Special to the Armenian Weekly
DIYARBAKIR (A.W.)–The man was eavesdropping, it was obvious. Suren and I had sat down on the other side of the bench, backs to the Ayasofya, staring up into the minarets of the Blue Mosque. Suren was explaining the meaning of the word “axper” in English for my benefit.
The journalists with Diyarbakir Metropolitan Mayor Osman Baydemir.
“It means, like, brother, you know.”
I was only half focused on what he was saying. In my peripheral vision, I was monitoring the man to our left, whose posture had gone from that of relaxation to one of intense concentration. When the conversation hit a lull, he finally spoke.
“Excuse me—sorry—you are Armenian?”
Regarding him cautiously, we nodded.
His face brightened in a massive grin. “Me too! Me too!” he exclaimed, jabbing his chest with his index finger for emphasis. “Where are you from?”
“Yerevan, and Boston,” Suren said, gesturing at me.
“I am from Sasun,” the man said, fishing his ID out of his jacket pocket. He passed it to us. His name was Turkish, the religious affiliation listed was Christianity. Pointing at it, he elaborated. “Many of my family, my father, some brothers, still Muslim. But me, no. We live in Sasun a long time, but now I am here, with my brother, we have jewelry store near Grand Bazaar. I was this week at a conference about the Armenians in Turkey, I show you…” His hand darted back into the jacket pocket and produced a brochure from the Hrant Dink Foundation’s conference earlier that week at Istanbul’s Bogazici University.
It was the same Hrant Dink Foundation that had brought me, Suren, and eight other Armenian journalists to Istanbul for a week-long program. One of the central events of the week was the conference on Islamized Armenians, the first of its kind held in Turkey. When the Foundation had attempted to hold it several years earlier, government pressure had forced it to be held at a private university, and the event was substantially disrupted by protesters. This year it was hugely successful—held as planned at Bogazici University and with three times as many attendees registered as the venue could hold.
The journalists with Diyarbakir Sur Municipality Mayor Abdullah Demirbas
The issue of Islamized Armenians was one that followed us as we traveled through Turkey on our week-long program. We spent two days in Diyarbakir, the second-largest city in southeast Anatolia, and the most important city in the Kurdish region of Turkey. We met with the city’s mayor, Osman Baydemir, as well as with the mayor of the central Sur municipality, Abdullah Demirbaş.
The two politicians, both members of the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (the BDP), are highly conscious of the Armenian presence that has laced the past and present of their city. “Welcome to your city” was a refrain repeated several times over the two days spent in Diyarbakir, a reference to the sizable Armenian community that existed in Diyarbakir up until 1915. Demirbaş elaborated, “I believe that we have the duty to once again give back to the city the identities which originally belonged to this city. And the Armenian identity is also one of these identities, one of these cultures that belongs to this geography.”
These are not empty promises. Demirbaş has initiated the printing of multi-lingual brochures about the city, including one in Armenian; instituted an Armenian-language course that now has between 70 and 80 people enrolled; and recently mandated that any city employee be able to speak one of the region’s primary minority languages (Armenian or the Assyrian/Chaldean languages) in addition to Turkish. A memorial has been erected in Sur to the victims of the genocides against minority populations and the Turkish citizens who resisted the violence, bearing the inscription, “We share the pain so that it is not repeated,” in Armenian and six other languages.
These initiatives are all firsts for Turkey, and they have come at no small price. Demirbaş’s son left home at the age of 16 to join the PKK. Demirbaş has been imprisoned before, and further sentences are an ever-looming threat due to his policies. He explained, “Because of this and similar activities, the judiciary is demanding that I be sentenced to prison for 483 years. I was imprisoned before, they released me due to health reasons, otherwise I would still be in prison right now because my friends are still in prison… I was forced to resign in 2007 as mayor and I was forced to resign in 2001 from my post as a teacher. So it is not really easy dealing with these issues… [But] let alone 483 years, even if they condemned me to 1,483 years of prison, I would still not give up, I would not abandon what I believe in. Of course there have been threats, there have been certain assassination attempts towards me, but I will not give up, as I said, I will not forsake what I believe in.”
Demirbaş lives an uncertain existence. His current trial continues, but even an acquittal would be no guarantee of freedom. “They can come again tomorrow morning and take me to prison. I do not have any guarantees that they will not try to do that. But I am prepared for that, this is always on the table. There is always a possibility that they might do this. But I am not scared of them taking me to prison, I’m not scared of them killing me. Because of what I believe in, my beliefs, I know that my beliefs are just, I know that what I believe in is right. And I think that if you do not risk losing, you will never be able to win…and if we do not do this now, if we do not take these risks, our children they will not live in a free world, in a free country.”
Such risks are a part of Osman Baydemir’s family history. He recounted the story of his father, Mehmet, to us:
The year is 1914, in a little village in Diyarbakir, and a woman named Asya takes her son Mehmet out into the courtyard of their house… It’s cold, and night has started to fall. Suddenly, a crowd of people, men, women, and children, throw themselves into the courtyard from the roof. Mehmet and his mother Asya scream and run back into the house. Pasha, Mehmet’s father, grabs his gun and runs back outside. Out of the darkness there is a hand that grabs and stops Pasha. The voice of that hand says in Kurdish, “Brother, don’t do this. We might have different religions but we have the same god, so don’t do this.” Pasha accepts the group, an Armenian family fleeing the violence of the genocide, into his house and conceals them there for more than a year. After a year passes and the environment is somewhat calmer, he and some friends help them to cross into Syria.
The interior of the Sourp Giragos Armenian Church in Diyarbakir (Photo by George Aghjayan)
Many years pass. Mehmet, Pasha’s son, grows up and becomes criminalized by the state. He is forced to escape into one of the Kurdish regions of Syria with his wife. They continue with border crossings, engaged in both smuggling and political activities, until one day there is a conflict at the border. Mehmet is wounded in the foot, but his friends are unable to find him until a day later. By the time he reaches a doctor, the foot is infected with gangrene. The doctor informs him that his foot will have to be amputated. Mehmet violently rejects this proposal and the doctor becomes angry with him. “You’re a very hard man, you don’t understand, you’re a very thick-headed man. Where are you from?”
Mehmet tells him he is from Diyarbakir.
“From which village?” the doctor asks. Mehmet names the village.
The doctor takes Mehmet’s hand. “Who is your father?”
“I’m Pasha’s son,” Mehmet replies.
The doctor’s tone softens. “Do you remember me?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I’m Agop. Remember we used to play in the courtyard together?” The doctor is the son of the Armenian family that was hidden by Mehmet’s father for over a year during Mehmet’s childhood. After escaping to Syria with his family, he had grown up and become a doctor. Their destinies met once more that day in Syria.
“I am Mehmet’s son,” Baydemir declared at the end of the narrative. “But no longer do we have the chance to listen to the first-generation Mehmets…” Meanwhile, Agop decided not to amputate Mehmet’s foot, declaring instead that he could heal it. Mehmet’s foot healed, but when he began to walk again, the injured foot was slightly shorter than the intact one, causing him to limp. Sometimes he’d joke with us, ‘This is Brother Agop’s product. My foot is 1.5 centimeters too short.’”
Baydemir offers far more than romantic anecdotes. Like Demirbaş, he has been subjected to numerous court proceedings and death threats. In February 2004, Amnesty International published a report that noted the Turkish government’s strategy of initiating excessive and overwhelming court proceedings against human rights defenders, and the state’s campaign against Osman Baydemir was the prime example cited.
It is under the tenure of Baydemir and Demirbaş that the Sourp Giragos Armenian Church in Diyarbakir has been restored. Re-opened for worship in November 2012, Sourp Giragos is the largest Armenian church in the Middle East. Its caretaker, Armen Demirciyan, is an Islamized Armenian. He changed his name from a Turkish one back to an Armenian one, but has remained Muslim. We sat drinking tea outside the church as he explained the complexities of excavating one’s identity from the dust of history. “We are still Muslims,” he said, gesturing to a younger Islamized Armenian man sitting beside him. “No, I’m an atheist,” his friend corrected.
Identities here are hybridized and half-hidden. While many Islamized Armenians have recently been emboldened to reveal their heritage, many more remain intimidated by the potential consequences. Demirbaş had reflected on this situation in our conversation with him. “In 2004, that’s when I started my duty as mayor of Sur, there were only two people in Diyarbakir who called themselves Armenian… Right now, there are at least 200 people in Sur who say either that they are Armenian, or that they have an Armenian person in their family. I think that the real number is much higher.”
The real number, like most other things in the region, is uncertain. It is easy to be buoyed by the progress that can be seen in Diyarbakir and in segments of post-Gezi Istanbul. Of course, Istanbul is not Trabzon. For every conclusion one tries to draw about Turkish society today vis-à-vis Armenia, contradictions spring up like heads on a hydra. The temptation from a distance is to see Turkey as a monolith, united in antipathy against Armenia and her people. It is far more difficult to navigate the nuances of Turkish society and politics, but it is in the nuances that our best hopes lie.
It is out of the nuances that our people re-emerge, re-claiming their names. The simplistic dichotomy of “us” versus “them” distorts upon closer inspection. For we are here too; represented in the kind guardian of the Sourp Giragos, in the skilled craftsmen weighing the gold in the Grand Bazaar, and in the man sitting alone on a bench in Sultanahmet Square, waiting for his people to arrive.