A Turk Traces Her Armenian Roots

[Tongue]

A Turk Traces Her Armenian Roots

By Amberin Zaman, Special to The Times


ISTANBUL, Turkey — Human rights lawyer Fethiye Cetin grew up believing she was like any other Muslim Turk.

So when the 55-year-old discovered nearly three decades ago that her maternal grandmother was an ethnic Armenian Christian who had survived a mass killing by Turkish forces during World War I, her "whole life was turned upside down," she said in a recent interview.

As a 9-year-old caught up in the violence, her grandmother was rescued by a Turkish officer after witnessing countless horrors: men from her village killed and tossed into a river, families torn apart.

"May those days be gone and never return," she was to later tell her granddaughter.

After her grandmother died in 2000, Cetin, who spent much of her career defending members of Turkey's ethnic and religious minorities, decided to reveal her secrets in a book called "My Grandmother."

Published in November and already into its fifth edition, the book coincides with growing calls from within the European Union for Turkey to acknowledge that a genocide occurred as a condition for joining the organization.

Debate on the Armenian issue, counted among the most sensitive topics in this strongly nationalistic land, has been deadlocked in sterile wrangles over statistics and terminology.

Armenians say 1.5 million of their people died from 1915 to 1923 in a genocide perpetrated by the Turkish government. Millions of Armenians worldwide are set to mark the 90th anniversary of the start of the violence April 24.

Turkey has consistently denied that a genocide occurred, saying that several hundred thousand Armenians died of malnutrition, exposure and disease during forced deportations to Syria after they collaborated with invading Russian forces in eastern Turkey.

Using language that is at once wrenchingly emotional and determinedly neutral, Cetin's work is significant because "it introduces a human dimension to the debate," said Hrant Dink, chief editor of the Agos weekly, which serves Turkey's 60,000-strong Armenian community. "She has melted the ice."

Cetin says the debate is degrading. "The Armenians' suffering has been reduced to a single word and to squabbles over figures," she said during a reading last month before a small group of Armenians in Istanbul.

"The reality — that every single one of these numbers represented a child, a woman, a man; in short, innocent human beings — has been overlooked," Cetin said as members of the audience silently wept.

Cetin said recent Turkish legislation aimed at easing the country's entry into the EU has stimulated freer discussion on a broad range of topics that were taboo. "My aim is not to provoke but to reconcile" Turks and Armenians, she said.

Last week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan renewed calls for a joint commission of Turkish and Armenian scholars to research the events of 1915. He said the findings would disprove claims of genocide — an indication, said a Western diplomat who requested anonymity, that "they are not willing to consider any other outcome."

The Armenian government has rejected the initiative as a ploy, and critics allege that Turkey's archives have been purged of incriminating documents.

Still, it is the first time Turkish leaders have invited international scrutiny of the deaths. In Istanbul, a group of Armenians is also preparing to launch the country's first Armenian-language radio station.

This month, Agos editor Dink and another Armenian intellectual briefed the parliament in Ankara on Turkish-Armenian relations, the first session of its kind.

"We advised them as a first step to open Turkey's borders with Armenia," Dink said.

Turkey sealed its borders with the landlocked former Soviet republic in 1993 after Armenia occupied parts of Turkic-speaking Azerbaijan in a bitter war over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

Western diplomats here agreed that opening trade with its impoverished neighbor would burnish Turkey's image both in Europe and the United States, where the influential Armenian diaspora is pressuring Congress to adopt a resolution recognizing the genocide.

Analysts here acknowledge, nonetheless, that any steps toward restoring ties with Armenia remain hugely risky for Erdogan amid a tide of resurgent nationalism.

Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's best-known contemporary novelist, should know. He became a target of death threats after telling a Swiss newspaper that "no one dares say that a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey," his publisher says. An official in the western town of Sutluce went as far as to order residents to destroy all of Pamuk's books. Fellow intellectuals accused him of angling for a Nobel Prize.

Cetin acknowledges that she's surprised she hasn't gotten a similar reaction. Rather, she said, she has been flooded with letters of support and phone calls from readers with similar hidden family stories. "It's extraordinary how many people have Armenian blood — and even more extraordinary that they would admit it in a country where the word 'Armenian' is commonly used as a slur," she said.

Cetin says she is gathering their names for her next book. Its title? "The Grandchildren," she said.


latimes.com

[Gavur]

A Wound That Wouldn’t Heal

[March 20, 2006]

“My family is very large and we all have different views. Some of us accept that we have Armenian roots, and others don’t,” said an Armenian-Kurdish woman who had come here from Turkey on a two-day visit to participate in a discussion of gender issues. Leyla (not her real name) had a grandfather named Hakob. As she explained, “I always knew that my father’s father was Armenian. We all knew, but we didn’t talk about it. Everyone knew, and a lot of people used to say to my grandfather that he was Armenian by origin, but we didn’t talk about it in our family. My uncles are fanatic Muslims, there are religious officials - imams- among them, who don’t want to talk about it.”

Hakob, who was born in the town of Ergani in the Diarbekir region, was eleven at the time of the Genocide. “All of his brothers, his whole family, were murdered. He and his mother were the only ones who escaped, and they hid in a Kurdish village, because they knew the tribal leaders there. They hid all day, and only came out at night. After two months of hiding out in the Kurdish village, his mother died, and my grandfather remained with the Kurdish tribal leaders. One of them took him into his home and then later on married him to his daughter, my grandmother,” Leyla recounted, adding that her grandfather Hakob’s name was changed to Muharem. She never knew his family name.

“My grandfather would talk a lot about the Genocide. He didn’t tell us his personal story, but he talked about similar events. He told us that in his town there was a hill, and on the other side was a natural waterhole. They would bring Armenians in a caravan and then throw them into the waterhole. Once, the soldiers leading the caravan got tired and stopped next to a spring. And they killed the whole caravan right there. They dug a hole and buried everyone. They say that for three days the spring ran blood. We know that during the Genocide Kurds and Turks would take Armenian children, and that mothers would willingly throw their children from bridges and canyons so that Turks wouldn’t get them.”


None of Hakob’s relatives survived. “My grandfather had no other relatives, but there were two Armenian girls in our village, and he had a warm relationship with them. There was another man; we called him Uncle even though he wasn’t related to our grandfather. His village was far away, but he came to visit often. The two of them had taken the same Turkish family name. Now, after their deaths, their children have kept up relations.”

Hakob didn’t teach Armenian to any of the nine children he had with his Kurdish wife. He couldn’t, of course, live as an Armenian so he acted like a Kurd. He didn’t talk with anyone in Armenian, but sometimes when we asked him something he would answer in Armenian. I never saw him praying, but he wasn’t faithful to Islam, either. My grandfather and grandmother weren’t religious people. My grandmother wouldn’t even do the daily prayer.”


His children have only the deed of ownership of Hakob’s house in Ergani, which his sons have hidden from the grandchildren. “Once when I was little some people came to our house, and my father and grandfather went with them to the town so that Grandfather could see his land. Grandfather wanted to use his deed to take back the land. I don’t know how much land it was, but when my grandfather tried to take it, my uncles argued with him and wouldn’t let him.”

Ergani is an old Armenian town, built on a hill. Hakob’s granddaughter tells us that the ruins are still there; there is a church, and houses. “The Turks are constantly looking for treasure there, Armenian gold, so they blow things up and turn everything into ruins. There is a sacred shrine to the prophet Mohammed and a small garden where we often used to have picnics. My grandfather told us that the shrine had been built on our land.”


“I see myself as a Kurd, but in the last two years I’ve felt some changes inside. In 2004, the famous historian Fehriye Çetin published My Grandmother, which tells the story of her grandmother. When she grew old, she confessed to Çetin that she wasn’t a Muslim, but an Armenian Christian. I read the book and met the author. After talking with her, I decided to look at my grandfather’s deed of ownership, but my father wouldn’t let me. When I try to talk about it with my father he won’t answer my questions, but I talk about it with my sisters and brothers. I visited my grandfather’s birthplace with Çetin; we met with people who were grandchildren of Armenians. We went to Ulfa and saw that the number of people of Armenian origin wasn’t small. We collected stories, information, and photos. Kurds and Turks settled in Armenian areas and they mixed with the Armenians. Most don’t know about their Armenian roots and they say that they’re either Turks or Kurds. I am not ashamed of my Armenian origins, but there is a problem expressing it to other people in my family. My husband is a Kurd, and he and my children know about my origins.”

Fehriye Çetin is working on a new book about Turks and Kurds with Armenian roots, which will include the story of Hakob and his granddaughter Leyla.

“I wanted to come to Armenia, and when I found out about this opportunity, I was very excited. From the moment I arrived, I haven’t felt like a stranger. It’s like I’m home. I see people on the streets and they look like me. Do my eyes look Armenian?” Leyla asked us.

“We don’t know, we haven’t seen Kurdish eyes,” we joked.

“I’ve been having emotional experiences for two days,” confessed the part-Armenian part-Kurdish woman. “I went to the Genocide museum and the memorial and it really affected me. I felt depressed. The pictures I saw in the museum weren’t news to me, since we imagined what it was like from my grandfather’s stories, but they still affected me.”

“We grew up respecting Armenians. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a soldier during the Genocide and he used to tell us that they [the soldiers] hadn’t wanted to do it, they felt bad about it, too,” Leyla justified her ancestors, adding, “Hakob liked my grandfather on my mother’s side a lot.”

Hakob died in 2000, at the age of 96. He never got his land in Ergani back.

“Grandfather was buried according to Muslim tradition. My uncles were at his deathbed, and I don’t know if he expressed a last wish. But he always said that it was a wound that wouldn’t heal, not even in 100 years.”

Liana Sayadyan