Eurasia Review
October 9, 2014 Thursday
Armenian Church Seeks Restitution From Turkey
By Vahe Harutyunyan
A plan by leading Armenian clerics to seek legal redress from the
Turkish judiciary for church property lost in the early 1900s takes
the campaign for genocide recognition to a new level, analysts say.
Aram I, the Catholicos or head of the see of Cicilia based in Lebanon,
announced the lawsuit at an annual congress of the Armenian diaspora
which opened in Yerevan on September 19.
`Here, before this meeting which represents our nation, we wish to
announce for the first time that next year, the Catholicosate of the
Great House of Cilicia plans to file a suit at Turkey’s constitutional
court seeking the restitution of its historical centre, the
Catholicate of Sis,’ he said.
The Armenian Apostolic Church is an ancient and unique institution,
not part of either the Orthodox or Roman Catholic worlds. It has two
spiritual sees, the Mother See at Etchmiadzin in Armenia, and the
`Great House’ or holy see of Cilicia, in Lebanon.
The Great House of Cilicia was based in Sis, near the Turkish city of
Adana, from the 13th century to 1921, when its leaders fled a fresh
wave of killings. This followed the mass killings in 1915 which
Armenians call genocide, a term Turkey hotly disputes.
Armenians have spent many years lobbying countries around the world to
acknowledge that genocide took place and to press Turkey to do the
same.
The planned lawsuit is a new approach which will take the dispute to
Turkey’s highest court. Commentators have drawn direct parallels with
the legal action taken to secure material restitution in post-war
Germany for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, through compensation or
restoration of property.
The Armenian government has indicated it will support the church’s
action. Asked about the plan during the same diaspora congress,
Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandyan said, `How can there be any other
opinion about this? It’s essential to support this initiative.’
Catholicos Aram said a sound legal basis for the proposed court action
had been crafted over the past two years. He added that `if our
lawsuit is turned down by the Turkish constitutional court, we will go
to international courts’.
Ashot Melkonyan, director of the Institute of History in Yerevan, says
that as well as church property, large numbers of Armenian homes were
lost. `In the 1920s and 1930s, everything was transferred to state
ownership. Then the Turkish government sold some of it to the local
Muslim population,’ he said.
The property claim is especially will be particularly as 2015 is the
year Armenia marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the bloodshed
with the Genocide Commemoration in April.
Ahead of the 2014 commemoration, Recep Tayyip ErdoÄ?an ` then prime
minister and now president of Turkey ` issued an unprecedented but
carefully-worded statement noting that `Armenians remember the
suffering experienced in that period, just like every other citizen of
the Ottoman Empire¦. The events of the First World War are our shared
pain.’
The omission of the word `genocide’ meant that his remarks fell short
of what Yerevan wanted. Presidential chief of staff Vigen Sargsyan
called it as `just another, though perhaps more refined, attempt to
deny and conceal the fact of the Armenian genocide’. (See Armenians
Call on Turks to Say “Genocide”.)
At the same time, there are signs both countries want to revive a
process of rapprochement that began in 2008 but foundered in 2010.
Armenian foreign minister Nalbandyan attended ErdoÄ?an’s inauguration
as president at the end of August, and handed him a formal invitation
to attend the 100th anniversary commemorations in Yerevan. (See
Armenia Sends Official to ErdoÄ?an Inauguration.)
IWPR wrote to the Turkish foreign ministry asking it to comment on
Catholicos Aram’s statement, but it declined to do so.
One reason for bringing an action now is that Turkey is under pressure
to change its legislation on historical property claims.
`In 2005, Turkey, which is seeking to join the European Union, tried
to bring its legislation into line with the requirements set by
Brussels, which demand that illegally acquired property be returned to
its rightful owners,’ Vigen Kocharyan, head of the European and
international law department at Yerevan State University, explained.
`But the process was not completed.’
If a submission to the Turkish judiciary fails, then Kocharyan points
to `a universal principle in international law according to which,
when the judicial resources of a state have been exhausted, one can
appeal to an international court’.
Manvel Sargsyan, director of the Armenian Centre for National and
International Studies, says that a formal application for compensation
or restitution is a new development in the long-running campaign by
Armenia and its diaspora.
`We can see an apparent shift from demands to acknowledge the fact of
genocide to a more concrete tactic of seeking compensation,’ he said.
`This is a new approach. In the near future, the compensation issue is
going to be of increasing importance.’
Vahe Harutyunyan is a freelance journalist in Armenia. This article
was published at IWPR’s CRS Issue 754.
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