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  • Armenian Church Seeks Restitution From Turkey

    Eurasia Review
    October 9, 2014 Thursday

    Armenian Church Seeks Restitution From Turkey

    By Vahe Harutyunyan


    A plan by leading Armenian clerics to seek legal redress from the
    Turkish judiciary for church property lost in the early 1900s takes
    the campaign for genocide recognition to a new level, analysts say.

    Aram I, the Catholicos or head of the see of Cicilia based in Lebanon,
    announced the lawsuit at an annual congress of the Armenian diaspora
    which opened in Yerevan on September 19.

    `Here, before this meeting which represents our nation, we wish to
    announce for the first time that next year, the Catholicosate of the
    Great House of Cilicia plans to file a suit at Turkey's constitutional
    court seeking the restitution of its historical centre, the
    Catholicate of Sis,' he said.

    The Armenian Apostolic Church is an ancient and unique institution,
    not part of either the Orthodox or Roman Catholic worlds. It has two
    spiritual sees, the Mother See at Etchmiadzin in Armenia, and the
    `Great House' or holy see of Cilicia, in Lebanon.

    The Great House of Cilicia was based in Sis, near the Turkish city of
    Adana, from the 13th century to 1921, when its leaders fled a fresh
    wave of killings. This followed the mass killings in 1915 which
    Armenians call genocide, a term Turkey hotly disputes.

    Armenians have spent many years lobbying countries around the world to
    acknowledge that genocide took place and to press Turkey to do the
    same.

    The planned lawsuit is a new approach which will take the dispute to
    Turkey's highest court. Commentators have drawn direct parallels with
    the legal action taken to secure material restitution in post-war
    Germany for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, through compensation or
    restoration of property.

    The Armenian government has indicated it will support the church's
    action. Asked about the plan during the same diaspora congress,
    Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandyan said, `How can there be any other
    opinion about this? It's essential to support this initiative.'

    Catholicos Aram said a sound legal basis for the proposed court action
    had been crafted over the past two years. He added that `if our
    lawsuit is turned down by the Turkish constitutional court, we will go
    to international courts'.

    Ashot Melkonyan, director of the Institute of History in Yerevan, says
    that as well as church property, large numbers of Armenian homes were
    lost. `In the 1920s and 1930s, everything was transferred to state
    ownership. Then the Turkish government sold some of it to the local
    Muslim population,' he said.

    The property claim is especially will be particularly as 2015 is the
    year Armenia marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the bloodshed
    with the Genocide Commemoration in April.

    Ahead of the 2014 commemoration, Recep Tayyip ErdoÄ?an ` then prime
    minister and now president of Turkey ` issued an unprecedented but
    carefully-worded statement noting that `Armenians remember the
    suffering experienced in that period, just like every other citizen of
    the Ottoman Empire¦. The events of the First World War are our shared
    pain.'

    The omission of the word `genocide' meant that his remarks fell short
    of what Yerevan wanted. Presidential chief of staff Vigen Sargsyan
    called it as `just another, though perhaps more refined, attempt to
    deny and conceal the fact of the Armenian genocide'. (See Armenians
    Call on Turks to Say "Genocide".)

    At the same time, there are signs both countries want to revive a
    process of rapprochement that began in 2008 but foundered in 2010.
    Armenian foreign minister Nalbandyan attended ErdoÄ?an's inauguration
    as president at the end of August, and handed him a formal invitation
    to attend the 100th anniversary commemorations in Yerevan. (See
    Armenia Sends Official to ErdoÄ?an Inauguration.)

    IWPR wrote to the Turkish foreign ministry asking it to comment on
    Catholicos Aram's statement, but it declined to do so.

    One reason for bringing an action now is that Turkey is under pressure
    to change its legislation on historical property claims.

    `In 2005, Turkey, which is seeking to join the European Union, tried
    to bring its legislation into line with the requirements set by
    Brussels, which demand that illegally acquired property be returned to
    its rightful owners,' Vigen Kocharyan, head of the European and
    international law department at Yerevan State University, explained.
    `But the process was not completed.'

    If a submission to the Turkish judiciary fails, then Kocharyan points
    to `a universal principle in international law according to which,
    when the judicial resources of a state have been exhausted, one can
    appeal to an international court'.

    Manvel Sargsyan, director of the Armenian Centre for National and
    International Studies, says that a formal application for compensation
    or restitution is a new development in the long-running campaign by
    Armenia and its diaspora.

    `We can see an apparent shift from demands to acknowledge the fact of
    genocide to a more concrete tactic of seeking compensation,' he said.
    `This is a new approach. In the near future, the compensation issue is
    going to be of increasing importance.'

    Vahe Harutyunyan is a freelance journalist in Armenia. This article
    was published at IWPR's CRS Issue 754.

    The post Armenian Church Seeks Restitution From Turkey appeared first
    on Eurasia Review.

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