ARMENIANS DISMAYED AS SYRIAN REBELS SEIZE HISTORIC KASSAB
Toronto Star, Canada
March 28 2014
Rebels seized control of Kassab on Sunday after launching an attack
two days earlier in the coastal Syrian province of Latakia
By: Albert Aji And Diaa Hadid Associated Press, Published on Fri Mar
28 2014
BADROUSIEH, SYRIA–When hundreds of residents of the postcard-pretty
coastal Syrian village of Kassab fled this week, it bore historic
weight: it was the third time since 1900 that ethnic Armenians there
felt compelled to run for their lives.
They left once at the hands of vengeful Turkish neighbours, and later
because of Ottoman forces. This time it was Syrian rebels storming
into town. It was a heavy blow for the minority community that sees
the town as key to preserving the Armenians’ identity in Syria.
Kassab “is a symbol of Armenian history, language and continuity. It’s
very symbolic,” said Ohannes Geukjian, a political science professor
who writes on contemporary Armenian history and politics. “And so
the fall of Kassab, I consider it the defeat of Armenian identity in
that area.”
Rebels seized control of Kassab on Sunday after launching an attack two
days earlier in the coastal Syrian province of Latakia. The fighters
were from an array of conservative and Islamic groups, including the
Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front.
The province has an ancient Armenian presence, but is better known as
a bastion of support for President Bashar Assad. It is his ancestral
home and that of followers of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite
Islam, that he belongs to.
The clashes led most of Kassab’s estimated 2,000 residents to flee
some 57 kilometres to Latakia city, emptying out a village that
boasted a Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant church.
“We had to flee only with our clothes. We couldn’t take anything,
not even the most precious thing — a handful of soil from Kassab. We
couldn’t take our memories,” said a woman to Syrian state television.
She identified herself as Kassab resident, but didn’t give her name.
Kassab is surrounded by the villas of middle-class Syrians who built
their homes amid green wooded hills overlooking the sea. The area
got a boost from a popular 2008 Syrian telenovela, “Daya, Daya,”
which was filmed in nearby village of Samra. Tourists flock to the
area in the summer.
Kassab residents, speaking to Syrian television, said mortar shells
and gunfire came from the Turkish border toward their village. A
Syrian field commander on a government-organized trip told journalists
near Kassab that gunmen began their attack “with clear support from
the Turks.”
Turkish officials refuted the claims.
“The allegations by some circles that Turkey is providing support to
the opposition forces by letting them use its territory or through
some other ways during the conflict … are totally unfounded,”
the Turkish government said in a media statement on Wednesday.
The Turkish government was prepared to admit Syrian Armenian refugees
and “protection could be provided to them,” the statement said.
Armenia’s President Serge Sarkisian said Kassab was attacked by
Turkish militants in 1909, forcing local Armenians to flee for their
lives. In 1915, as the 600-year-old Ottoman empire violently unraveled,
the Armenian population was deported by the Turks, and thousands died
as they marched across the desert.
A website created by Kassab descendants, “Kessabtsiner,” confirmed
those events.
“This is the third expulsion of Armenians from Kassab and it represents
a major challenge to modern mechanisms for the protection of ethnic
minorities,” Sarkisian said in a statement this week.
Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by
Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by
scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkey, however,
denies that the deaths constituted genocide, saying the toll has been
inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest.
The forced flight from Kassab has deep meaning for many Armenians,
because it is one of the last areas tracing back to the 11th-century
from the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, said professor Geukjian.
Other areas in modern-day Syria once had ancient Armenian villages,
but residents left to join larger communities in cities like Aleppo,
or assimilated into the wider Christian minority, or emigrated,
said Geuikjian. Only Kassab “kept its identity and language,” he said.
“When you say Kassab, you understand you are referring to the
Armenians,” said Arpi Mangassarian of Badguer, a Beirut-based Armenian
cultural organization. “It symbolizes Armenian culture.”
Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian said ethnic Armenians
accounted for about 70 per cent of Kassab’s population.
Before the Syrian uprising, there were some 70,000 ethnic Armenians
in Syria, particularly concentrated in the northern city of Aleppo
and the area around Kassab. They were already a tiny minority among
23 million citizens, but part of Syria’s rich mosaic of tiny, ancient
Christian and Muslim sects.
As the war grinds on, Armenians have been leaving for Lebanon, Armenia,
Canada and the U.S.
The war has grown increasingly sectarian, as hardline Sunni rebel
groups play a prominent role in the uprising, and Syrian minorities
huddle behind Assad, fearing for their fate should extremists come
to power.
There are no statistics of how many Armenians remain, but Geukjian
estimated some 15,000 Armenians remained of a pre-war population of
40,000 in Aleppo. Others had drifted toward Latakia and yet others
had remained in Kassab, he said.
“What will happen to us? We don’t know,” said the woman from Kassab,
speaking to Syrian television.
The ancient area’s loss to ultra-conservative Muslim rebels suggests
an uncertain future.
“We are afraid, if you want the truth. Of what is happening now,
the future. The future is not clear,” Geukjian said.
Hadid reported from Beirut. Associated Press writers Avet Demourian in
Yerevan, Yasmine Saker in Beirut and Suzan Fraser in Ankara contributed
to this report.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/03/28/armenians_dismayed_as_syrian_rebels_seize_historic_kassab.html