Youths from the Turkey Youth Foundation organisation chant slogans during a protest supporting Azerbaijan in front of Azerbaijan's consulate in Istanbul. Experts say Armenians in Turkey feeel under threat. AP
Sept 30, 2020.
Fighting around
Nagorno-Karabakh in the southern Caucasus has renewed pressure on Turkey’s
ethnic Armenian minority as Ankara ramps up support for its long-standing ally
Azerbaijan.
Mostly living in
Istanbul, Armenian Turks number around 60,000, a huge drop from the estimated
1.5 million to 2.4 million who lived across eastern Anatolia before World War
I, during which the population faced massacres and expulsions by Ottoman
forces.
The resumption of
the conflict between the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan has
seen the re-emergence of anti-Armenian sentiment in Turkey, both online and in
traditional media.
Garo Paylan, an
opposition MP of Armenian ancestry, claimed the Turkish government’s bellicose
support for Azerbaijan and anti-Armenian rhetoric was fuelled by “racist
motives” that posed a danger to Armenian Turks.
“Why do you
perceive Azerbaijanis as brothers and Armenians as the enemy when we have
Azerbaijani and Armenian citizens,” he said in comments directed at Vice
President Fuat Oktay.
“Are you aware
that your hate speech towards the Armenian people is making our Armenian
citizens a target?”
The words of
politicians and newspaper columnists were reflected in a demonstration outside
the Istanbul headquarters of the Armenian Patriarchate on Monday when a convoy
of cars decked in Azerbaijani and Turkish flags passed the building sounding
their horns.
In the southern
city of Sanliurfa, fire engines processed around the city similarly bedecked in
flags.
Mr Paylan called
the Istanbul demonstration a “provocation” and demanded the government address
“hate crimes”.
Even before fresh
fighting resumed at the weekend around Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave seized from
Azerbaijan by Armenia-backed secessionists in the early 1990s, a report
identified Armenians as the group most targeted by hate speech in the Turkish
media.
The Hrant Dink
Foundation – named after a Turkish-Armenian journalist murdered in 2007 –
reported on Sept 18 that 803 articles targeted Armenians last year, with many
written around the day that marks the 1915 Armenian genocide, a term that
itself draws fierce reaction in Turkey.
Yetvart Danzikyan,
editor-in-chief of the dual Turkish-Armenian language Agos newspaper, said the
conflict had roused nationalist feelings in Turkey that were raising concerns
in the Armenian community.
“Whether it’s
Karabakh or a decision taken by the US legislature on [recognising] the
Armenian genocide, unfortunately, Turkish-Armenians feel that the spotlight is
suddenly turning on them, and of course it creates anxiety among them,” he
said.
Turkey’s affinity
with Azerbaijan stems from their shared Turkic ethnicity, language and culture,
prompting the expression that they are “one nation, two states”, although their
citizens largely follow different strands of Islam.
They have deep
economic ties, particularly regarding energy with much of Turkey’s natural gas
coming from its neighbour while Baku’s oil and gas reserves cross Turkey to
reach overseas markets.
In addition,
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilhan
Aliyev have a close personal relationship.
The renewal of
hostilities on Sunday has seen some 100 people killed, including civilians, in
the heaviest clashes in the stop-start conflict since 2016. Both sides blame
the other for reigniting the war.
The conflict
threatens to draw in Turkey, which has denied sending air power and Syrian
mercenaries to support Azerbaijan, while Russia supports Armenia, although
Moscow also has good ties with Baku.
Turkish Foreign
Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Wednesday reiterated Mr Erdogan’s comments that
Turkey would “stand by” its ally if it chose to solve the dispute “on the
ground”.
Such remarks have
been amplified in Turkey’s pro-government media with a leading commentator in
the Yeni Safak newspaper calling for Azerbaijan to launch an all-out war.
The media has also
sought to align Armenia with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), which has
fought a 36-year insurgency against Turkey and is designated a terrorist group
by the US and the EU as well as Ankara.
The state-run
Anadolu news agency on Monday reported claims by the Azerbaijani ambassador to
Ankara that PKK fighters had been recruited to fight alongside Armenian forces,
as well as members of an Armenian terror group that targeted Turkish diplomats
and airlines in the 1970s and 1980s but has not been active for more than two
decades.
The claims were
described as “absolute nonsense” by Armenian President Armen Sarkissian.
On Wednesday,
Turkish media outlets carried reports of Armenians and “PKK sympathisers”
holding an “anti-Turkey” rally in Paris.
Rober Koptas, who
runs Aras Publishing in Istanbul, compared the current climate to previous
anti-Armenian pogroms.
“Armenians
experience this fear very vividly,” he said. “It’s a community that’s already
cowering and is closed. When this rhetoric is expressed on social media or in
other forms, these fears that already exist in Armenians are exaggerated and
life gets a little more difficult.”