Cathedral of the Holy Cross is a Medieval Armenian Apostolic church on Lake Van’s Akdamar Island in eastern Turkey. (Photo by Bruno Vanbesien/CC BY-NC 2.0)
Eurasianet.org has unveiled an article by freelance journalist Ayla Jean Yackley about the situation of Armenians following a failed coup in Turkey.
Aruş Taş, a silversmith in Istanbul’s historic Grand Bazaar, has witnessed decades of economic and social upheaval. But the crackdown wrought by a failed military coup in 2016 has been among the most wrenching, he says. Friends and family are leaving Istanbul, trade has nearly ground to a halt, and his faith that he and his fellow Armenians have a future in Turkey has dwindled.
“This time it is worse, because I have lost hope,” Taş says. “Now I fear for the country.”
In the wake of the coup, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has jailed more than 50,000 people, and the authorities have banned hundreds of news outlets and civil society groups. The country’s lurch toward Islamist-tinged nationalism under Erdoğan has left religious minorities feeling vulnerable. Recent attacks on minorities, although apparently isolated and spontaneous, have heightened those suspicions.
Turkey’s largest group of non-Muslims, Armenians have seen restored churches wrecked in military operations and the government block their efforts to elect a new spiritual leader. At stake is a tentative opening over the last decade that had eroded long-standing taboos, especially about the World War I-era Genocide when as many at 1.5 million Armenians perished as the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
Armenians “remember their past, what happened to their grandparents in this kind of atmosphere [which encourages] crimes. They know there is a big risk,” says Garo Paylan, an ethnic Armenian lawmaker from the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party.
Paylan does not believe Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) deliberately targets these groups, but worries rival political forces can “play the card any time, knowing there is bias against the Armenian identity, and organize provocations against minorities. Armenians know that, and that is why they are silent again.” In this environment, many are reminded of the fate of Hrant Dink, Paylan says. Dink was the outspoken editor of the Armenian community newspaper Agos and an advocate for reconciling with the genocide, and was gunned down by Turkish nationalists outside of his office in central Istanbul in 2007. A trial of state officials accused of complicity in the murder drags on in an Istanbul court.
Paylan himself faced censure for discussing the genocide in parliament last year. A few months later, parliament passed a new set of rules, dubbed the “Garo Paylan clause,” fining lawmakers who are reprimanded or ejected from the assembly. Paylan sees the rules as an attempt to stifle critical debate.
The Turkish government has also thwarted attempts to elect a new patriarch at Istanbul’s Armenian Apostolic Church See. Church leader Mesrob II Mutafyan has been incapacitated, reportedly with dementia, since 2008. A lack of legal clarity over succession and the patriarchate’s status has allowed Turkish authorities to reject the community’s choice last year of Karekin Bekjian, an archbishop in Germany.
The Turkish Interior Ministry informed the patriarchate in early February that it does not recognize Bekjian’s position and that the Church had not established the appropriate conditions for a patriarchal election.
For many in Turkey, the climate has become so restrictive that abandoning it has become the only choice.
Official figures for the number of Turkish citizens who have moved overseas are not available, but the opposition Republican People’s Party reports that tens of thousands of affluent Turks have left since the coup attempt. Paylan, the MP, estimates that hundreds of Armenians are part of that exodus and that hundreds more plan to go.
In recent years, Erdoğan has threatened to “deport” the estimated 30,000 migrants from Armenia in Turkey without papers. The choice of words was painful: Most Ottoman Armenians died during their deportation to the Syrian desert a century ago.
The departure of Armenians and other non-Muslims is felt more acutely in communities already struggling to maintain their numbers, says Yetvart Danzikyan, Dink’s successor at Agos. “There is a historic responsibility in deciding to stay, but I cannot blame anyone who leaves. If only the government had not transformed Turkey into a place that people want to leave.”
