SYRIA: KESSAB’S BATTLE AND ARMENIANS’ HISTORY
Open Democracy
April 2 2014
VICKEN CHETERIAN 2 April 2014
The takeover by anti-Damascus rebels of an Armenian village in northern
Syria, near the border with Turkey, has triggered a propaganda war
which focuses on the position of Syria’s Armenians.
This highlights core aspects of Armenians’ experience since the 1915
genocide, says Vicken Cheterian.
On 21 March 2014 a coalition of Syrian opposition fighters entered the
town of Kessab, which is an Armenian-inhabited location in north-west
Syria, bordering Turkey from the north and the Mediterranean from
the west. This followed the Syrian regime victory in Qalamoun, and
its attempt to control the Syrian-Lebanese frontier.
These twin military developments reveal once again that a certain
equilibrium has been created out of both internal Syrian realities,
but also on the international level, which will make a military victory
of one side over the other excluded on both short- and medium-term
perspectives. The Geneva-2 conference and preparations for a new 99%
presidential election also eliminate a negotiated solution, and the
only remaining alternative is the continuation of the destructive war.
The Kessab operation also triggered a new propaganda war between the
regime and the opposition by introducing the Armenian element into it.
The situation on the ground remains murky, though it is known that
620 Kessab families have been evacuated to the nearby port city of
Latakia, while some dozens of people (mostly elderly) seem to have
remained in the town. Pro-regime media talk about jihadists attacking
Christians, destroying churches, and pillaging private property;
these are often supported with horrible pictures and films originating
from elsewhere. They also accuse Turkey of having orchestrated the
attack, and portray it yet another anti-Armenian aggression, as well
as confirming Turkey’s hostile attitude towards Syria as a whole.
The recent media leaks in Turkey itself, where high-level officials
seem to be discussing an act of provocation as a cover for direct
Turkish military intervention, give some credit to the Syrian official
narrative. This latest scandal led to the shutting down of YouTube in
Turkey. The Syrian rebels have also posted footage showing a state of
normalcy in Kessab, notwithstanding abandoned streets where rebels
guard churches and the remaining population. Now, rebels have to
prove that they will secure both lives and property and that Kessab
will not become another Raqqa.
In a military sense, the opposition fighters could have taken Kessab
at any time over the past year, after they dominated the mountains
east of the town. They did not enter the town because it would have
embarrassed the Turkish government internationally. In order to
understand why Turkey’s official position shifted, I turned to Rober
KoptaÅ~_, editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Agosin Istanbul. His
explanation centred on internal Turkish politics: namely, close to
the municipal elections, the ruling AKP needed to show a “victory”
in Syria to its constituency, something that became urgent after the
recent opposition losses in the centre of the country.
In a signed article in Agos, KoptaÅ~_ says that many Armenian
organisations both in Syria and Turkey think the attack could only
have happened with the agreement and logistical support of Turkey. The
Turkish military involvement was underlined by the shooting down of a
Syrian warplane – something the Turkish army did not do in 2012 when
the Syrian side downed a Turkish F-4 Phantom and killed its two pilots.
The past is present
It has been a while since Arab public opinion has been familiar
with the Armenians and their history, or at least they now have
“forgotten” it. When I was growing up in Beirut in the 1970s, the
dominant narrative was constructed around the Arab national struggle
with a focus on Palestine. In this discourse, Armenians were fellow
victims struggling for their national rights, and Turkey was on
the side of the enemy: Nato and Israel. In recent years things have
changed, and gradually – whenever there was political struggle between
Armenian organisations and Turkey around the question of genocide –
I found aggressive anti-Armenian discourse on the internet. The Arab
public reaction in most cases was extremely hostile to the Armenians.
This change was of course influenced by the tectonic political changes
in the middle east: national struggles had been defeated and emptied
of their content, and in their place a new Islamist discourse emerged
which is largely sectarian and lacking Islam’s universality. The coming
to power of the AKP in Turkey in 2002 inflamed large sections of Arab
public opinion, especially after the mediatised operation of the Mavi
Marmara to break Gaza blockade. This revealed how dispossessed Arab
public opinion felt, and that they needed an outside saviour. In the
emerging narratives, Armenians became the outsiders.
But I also think Armenian intellectuals in the middle east have a
great responsibility. What happened in 1915 is not just an Armenian
suffering, a pain we have to mourn alone. The Armenian experience
is of universal value, and the necessary lessons have still not
been learned by humanity – even now, ninety-nine years later. And I
specifically think that the Armenian experience is extremely relevant
to the current struggle in Syria.
Two reactions after the opposition seizure of Kessab illustrate
my point.
First, a week after the events in Kassab, on 28 March, a “save Kessab”
campaign was launched on social media, which quickly received a huge
volume.of attention and support. Armenian interest-groups in the
United States linked the Kessab events with the Armenian genocide in
1915. Some reports talked about “eighty Armenians killed” by Syrian
rebels. Video footage of massacres that happened in totally other
contexts were thrown into the amalgam.
The campaign took a political turn on 24 March, the Armenian National
Committee of America (ANCA), an influential Armenian pressure-group,
asked Barack Obama’s administration to press Turkey to prevent
“militant extremists streaming into Kessab from Turkey.” In
addition, a parliamentary delegation hastily flew from Yerevan
with the stated intention of checking the condition of the Kessab
inhabitants now displaced to Latakia. They also met Syria’s president,
Bashar al-Assad, and produced a declaration supporting his policies
“against terrorism”. For the first time since the start of the Syrian
conflict in 2011, the Armenian community was being perceived as being
“pro-Bashar”.
A pro-Syrian opposition publication had a short article entitled:
“American Armenians distort the image of Syrian revolutionaries
to settle old accounts with Turkey.” Armenians, says the article,
are accusing Turkey of “supporting ‘terrorist groups’ in Syria and
being responsible for the destruction of churches there. They see this
demarche as motivated by sectarian revenge, the result of deep-seated
national grudges dating back to the Ottoman massacres against the
Armenians in the second decade of the past century.”
Second, Fawwaz Tallo, a Syrian opposition figure, commented on
the developments in Kessab thus: “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.” In the same
interview, Tallo attacked the idea of federalism, considering it a
division of the country on sectarian lines.
The Armenians and Syria
Kessab Armenians are not “guests” who came to Syria a hundred years
ago. Kessab Armenians, as well as the Armenian villages of Jebel Musa
just across the border to the north, have been on their land for
over 1,000 years. They were part of the Cilician Armenian Kingdom
(1198-1375), although there are other accounts that indicate that
Jebel Mousa Armenians are present there even centuries earlier. Their
distinct dialect underlines this fact.
The history of Kessab and Jebel Musa is extremely interesting, as
Franz Werfel’s novel Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933) shows, though that
is another story. Only two other villages have survived to this day
whose people speak the Jebel Musa dialect. One is Anjar in Lebanon,
composed of villagers who preferred to leave their land when France
decided to transfer Alexandretta to Kemalist Turkey in 1939. The
other is Vakifli, a village of 135 individuals, who decided to remain.
Vakifli is the only surviving Armenian village in Turkey, from
thousands of villages, towns of cities that existed on historic
Armenian land before the genocide of 1915.
If Syrian politicians were interested in Armenian historic experience,
they would have known that great powers will never send their forces
to save a people from massacres. During the Hamidian massacres in
1894-96 in which some 300,000 Ottoman Armenians were killed (that
is, in the period of Sultan Abdul Hamid II), the European powers who
had legal obligations to defend the minorities of the Ottoman empire
condemned the crimes – but did nothing else. During the first world
war when the Young Turks deported the entire Armenian population in
“death marches”, the great powers promised to bring those responsible
to justice. But after the war they had to collaborate with Kemalist
Turkey in face of a rising Bolshevik Russia, and the Armenian victims
were soon forgotten.
Armenian history shows how notions of “minority” and “majority” are
political constructs that change over time. The Armenians were highly
appreciated by the Ottoman Sultans, and the Armenian nobility served
as the bankers, architects, and industrialists of the Sultan. In
eastern Anatolia the situation was different, as local Armenians
peasants and townspeople, were in a struggle with armed, nomadic,
mainly Kurdish tribes. After the Berlin treaty of 1878 – when the
great powers demanded the Ottoman Sultan introduce reforms in the
Armenian provinces – Sultan Abdul Hamid decided to eliminate the
“Armenian question” by massacres, often using the Kurdish tribes for
this operation.
The Young Turks took this policy to new levels by deporting and
killing the entire Armenian population. From the 2.2 million Ottoman
Armenians in 1914 there were only 250,000 left in Turkey in 1923, and
only 60,000 today. But once the Armenian “minority” was physically
eliminated, Kurds in Turkey became the new “minority” and victim of
repressive policies, in a conflict that still needs to be solved.
History and justice
The conclusion is twofold. First, that the problem is not the
existence of “majority” and “minority” – which are shifting and
political concepts – but eliminating violence as an instrument
of policy-making. Second, that rejecting federalism as a form of
“separatism” and insisting on a centralised state, as Fawwaz Tallo
does, may not be the best solution.
But there’s a third and even bigger conclusion: that the fight for
justice and memory continues after any war ends. The apologists of
a criminal regime will continue to accuse the victims, and justify
the criminals. Others will call you “revengeful” and your struggle
“deep-seated grudges”. Hence it is important today to document all
the crimes committed in Syria. In the case of the Armenians, the
struggle for justice is continuing for ninety-nine years now.
The clash of victimhoods? It does not have to be. In no way should
the first genocide of the 20th century be put in the service of a
regime massacring its people and a ruler destroying his country to
preserve their political monopoly.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/vicken-cheterian/syria-kessabs-battle-and-armenians-history