Kitten. Making Kardashian the fall girl
for misinforming the public about Kessab merely highlighted the way in
which celebrities rather than experts are looked to as purveyors of
knowledge in an environment of anti-intellectualism. After all, the
mainstream media quoted Twitter, Facebook pages of pro-opposition
activists, lobbyists, and celebrities in search of the Kessab story
which is hardly rigorous journalism.
While the internet has its own ability to produce gullible consumers,
history shows there is a reason why such fears are easily stoked
within the Armenian community. Images of sectarian murder have spread
virally on state and social media paralyzing minority communities into
submission to not only the Asad regime but to political interests more
broadly. Turkey also got involved in the game’as did opposition
activists’to dismiss sectarian concerns that were chalked up to mere
hype. There was little effort to acknowledge what the loss of Kessab
meant to the Armenian community and why its capture would produce such
internet hysteria. The state sought to capitalize on the outrage over
Kessab as it launches its campaign against opposition forces in
Latakia province. Kessab is yet another manifestation of the Syria
conflict’s Rashomon effect as each faction works to produce their own
reality to gain support amid a hopeless political stalemate.
The Lambs of Kessab: A Requiem
Kessab is a place where Syria’s Armenians including myself summered
for the celebration of the Virgin Mary during the heady days of
August. I remember the lines of lambs outside a small chapel in a
field in one of Kessab’s villages where people assembled for the
sacrifices to the Virgin. Forty slaughtered lambs were converted into
ten cauldrons of piping lamb and wheat porridge called `harisa’ cooked
over open wood fires and spooned out to the community. The long nights
of celebration until daylight infused with nostalgia’a word that
unites the Greek word for `homecoming’ with that of `pain”the longing
for village life in Turkey lost to a crippling diaspora. Centered on
the church, the heart of the summer ritual was the blessing of the
grapes performed by the Armenian Archbishop of Aleppo. The grapes were
symbolically harvested by the Archbishop while Kessab’s Armenians
returned to their homes to cut their own vines after the ceremony.
During my last visit to Kessab during the celebration of St. Mary, we
danced to the cool breeze late night in the fields near blood-stained
front steps of the church where lambs were slaughtered earlier that
day. Bits of a tail, tufts of wool, and pools of blood were left to
soak into the soil before the Virgin’s chapel in a field near Kesab’s
Eskuren village. The zurna, a double-reed wind instrument, hummed a
familiar tune and the drum kept us on step as Armenians from all parts
of Syria gathered hands, or more specifically pinkies, in a circle
dance. Over the last decade, Kessab was noticeably overrun by Saudi
tourists who summered there to escape the summer heat in the Gulf. We
all noticed the two Saudi men, visibly without their families’a sign
they thought the gathering inappropriate for loved ones’appear in the
circle to dance with us. One man kept bullying the zurna player to
play debka, an Arabic circle dance with a very different beat. Even
though the instrument was familiar to the man, the rhythm, an Armenian
tamzara, was completely foreign to him. The musicians refused to
comply and kept playing Armenian tunes anyway.
I think about that episode today, the power dynamics laid bare in the
exchange that seem more meaningful today: the failure on the part of
the Armenian musician to accommodate the demands of outsiders
suggesting he thought they should not be there, and the inability of
the Saudi men to understand just what they were witnessing beside the
church that night. For both parties, there was a failure to recognize
the other. To the Armenians, the men were invaders and a threat to
ritual. To the Saudi men, we were just a group of Armenians dancing in
a field in Kessab. But to us, Kessab held intangible value as an
artifact from a medieval Armenian kingdom that once ruled over this
place and memory of village life before the great catastrophe that we
reenacted every August.
http://voxpop.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17442/