A TURKISH AWAKENING ON ARMENIAN, KURDISH ISSUES?
AL-MONITOR
April 29 2013
By: Cengiz Candar for Al-Monitor Turkey Pulse Posted on April 28.
It was a frenetic week for Turkey marked primarily by the sharp curve
in the Kurdish issue. The much awaited Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
announcement that it is withdrawing its forces out of Turkey was
finally made at its Kandil Mountain headquarters on the Iraq-Iran
border on April 25.
The outside world may wonder what the fuss was all about. After all,
it was already known that Murat Karayilan, recognized as the second
most authoritative name in the PKK after the imprisoned leader
Abdullah Ocalan, was going to make this declaration at the Kandil
Mountain base. Unchallenged leader Ocalan had already reached an
agreement with a state delegation which was meeting with him on behalf
of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Nobody doubted that Karayilan
whose loyalty to Ocalan is beyond dispute and the PKK organization
would carry out Ocalan’s decisions.
Nevertheless, Karayilan’s announcement was an extraordinary
development just as Ocalan’s Newroz message that was read to one a
half million people in Diyarbakir on March 21.
First of all, the announcement that the PKK has agreed to wi thdraw
from Turkey could well be the beginning of the end of the PKK’s
30-year armed struggle in Turkey. Most likely it is, and that is why
it is an extraordinary development.
Second, the Turkish media with more than 100 writers and reporters
launched a Kandil expedition. Erbil hotels were overbooked. Turkey’s
semi-official Anatolian news agency, which only a year and half ago
reported that Karayilan was captured and arrested by Iran, was
represented by a powerful team of its Turkish-Kurdish-Arabic services
at Karayilan’s press conference.
As April 25 approached, people known as the “PKK hawks,” but whose
photos had never appeared in Turkish newspapers, gave private
interviews to Turkish journalists. They all emphasized peace.
Descending on the Kandil Mountain like grasshoppers, Turkish
journalists and cameramen turned the area into a media jamboree. So
much so that there were humorous news items of Karayilan being almost
crushed by excessive interest of the Turkish media when he showed up.
No doubt that such wide coverage in Turkish newspapers and on TV was a
grand and unprecedented public relations happening for the PKK. That
is why it overshadowed another wondrous development, the April 24
Armenian genocide commemorations.
For the past three years, Turkey has been holding, without much
fanfare, Armenian massacre [1915] observations at Taksim Square in the
center of Istanbul. The first year such an observance was held, a
group of Turkish Armenians accompanied by a small group of Turks in
solidarity with them went to the Haydarpasa Station – which marks the
beginning of Asia in Istanbul – and held a symbolic observance there.
This train station was the starting point of Istanbul’s Armenian
intellectuals on their trips of no return. The same night the group
also organized an observance at Taksim Square.
For anyone anywhere in the world interested in this issue, this was
indeed an incredible affair and those who participated in it were
truly courageous people. The observance was repeated in 2012 and
attended by an even larger crowd. The participants first met during
the day in Istanbul’s famous Sultanahmet tourism area, because the
building known today as the Islamic Arts Museum was the place where
Armenian intellectuals and politicians were first assembled and then
detained in 1915.
This year, the dimensions of April 24, 1915, suddenly changed. The
observances spread to Turkey’s most important political center of
Diyarbakir and to Dersim in the north, the mountainous region where
Kurdish Alevis were brutally massacred.
The crowds at the daytime meeting and the nighttime observance at
Taksim Square were the largest yet, but there were other events that
marked Armenian Remembrance Day.
Behind these new events that spread outside of Istanbul is an
interesting Armenian intellectual, Ara Sarafian of Britain. Sarafian
is a historian and also the head of the London-based Gomidas
Institute. Gomidas was a great Armenian musician deported from
Istanbul on April 24, 1915. Sarafian who heads the institute named
after the musician is very different from the Turk-hating traditional
figures of the Armenian Diaspora. Instead of being part of the
diaspora and making a name for himself with anti-Turk and anti-Turkey
activities, he comes to Turkey frequently and debates the issue with
people there.
This year, he remembered a name even most Turks do not know. Faik Ali
Ozansoy, a Turkish bureaucrat who was in charge of the town of
Kutahya, which is today a provincial city in western Turkey, in 1915.
Ozansoy sternly resisted the deportation of the Armenians and did not
carry out the exile orders.
On April 24, as the first order of the day, Sarafian, accompanied by
representatives of the Human Rights Association of Turkey and
anti-racist Turkish and European organizations, visited the grave of
Ozansoy in Istanbul and held an observance.
A few days earlier, he had appeared as a guest lecturer of the
Diyarbakir Bar Association in Diyarbakir. Encouraged by Sarafian, the
people of Diyarbakir, a town known as the civilian center of political
movement directed by the PKK, and the city’s popular mayor Osman
Baydemir went to the Euphrates River and threw flowers into the water
where 635 Armenians on their way to exile in Mosul were killed in
1915.
Hrant Dink, editor-in-chief of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian
newspaper Agos, whose assassination in 2007 had shaken the country,
reported the event under the headline “Diyarbakir Remembers
Armenians.’~R
In 1915, about 56,000 Armenians lived in Diyarbakir and made up the
largest population segment of this cosmopolitan city. In 1917, 97% of
Armenians in Diyarbakir had disappeared. Today, Diyarbakir’s Kurdish
notables, while loudly demanding Kurdish identity rights from the
Ankara government, are also debating the role of the Kurds on what was
done to Armenians in 1915. In Turkey, they are one of the groups that
lead the discussion on the Armenian genocide.
In Dersim, where people are either Kurds or Alevis, researches have
revealed that many Armenians had changed their religion and identity
to save their lives. This is why the Dersim Armenian Association
suddenly appeared this year and organized its own 1915 remembrance
observances and placed themselves on the map.
The events of 1915 were not only observed in Istanbul and Diyarbakir
but also in cities such as Adana, Izmir, Urfa and Malatya.
As in previous years, the events of 1915 were reported by the Turkish
media. Each year, the Turkish media focuses on whether the US
president will use the “g word” [genocide] in his statement. This
year, they relaxed when US President Barack Obama used the Armenian
words “Medz Yeghern,” [ the “Great Disaster”]. Nevertheless, the
Turkish Foreign Ministry, just as the White House’s template
statements, undusted its annual statement and criticized the United
States for being prejudiced about 1915.
They are not important anymore. The Turkish public is becoming
increasingly involved in observing the “victims of genocide,” not
“Medz Yeghern.” An extraordinary development this year was the
participation of Armenians in the diaspora, especially those from
France, at the 1915 observances in Turkey.
Sali Ghazarian who is based in Los Angeles and heads the Civilitas
Foundation in Yerevan – established by former Minister of Foreign
Affairs Vartan Oskanian [of Aleppo] – was also in Istanbul. His
sister, thinking that he had lost his marbles for going to Turkey to
observe April 24, could not believe the images she saw on TV of the
observances in Istanbul, and sent a message saying: “Next year I will
be in Turkey too.”
As the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide approaches in 2015,
could there be a totally unexpected development on the Armenian issue
in Turkey? Will this affect Turkish-Armenian relations and change the
geopolitics of the Caucasia?
That is a question to ponder as 2015 nears.
The answer might not be all that difficult if one looks at the
developments on the Kurdish issue in 2013 and the recent observances
of the 1915 disaster defined as genocide that fell upon the Armenians.
The impossible is impossible in Turkey.
Cengiz Candar is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor’s Turkey Pulse.
A journalist since 1976, he is the author of seven books in the
Turkish language, mainly on Middle East issues, including the
best-seller Mesopotamia Express: A Journey in History.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/04/pkk-withdrawal-armenian-genocide-day.html