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TURKEY LOSING PROPAGANDA WAR OVER SYRIAN ARMENIANS
Al-Monitor
April 8 2014
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 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: "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 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 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 (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 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 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, 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 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."
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/turkey-syrian-conflict-armenian-genocide-kassab-propaganda.html
Al-Monitor
April 8 2014
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 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: "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 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 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 (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 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 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, 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 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."
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/turkey-syrian-conflict-armenian-genocide-kassab-propaganda.html