Turkey’s Seizure of Churches and Land Alarms Armenians

By Ceylan Yeginsu, NY Times, April 23, 2016 ISTANBUL–The Turkish government has seized the historic Armenian Surp Giragos Church, a number of other churches and large swaths of property in the heavily damaged Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, saying it wants to restore the area but alarming residents who fear the government is secretly aiming to drive them out. The city, in the heart of Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, has been the scene of heavy fighting for nearly a year, since the Turkish military began a counterinsurgency campaign against militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which ended a two-year cease-fire in July. Many neighborhoods have been left in ruins, and hundreds of thousands of people have been forced from their homes. Surp Giragos, one of the largest Armenian churches in the Middle East, was damaged in the fighting and forced to shut its doors. Both the Armenians, for whom Surp Giragos is an important cultural touchstone, and the Kurds have discerned a hidden agenda in the expropriations. They say the government plans to replace the destroyed neighborhoods they shared with other minorities with luxury rentals and condominiums affordable only to a wealthier, presumably nonminority class of residents. Some analysts agree, saying even some of the better-off Syrian refugees in Turkey could end up there. “Solving ethnic and religious strife through demographic engineering is a policy of the Turkish government that goes back well over a century,” said Taner Akcam, a prominent Turkish historian. “The latest developments in Sur,” he added, referring to the historic heart of Diyarbakir, “need to be viewed through this framework.” Indeed, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party has displayed a predilection for sweeping projects. It was a proposal to build a shopping mall in place of a razed central park in Istanbul that set off mass antigovernment demonstrations in 2013. Mr. Erdogan announced the government’s urban renewal plans for Diyarbakir in 2011, saying they would “make the city into an international tourism destination.” Shortly after that speech, the local housing administration started tearing down decrepit residential buildings in Sur, but opposition soon brought a halt to the demolition. Many of the buildings in Sur are protected, prohibiting big restoration projects. Mass construction can be carried out only if the government declares an urgent expropriation, as it has done now. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said recently that the government would rebuild Sur to look like the scenic Spanish city of Toledo. “Everyone will want to come and appreciate its architectural texture,” he said. Yet for the Armenians and the Kurds, distrust of Turkey’s intentions runs deep. Armenians still have vivid memories of what historians now call the World War I genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks, in which 1.5 million of their countrymen died, and the Kurds have fought the Turkish government on and off for generations. Diyarbakir is a polyglot city that is home to small Christian congregations of Assyrians, Chaldeans and Turkish converts, as well as to Armenians and Kurds. Surp Giragos (“Surp” means saint in Armenian), which stands in Sur, closed in the 1960s for lack of parishioners but was renovated and reopened in 2011, part of a reconciliation process begun by the Erdogan government that has returned dozens of properties that the Ottoman Turks confiscated during World War I. To many Armenians in the area, who lost touch with their family histories after the genocide and were often raised as Muslims by Kurdish families, the church has served as an anchor as they rediscovered their identities. These “hidden Armenians” emerged as Turkey relaxed its restrictions on minorities, but now they say they again feel threatened. That helps explain why the government’s seizure of the church struck a particularly raw nerve with the Armenian diaspora and rights groups, who say the expropriation of religious properties and 6,300 plots of land in Diyarbakir is a blatant violation of international law. “This is reminiscent of the events leading up to the start of the Armenian genocide on April 24, 1915, when properties were illegally confiscated and the population was displaced under the false guise of temporary relocation for its own protection,” said Nora Hovsepian, the chairwoman of the Western Region of the Armenian National Committee of America. “That temporary relocation,” she added, “turned out to be death marches and a permanent disenfranchisement of two million from their ancestral homeland.” The Turkish government denies that those killings amounted to genocide, saying thousands of people–many of them Turks–died as a result of civil war. That history, and the traumas associated with those bloody events, have been passed down through generations, and continue to reverberate among Armenians. “We haven’t been able to go to the church for months, and it’s devastating to hear that it has been damaged in the fighting,” said Onur Kayikci, a Kurdish resident of Sur, who recently became aware of his Armenian ancestry. “For us, it’s not just a building or a place of worship. It’s where we would come to put together the pieces of our history and identity together.”