EGYPTIAN TWITTER POST PUSHES TURKEY’S BUTTONS
AL-Monitor
Aug 23 2013
By: Yasemin Congar for Al-Monitor Turkey Pulse Posted on August 23.
I learned what “khachkar” meant some years ago in Egypt.
I had always known the word, of course. All Turkish school kids
do. It is the mountain range in the northeast that we used to paint
in a dark shade of brown on our hand-drawn maps of Anatolia. We would
even leave a speckle of white in the middle to suggest a summit of
never-melting snow and write there on the top: Kackar.
It was an undefined word, but in my young dreamy mind, I associated
it with glimmering ski slopes — an image doubtlessly fortified by
the literal meaning of the word’s two syllables, kac (escape) and kar
(snow).
That image melted away three decades later as I stood before a green
marble wall inside the St. Gregory The Illuminator Church on Avenue
Ramses in Cairo. There, fixed on the wall at eye level was a frame
with two bird icons facing each other and a stone carving of a cross
above them.
“The khachkar is beautiful” said Garen Mouradian, an Armenian-Egyptian
colleague who had accompanied me to the church.
“Khachkar?” I asked, still looking at the frame.
“Come on, you must know the word,” Garen said. “Like the mountains.”
Afterward, he explained to me what khachkar meant: a cross-stone that
was a typical form of sculpture in Medieval Christian art. I realized
then that my snow-capped mountains, like so many of the landforms
and old settlements in Anatolia, bore an Armenian name.
We Turks — at least those of us with curious minds — all have our
stories of initial awakening to our country’s Armenian past and the
consequent self-education trying to tear away the layers of ignorance
instilled in each of us by a school system that turned a blind eye
to the crimes of our ancestors.
My visit to the St. Gregory Church in Cairo was a step in that effort.
Having already read my way through several memoirs of the Meds Yeghern
or “the great tragedy” inflicted upon the Ottoman Armenians, I was
doing a series of interviews with members of the Armenian diaspora
in the region.
I went to the church specifically to see the monument that was
installed to commemorate the 1.5 million Armenians killed in 1915.
Garen translated for me the inscription which gave the date and the
number of the victims, but did not include the word “genocide.”
He believed — as do I — that the acts against Armenians amounted
to what was defined as genocide by the United Nations in 1948, but he
did not envision Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt ever recognizing that. “Turkey
is way too important to upset,” he said.
So, when the possibility of such a decision by Cairo — albeit by
another undemocratic government — was raised recently, I wondered
what had changed.
In a way, the context is obvious. On Aug. 15, Turkey’s Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacted with fervor to the brutal killings in
Egypt. Criticizing the military coup in the harshest terms, he called
what transpired on the streets of Cairo “a clear massacre.”
A translation of Erdogan’s words which appeared on several news sites
the next day misquoted him as having described the killings as a
“genocide.” Then, on Aug. 17, a statement reportedly by Egypt’s
Interim President Adly Mansour surfaced and was widely interpreted
as a quid pro quo.
It was a message posted by what was assumed to be Mansour’s personal
account on Twitter. “Our representatives at the United Nations
will sign the international document that acknowledges the Armenian
genocide, which was committed by the Turkish military, leading to
the deaths of 1 million,” the message stated in Arabic.
Soon, Turks, Armenians and Arabs of every stripe were frantically
tweeting on the news. Egyptian and Turkish newspapers also reported
the message — the latter mostly employing Ankara’s ludicrous official
cliché, “the so-called genocide.”
For their part, the Armenian news sites seemed to welcome the
development.
To me, the most striking denouncement of Mansour’s message came from
Rober Koptas, editor-in-chief of the Armenian weekly Agos.
“Those who intend to recognize Armenian genocide because they are
angry with Turkey are essentially showing a lack of respect for the
victims of genocide,” Koptas wrote in consecutive Twitter messages.
“This means the genocide was not recognized until today because
relations with Turkey were good. Could anything be more immoral
than that?”
Ruben Melkonyan, the deputy dean at the Oriental Studies Department
of Yerevan State University, also took issue with Cairo’s reported
intention. He told the Armenian news site Tert.am that a decision
by Egypt to recognize the genocide earlier would have been more
praiseworthy and honest.
“For us, it is naturally important for an Arab country like Egypt to
acknowledge and condemn the Armenian genocide, given especially that
the Armenians have played an essential role in the history of Egypt.
But, … the selection of timing gives ground for concern a little
bit.”
Later, it all turned out to be a storm in 140 characters.
Turkish Foreign Ministry Spokesman Levent Gumrukcu was the first to
dismiss the news: “The Egyptian side reported to us that the Interim
President Mansour doesn’t even have a Twitter account.” Egypt followed
suit the next day with a statement from its permanent mission at the
United Nations.
Was all that arguing much ado about nothing then?
Hardly. What now seems a trial balloon by Egypt, if not an outright
attempt at intimidating Erdogan, clearly touched a sore spot in Ankara
and revealed a certain amount of panic.
Less than 48 hours after Turkey had recalled its ambassador to Egypt,
Turkish diplomats found themselves furiously working through channels
in Cairo and New York to prevent a possible move by the Egyptian
interim government at the United Nations. When the message was
eventually disowned by Mansour, the sigh of relief in Ankara was
audible around the world.
Turkey’s justifiably harsh criticism toward Egyptian authorities was
already viewed in the region as reflecting a double standard in light
of Erdogan’s endorsement of recent police brutality in Istanbul. The
impact of the Turkish position vis-a-vis Egypt further weakened as
the international community was reminded of Ankara’s inability to
deal with a major crime in its own history.
Rober Koptas is right. Not much can be as immoral as treating the
genocide issue as a political football.
Nonetheless, at a time when the countdown for worldwide commemorations
of the genocide centennial with the motto “Remember, remind and
reclaim” is about to begin, a “fake” tweet might have tempted
international players to do just that.
Before the tweet was refuted, I had emailed Garen — who now lives
outside Egypt — to ask if he heard of it. “Never mind the tweet,” he
wrote back, “Lately, Egyptian newspapers have been busy rediscovering
the genocide. The army wants to keep the Armenian minority on board,
I suppose.”
Then he added: “Do you still remember what khachkar means?”
Yasemin Congar is the author of four books in Turkish, among them
Artık Sır Degil (No More A Secret), a detailed analysis of the US
diplomatic cables on Turkey first made public by WikiLeaks. A former
Washington bureau chief for Milliyet (1995-2007) and a founding deputy
editor-in-chief of Taraf (2007-2012), Congar is currently based in
Istanbul and is a columnist for the Internet newspaper T24.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/08/egypt-turkey-genocide-armenia.html