Our minorities - I

Irrespective of whether one describes as "fascist pressure" or "peer pressure," it is a fact as well that members of those minorities who left Turkey and settled somewhere else did not decide to do so voluntarily, but felt compelled because of the not so favorable conditions created by the advance of some radical and exclusive political tendencies in this land.

Irrespective whether it was a "genocide" as Armenians wish to describe it or a hostile atmosphere produced by a civil war, Russian aggression as well as imperial designs of some Western powers in which Turks, Kurds and Arabs confronted with the local Armenian population and consequently immense human suffering was lived, it is a fact that compared to the closing years of the 19th century, we almost have no sizeable Armenian presence in today’s Turkey.

Besides the population exchange application in line with the Lausanne Treaty in the founding period of the Turkish Republic, the sad and shameful September 6-7, 1955 events in Istanbul forced the majority of the remaining Greek community of Istanbul flee to Greece. Were not they "owners" of this land, as much as we ethnic Turks are? Yet, those sons of this land were compelled to abandon their homeland and settle in Greece because the Istanbul of 1955 was no longer a safe place for them to stay on.

The Syriacs suffered as well a similar but perhaps a less traumatic but long enduring process that eventually resulted with many members of the community abandoning their homeland and settling somewhere else because of increased threats to their security. Don’t we have Syriac villages with no or very few Syriacs today in Mardin and elsewhere in that geography of our country? Did they leave their homeland voluntarily? Did not the political climate and the insensitivity of the state to their plight produced this end result? Even today, if the remaining dwindled Syriac community of Turkey can get almost no support from the Turkish authorities but receive an across the parliament support from all groups in the Bundestag against the alleged occupation by some villagers the forested land of the Deyrelumur, or the Mor Gabriel Monastery in Mardin?

Recently, together with my wife, Aydan, we were on a tour of the Scandinavian countries. We started our trip from Copenhagen and after a nine day tour was to end it in Copenhagen as well. However, rather than Copenhagen, we preferred to conclude our tour in Malmo, a beautiful city in Sweden very close to the Copenhagen airport. One reason we ended up there was many friends we have there, another was the beautiful city itself with its many parks, pedestrian areas and the shopping paradise it offers.

Syriac girl at a Malmo shop

At one of the Malmo shops while discussing in Turkish hopelessly to convince my wife that she did not need to buy a new bag, hearing us talking in Turkish a young sales assistant lady, with shining eyes approached us and in an accented Turkish asked "Are you from Turkey?" Knowing that a large Turkish-Kurdish group was living in the city, I was not surprised. After some discussion, I learned that she was daughter of a Turkish Syriac family who migrated there long ago. Soon her father joined us together with his many questions about Turkey, present socio-political conditions and hopes for a return one day. He was homesick and the pain of being compelled to live away from homeland was so apparent in his face. He was not there because he wanted a "better life" but rather because he was scared for the security of his family.

While enjoying a cup of coffee and fuming our cigarettes on the bench across his shop he explained with bitter examples the incredible pressures from the Turkish, Kurdish, Arab "neighbors" as well as the local Turkish officials, the prejudices, misconceptions, the dark and ugly peer pressure on them. How much was real, how much was product of the scared perceptions of the Syriac community he belonged to was of course irrelevant as the end product was there: They were uprooted from their homeland and made refugees in a foreign land which they have been trying to make their second homeland.

I remembered similar feelings in discussions in Athens with Greeks who were compelled to settle there in the aftermath of the 1955 events and with second or third generation Anatolian Armenians in Yerevan.

Why did we lose so many precious gems?