Boys playing football in the yard of what was Camp Armen, also known as the Tuzla Armenian Children’s Camp, which was closed in 1983.
May 10, 2014, Saturday/ 17:00:00/ AYÇA ÖRER

Camp Armen, which raised hundreds of Armenian orphans, including the late journalist Hrant Dink, should be reopened, according to the wish of its former residents.

The camp, also known as the Tuzla Armenian Children’s Camp, was home to many children until 1983. Dink in his article “Do not get lost children,” from Nov. 8, 1998, would say of the camp: “Our orphanage was the meeting center for those who were separated. For example, there were Garabet and Flor. These two siblings, who had lost their mother, were able to find each other after 15 bitter years at the end of a sweet accident of fate. … How can I ever forget the way they ran towards each other when we told them they were siblings? How Garabet ran to his sister, towards the sea. Now some of you will say, ‘Oh, this sounds just like a Turkish movie.’ But that’s how it happened.”

The story that Dink wrote years ago is about Garabet Orunöz, the organizer of a recent union at Camp Armen after many years. The first time they came together in a reunion was in 2008, one year after the death of Dink. Since then, they have been meeting once or twice a year to remember the old days.

Orunöz showed us around, pointing at the corridors of the camp, which are now in ruins. “This used to be the cafeteria. This is where our bunk beds were; eight children shared a room.” He remembers that to teach children responsibility, every child would be in charge of a certain task. “For example, I was in charge of eggs. Even adults would come and tell me, ‘I bought this many eggs.’ Just like that, the trees in the camp were assigned to the children.”

Hand-built school

The camp was built in 1963, but not completed until 1966. The children staying at the camp completed the missing parts. “We were scrawny kids between grades two and five. We first started digging. We kept digging. We put up the poles of our Kızılay [Red Crescent] tents. We planted saplings. We dug a well. For three years, we got up at dawn and worked until midnight and completed the camp building. … Everybody envied [how hard we worked].”

Garabet Orunöz now tells his own story and the story of those days to the visitors of the camp. “My father sent me to Gedikpaşa first to learn how to read and write. Later I started going to Tuzla Camp. In the summer of 1970, Camp Armen’s principal, Hrant Güzelyan, sent me to Malatya to my father’s house. My father prayed in the morning. He was thankful to the woman who sent me to the orphanage in İstanbul.

“My name was Nedim when I came from Malatya. I found out in İstanbul that my name is Garabet. When my mother died, we gave my then-3-month-old sister to a family. The woman who found the family, Sara Makascı, didn’t tell me where the family lived. I promised myself not to fall in love until I found my sister. I was 19 and I worked at a workshop. My friend Nişan arranged for us a place near the camp. My sister was also there to oversee younger children. Everybody there knew we were siblings. When I was there, Hrant Dink’s father, Sarkis, shouted at me, ‘You have a sister, you have been looking for her.’ He pointed at the balcony across. I instantly recognized Flor.”

Most residents of the camp today live abroad. Cellphones kept ringing during the reunion. They connected to a friend who lives in Argentina via video chat. Tears ran down the cheeks of the faces on the two screens. They showed each other the saplings they had planted as children, saying, ‘This is my tree.’ At this point, Orunöz gave a present to the children of the Aziz Nesin Foundation, who had also come to visit the camp: three bicycles. “We could never learn to ride. Take these bicycles so that you may learn.” Orunöz also said they wanted their camp back.

Last word from Dink

“I went to Tuzla when I was 8. I spent 20 years [working for the camp]. I met my wife, Rakel, there. We grew up together. We married there. Our children were born there. Later they imprisoned the principal of our camp, accusing him of ‘raising Armenian militants.’ It was a false accusation. We weren’t raised as Armenian militants. … I have a complaint, humanity! They threw us away from the civilization we had created. They sat on the labors of 1,500 children who were raised there. They usurped our labor. They destroyed our home. … And our Tuzla Camp for Poor Children, our own Atlantis, now lay in ruins. The water had gone from the well, together with the children’s voices. The building had lost its teeth, its shoulders slouched, its cheeks gaunt. The soil is dry, the trees are offended. My anger is as sharp as the anger of a sparrow whose nest which it built after painstaking efforts had been destroyed with a single strike.”

Getting through

Those who visited the camp that day also talked about “1965,” a book co-authored by journalists Serdar Korucu and Aris Nalcı about the 50th anniversary of the events of 1915. We talked about what had happened half a century earlier on April 24 with the authors.

Nalcı noted that in 1965, the language of the state was different from that of today. “Hate crimes were not seen as a bad thing. The wider Turkish society didn’t know about the discrimination citizens of the republic were being subjected to because of their ethnic roots. In 1965, gatherings to commemorate the victims of the genocide began in Lebanon. Turkey met with the diaspora Armenians for the first time and they put forth the thesis that it wasn’t the Turks who killed the Armenians but the Armenians who killed Turks. At the same time, they also wanted the ‘hostage’ Armenians inside the country to respond to the diaspora. The same things are happening today.”

Korucu notes that the mainstream media has been changing its approach to the genocide issue. “Given that the media in Turkey always aligns itself with state policies, it is not surprising that the issue has not been discussed adequately with only one year left before the centennial of 1915. As we state in the book, the state theses that were first formed in 1965 remain alive today. Official history doesn’t change rapidly in any country.

“And if we are talking about Turkey, we all know how slow that change is. We have seen many examples where government ‘initiatives’ have failed to change official ideology. If missionaries are still listed as an element of threat in schoolbooks in spite of the Zirve massacre, if they have only just recently retracted the sentence ‘They became instruments of Western interests for their own welfare,’ which was said of Syriacs, that means there is a problem.”

Garabet Orunöz talked about the recent meeting between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Armenian Patriarch Aram Ateşyan: “The problem in this meeting is that the political government is talking to a religious institution as a counterpart. There were other civilian representatives, but we need to think about their representation. Today, there is not a single unit that can represent the Armenian society in Turkey. The mechanisms we have developed only to survive have put our minds in chains, making us into ‘loyal’ citizens.”

Orunöz said Armenians in Turkey became centralist after their attempts to engage in politics, both left wing and right wing, were suppressed. “This is why we should see the wealthy among Armenian society thanking the prime minister for preserving what is. The solution to this pathological state of mind is through healing each other. Armenians and Turks will have their healing process together.”

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