turkey losing propaganda war over syrian armenians - al-monitor_ the pulse of the middle east
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Turkey losing propaganda war over Syrian Armenians
Author: Amberin Zaman
Posted April 8, 2014
“The bearded men came to our home. They spoke Turkish. They rifled through our
belongings and asked if we had guns.” This is how Sirpuhi Titizyan, a refugee from
Kassab, a mainly Armenian village in northern Syria that was overrun by jihadists
fighters on March 21, described her ordeal (http://www.agos.com.tr/haber.php?
seo=evin-anahtarini-sakalli-adama-verip-geldim&haberid=6907) to Agos, an
Istanbul-based Armenian weekly.
The frail octogenarian blamed Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for
Kassab’s fall. “Had Erdogan not cleared the path to Kassab, this many evil men
would not have come,” Titizyan said. “May Allah blind Erdogan,” she thundered in a
separate interview with Aris Nalci, a Turkish-Armenian blogger.
But readers of the mass circulation daily Hurriyet, which disingenuously claimed to
have interviewed the sisters first, were offered a completely different version of
events. When asked to respond to allegations that Turkey had helped to orchestrate
the attack against Kassab, Sirpuhi was quoted as saying
(http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-hosts-armenians-from-syria.aspx?
pageID=238&nID=64590&NewsCatID=510): “If this were so, why would the
[Turkish] government be helping us?”
Sirpuhi and her sister Satenik have become the unwitting tools of a propaganda war
pitting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime and members of the Armenian
diaspora against Turkey and its rebel proteges.
The Islamist fighters promised the women, who were among a handful of elderly
people left behind, that they would help them join their fellow villagers in regime-
controlled areas of Latakia and Tartus. But they handed the pair over to Turkish
authorities in the neighboring province of Hatay instead.
The sisters have since been resettled in Vakifli, the sole Armenian-inhabited village
(http://hetq.am/eng/news/1019/vakif-last-surviving-musa-ler-village-faces-uncertain-
future.html) left in Turkey since 1915.
That was when more than a million Armenians were slaughtered by Ottomans in
what most historians concurred was the first genocide of the 20th century. Much of
the violence took place as hundreds of thousands of Armenians were uprooted from
their homes and ordered on a “death march” to the Syrian desert in Deir al-Zor.
Coming just weeks before the 99th anniversary of the genocide on April 24,
the campaign in Kassab (http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/syria-
aleppo-kassab-latakia-turkey-rebels-war-regime.html) was bound to bruise Turkey’s
image. And that is why, wrote Agos editor-in-chief, Rober Koptas, Turkey intervened
with opposition fighters to prevent them from moving against Kassab in the past. So
what prompted the change? he asked. Most Armenians, Koptas notes, would give
the shortcut answer that it was “to harm Armenians.” But as he said, any harm
suffered by Kassab’s Armenians would harm Turkey, too. The more likely reason
that Turkey did not stand in the way of the rebels this time was because the conflict
was tipping in the regime’s favor. Kassab would give the rebels a strategic foothold
in Latakia and unprecedented access to the Mediterranean Sea. But at what price?
Claims that the jihadists had desecrated churches and beheaded Christians in
Kassab have been debunked. And there has been only one civilian death reported
so far. Yet, the Armenian National Committee of America
(http://www.todayszaman.com/news-343024-us-armenian-group-says-turkey-
assisting-rebels-in-Kassab.html) (ANCA) called on US President Barack Obama “to
immediately press Turkey to stop facilitating attacks on civilians in Kassab, and to
investigate Turkey’s reported assistance to foreign fighters associated with US-
designated terrorists groups.”
ANCA is at the forefront of a long-running campaign to get the US Congress to
formally recognize the Armenian genocide. Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan was
quick to draw parallels with 1915. Speaking in The Hague on the sidelines of the
World Nuclear Summit, Sargsyan said: “All of us remember the history of Kassab
(http://www.armradio.am/en/2014/03/24/serzh-sargsyan-deportation-of-Kassab-
armenians-a-challenge-to-mechanisms-of-protection-of-national-minorities/) very
well. Unfortunately, in the course of the past centuries it has been rich in hellish
realities of deportations of Armenians.”
Armenian-American celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Cher (http://www.al-
monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/kim-kardashian-kassab-armenia-blame-turkey-
syria.html) have waded in with tweets to “Save Kassab.”
Turkey denies it had any role in the fall of Kassab. In a statement on April 6, the
Turkish Foreign Ministry declared that it had taken “swift measures to ensure that
the people of Kassab were kept out of harm’s way.” Turkish authorities were
coordinating with the Armenian Patriarchate to facilitate passage for those
Armenians who wished to come to Turkey.
Some 18 Kassab Armenians have been brought over to Turkey and joined the
Titizyan sisters in Vakifli, where the Turkish Red Crescent was tending to them. But
Agos editor Koptas believes it’s more of a public relations exercise than a
humanitarian mission. “It is clear to us that the rebel assault against Kassab was
launched from Turkish soil,” Koptas told Al-Monitor, echoing eyewitness reports
from the Turkish-Syrian border. “Turkey is now in an extremely difficult position and
is trying to repair its image,” he said.
It’s easy to see why Turkey’s actions have triggered such controversy. The horrors
of 1915 are never far from the Armenians’ collective memory. In Kassab, which
overlooks Turkey, “the feelings for Turkey were not of yearning but of dislike,”
recalled Nigol Bezjian, a Syrian-Armenian filmmaker who as a child spent summers
in Kassab.
“From what I remember there was talk about the genocide and there was talk about
inhumane violence, but there was also a sense of pride in that Kassab along with a
few other Armenian villages — Aramo, Ghnemieh and Yacoubieh — continued to be
inhabited by Armenians after the genocide,” Bezjian told Al-Monitor.
Turkey denies that there was a genocide (http://www.al-
monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/12/turkey-armenia-genocide-academic-research-
media-exposure.html), and has pumped millions of dollars into a largely
unsuccessful campaign to peddle its own narrative which proposes that, swept up in
the chaos of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, the Armenians mostly perished as a
result of famine and disease.
Ankara’s credibility with the Armenians was further dented when it junked a set of
protocols (http://www.tesev.org.tr/assets/publications/file/TurkeyArmenia.pdf) it
signed with Armenia in October 2009 that were supposed to have
established diplomatic ties and reopened its long-sealed land border with the former
Soviet republic.
The ink on the documents had barely dried when Turkey declared that it could not
implement them unless Armenia withdrew from at least some of the territories it had
seized from Azerbaijan during a bitter six-year war over the disputed Nagorno-
Karabakh enclave that ended in 1994. Turkey’s minister for European Union affairs,
Mevlut Cavusoglu, asserted in a recent interview that Armenia had delivered “a
verbal pledge to withdraw from territories under its occupation” before the protocols
were signed. “But they failed to keep their promise; it is Armenia’s fault,” Cavusoglu
insisted. But Western diplomats who were close to the negotiations say that
Nagorno-Karabakh never came up. There is no mention of the issue in the
protocols, and it is widely assumed that Turkey’s volte-face was a result of
Azerbaijan’s threats to cut off vital oil and natural gas sales.
Despite the freeze in official ties between Turkey and Armenia, civil society
initiatives to heal the wounds of the past are flourishing. A growing number of
Turkish academics and intellectuals are rejecting the official account of what
happened in 1915. A commemoration of the tragedy will be held April 24 in Istanbul’s
central Taksim Square.
Now many fret that Turkish meddling in Kassab will undo such progress. Some
Armenian intellectuals, in turn, worry that disinformation about Kassab may hurt the
Armenian cause.
“Kassab is the heart and soul of the Syrian-Armenian community, a surviving artifact
of life we had before the genocide. Losing it feels a bit like a final erasure,”
explained Elyse Semerdjian, who teaches Middle East and Islamic History at
Whitman College, in an interview with Al-Monitor. But Semerdjian cautions against
linking the events in Kassab to 1915 “to attack Turkey’s role in the Syrian conflict as
well as agitate further for Armenian genocide recognition.” She said, “Genocide
recognition is a noble cause, but it should not come at the expense of Armenian
credibility on human rights.”
Bezjian agrees that the Armenian community must not allow itself to be manipulated
by the warring sides. “When things were good and Assad vacationed with Erdogan,
all books about the Armenian genocide were confiscated from the bookstores by
Syrian secret service agents,” Bezjian recalled. “Now that things have turned the
other way, Assad talks about the genocide to justify his own conduct.”
Read More: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/turkey-syrian-conflict-
armenian-genocide-kassab-propaganda.html
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