Turkey’s Hate Crimes Are only the Tip of the Iceberg

These crimes could not be regarded as the unintended consequences of a policy since that policy is inciting hatred towards Turkey’s minorities. Right at this moment, Erdogan’s administration is waging a war against a quarter of the country’s population, the Kurds. And Hrant Dink was also a victim of that policy, after being harassed in trials on trumped up charges for years.

It is the manifestation of the same policy when government officials turn their ire against Armenian migrant workers. This time around, it is a right-wing party aligned with Erdogan’s AK Party, which is advocating the expulsion of migrant workers, who are thought to number between 10,000 and 30,000. But Mustafa Destici, the head of the Great Union Party, has asked the government to take action against those immigrants, stating, “There are 100,000 Armenians here who came from Armenia and are illegally filling their stomachs. I am saying that we should expel them. Why are we letting them stay?”

First of all, the number is exaggerated and second, for a very practical reason — the language barrier — they are mostly employed by local Armenians. Never mind that the Turks have destroyed an entire historic Armenia and have filled their stomachs with the looting of what millions of Armenians left behind.

This threat does not only come from the extreme right-wing. Before him, Prime Ministers Turgut Ozal and Tansu Çiller also made similar threats while Mr. Erdogan has made oblique references to them by stating that the Turkish state is such a charitable institution that it does not take punitive actions against the “transgressions” of the Armenians.

Mustafa Destici has been trying to take his revenge on those migrant workers, because he cannot stand up to French President Macron, who recently announced that April 24 will officially mark Armenian Martyrs’ Day in France. The Turkish government has been exercising a policy of cat-and-mouse with its minorities to dupe the European Union. A case in point is the recent return of Sanasarian Han, a huge piece of real estate, which had been confiscated from the Armenian community and after a show trial, was returned it to the Armenians, only to be confiscated again.

The Turkish leaders view Europeans as naïve statesmen who cannot detect their chicanery. But lo and behold, the European Union suspended the negotiating process with Turkey.

The Turks and Azeris have deep-seated anxieties with regard to the harsh judgement of history since they have occupied the territories of indigenous people and one day may face a reckoning.

Hence, the Sevres Syndrome remains alive.

That is why they are in a race against time to destroy all the vestiges  of Armenian presence and civilization on those lands, meantime fabricating a historic narrative that for centuries Seljuk Turks were inhabiting the Anatolian plateau and that Christian Albanians have inhabited Karabakh and Nakhichevan, all ancestors of Turks and Azeris.

Before World War I, there were 2,538 churches and 451 monasteries within the borders of modern Turkey. They have all been either destroyed or repurposed as stables, museums, storage areas or movie theaters. Laure Marchange and Guillaume Perrier explain in their book, Turkey and the Armenian Ghost, “Since the Armenians’ religious heritage was the strongest expression of their ancestral roots, it became a prime target of their oppressors. In absolute numbers, Turkey’s wipeout of Armenian cultural heritage dwarfs Azerbaijan’s’ recent vandalism in Nakhijevan.”

One Armenian scholar, Argam Ayvazyan, singlehandedly has documented almost all the architectural monuments in Karabakh and Nakhichevan and has published 200 articles and 40 books on the subject.

To this day, none of the successive administrations in Armenia have given proper recognition and support to him and his cause. It is time to divulge a little secret here. Way before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ayvazyan reached out to me at the Manoogian Cultural Fund, declaring that momentous events are predicted in the Caucasus. Therefore, he said, it is time to document monuments in Karabakh and Nakhichevan. After obtaining initial funding, he hired a foreign photographer to capture all the monuments. Even during  the Soviet period, Armenians were banned from traveling to Nakhichevan and the Azeris had managed to expel the remnants of the Armenian population from that exclave.

In Nakhichevan, Ayvazyan was able to document 89 Armenian churches, 5,840 ornate khachkars and 22,000 horizontal tombstones. All the khachkars were destroyed by the Azerbaijani government in 2005. All protests to UNESCO proved futile. Later on, it was discovered that when the US cut its support to UNESCO, the Azerbaijani government donated a grant of $5 million and was soon after recognized by UNESCO as a “country of tolerance.”

What a farce.

The ghost of martyred Armenians will haunt the Turks and Azeris forever and their only protection from history’s judgement will force the race toward the destruction of Armenian monuments.

Today’s hate crimes in Turkey are only the tip of the iceberg. The rest lies below the surface, under the ocean of history.

Clarification

The editorial above included a quote from a story by Simon Mahagyan and Sarah Pickman, titled “A Regime Conceals Its Erasure of Indigenous Armenian Culture.” Azadian had quoted the text, but misplaced the quotation mark, thus the sentence “In absolute numbers, Turkey’s wipeout of Armenian cultural heritage dwarfs Azerbaijan’s recent vandalism in Nakhichevan,” was not included in quotation marks.

In addition, several sentences were paraphrased from the article.

We regret the errors, which were all unintentional.

Below please see the link to the article, https://hyperallergic.com/482353/a-regime-conceals-its-erasure-of-indigenous-armenian-culture/