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TURKEY AND ARMENIA: TWO VAST AND UGLY BLOCKS OF STONE - ECONOMIST
Tert.am
14.01.11
Statues in Kars are not safe when Recep Tayyip Erdogan is around. When
Turkey's prime minister visited the city last year, the local mayor,
who belongs to Erdogan's mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK)
party, sought to avoid his ire by ordering the removal of a public
fountain featuring bare-breasted nymphs.
Last week, during another trip to Kars, which lies about 45km west
of the border with Armenia, Erdogan called for the demolition of a
local monument designed to promote reconciliation between Turks and
Armenians. The statue, of two 30-metre-tall concrete figures reaching
out to each other, was, he said, a "freak".
Erdogan insisted that his distaste was purely aesthetic. Yet some
suspect him of pandering to nationalist sentiment in the run-up
to elections in June. Many Turks see the statue as an admission of
Armenia's charge that the slaughter of up to 1.5m Armenians by Ottoman
forces in 1915 amounted to genocide.
In 2009 the then mayor of Kars, Naif Alibeyoglu, who had commissioned
the statue, was forced out under pressure from Erdogan and the city's
20% ethnic Azeri population (egged on by Azerbaijan, which disliked
Turkey's efforts to make peace with Armenia).
Erdogan has backed away from a set of protocols signed with Armenia
in 2009 that foresaw the establishment of diplomatic relations and
the reopening of borders. These were sealed in 1993 after Armenia's
short war with Azerbaijan over the mainly Armenian enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh. Erdogan insists that the protocols can only be
ratified if Armenia withdraws from seven regions it occupies around
the enclave. Armenia is threatening to scrap the deal altogether.
But there is also a whiff of Islamic orthodoxy in the air. Erdogan's
tirade against the Kars statue included references to Hasan Harakani,
an ancient Muslim scholar buried nearby.
"They erected a strange thing next to his mausoleum... it is
unthinkable," he complained. Many Muslim scholars consider statues
to be idolatrous, and other AK officials have not disguised their
aversion to them. Ankara's mayor, Melih Gokcek, has systematically
dismantled statues erected by his pro-secular predecessors. "I spit
on this kind of art," he once said.
Mehmet Aksoy, the designer of the Kars monument, says that the
government risks being seen as "the Taliban" if it presses its
demands. But Turkey's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has backed
his boss, arguing that Aksoy's work fails to blend into the Seljuk,
Ottoman and Russian character of the city. He might have included
Kars' Armenian legacy, but that is being erased. A long-abandoned
tenth-century Armenian church recently reopened - as a mosque.
From: A. Papazian
Tert.am
14.01.11
Statues in Kars are not safe when Recep Tayyip Erdogan is around. When
Turkey's prime minister visited the city last year, the local mayor,
who belongs to Erdogan's mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK)
party, sought to avoid his ire by ordering the removal of a public
fountain featuring bare-breasted nymphs.
Last week, during another trip to Kars, which lies about 45km west
of the border with Armenia, Erdogan called for the demolition of a
local monument designed to promote reconciliation between Turks and
Armenians. The statue, of two 30-metre-tall concrete figures reaching
out to each other, was, he said, a "freak".
Erdogan insisted that his distaste was purely aesthetic. Yet some
suspect him of pandering to nationalist sentiment in the run-up
to elections in June. Many Turks see the statue as an admission of
Armenia's charge that the slaughter of up to 1.5m Armenians by Ottoman
forces in 1915 amounted to genocide.
In 2009 the then mayor of Kars, Naif Alibeyoglu, who had commissioned
the statue, was forced out under pressure from Erdogan and the city's
20% ethnic Azeri population (egged on by Azerbaijan, which disliked
Turkey's efforts to make peace with Armenia).
Erdogan has backed away from a set of protocols signed with Armenia
in 2009 that foresaw the establishment of diplomatic relations and
the reopening of borders. These were sealed in 1993 after Armenia's
short war with Azerbaijan over the mainly Armenian enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh. Erdogan insists that the protocols can only be
ratified if Armenia withdraws from seven regions it occupies around
the enclave. Armenia is threatening to scrap the deal altogether.
But there is also a whiff of Islamic orthodoxy in the air. Erdogan's
tirade against the Kars statue included references to Hasan Harakani,
an ancient Muslim scholar buried nearby.
"They erected a strange thing next to his mausoleum... it is
unthinkable," he complained. Many Muslim scholars consider statues
to be idolatrous, and other AK officials have not disguised their
aversion to them. Ankara's mayor, Melih Gokcek, has systematically
dismantled statues erected by his pro-secular predecessors. "I spit
on this kind of art," he once said.
Mehmet Aksoy, the designer of the Kars monument, says that the
government risks being seen as "the Taliban" if it presses its
demands. But Turkey's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has backed
his boss, arguing that Aksoy's work fails to blend into the Seljuk,
Ottoman and Russian character of the city. He might have included
Kars' Armenian legacy, but that is being erased. A long-abandoned
tenth-century Armenian church recently reopened - as a mosque.
From: A. Papazian