Med

I had Solaris in mind. I don't know what you are. Don't take things too literally.

Thank god for that article. It only demonstrates that the WSJ has less worth than your average toilet paper if that's the level of their senior columnists.

I guess it's incomprehensible to some that girls are capable of handling other things than the TV remote. There is nothing easier than distinguishing men from the women in these forums. It's quite easy really. They are the ones who think in straight-angles, and when they are the slightest bit mentally challenged, they rehash the same old antics to inflate their wounded pride.

In my 28 years I can say that I learned not to ascribe human characteristics to nations. Or certain national stereotypes to all individuals from that country. We can all go downhill from that point. It's quite tempting to do so and a habit I also can't seem to get away.

But then I have a co-citizen in this forum who disowns me because of my origins.

Obviously not.

I am a she by the way. What's so peculiar about that expression? They are all around me, though the country I live isn't known for its enlightened views on women. I live in the land of milk and money.

I remember that incident. It happened about 3-4 years ago. The hotel was called Vartan after the owner's son. The Turkish authorities were insisting that it's Armenian for Victory. They were looking for any excuse to expel them from Van.

The UN has been a plaything of the US since its inception. Just to give an example of a gross injustice: The People's Republic of China was denied entry for nearly 25 years and represented instead by a defunct statelet on Taiwan. One-fifth of the world's population without any voice whatsoever in all international bodies. But then it's time for China to exact revenge on Taiwan and rightly so.

Now that is cruel!

This forum is full of feminazis.

I like your dry humour.

There is a saying in Turkish which sums it up perfectly: Etekleri sivisti. They are in deep shit at the moment, but are not capable to do anything about it.

You have a point there. All Science majors, especially Engineering and Life Science majors are really bad.

The New Armenians of Western Europe BRUSSELS — Sirnak and Silope are nothing more than small dots on the map, but Armenians rehabilitated from these Kurdish villages along the Turkish-Iraqi border are changing the fabric of Armenian communities in at least two European cities. In Brussels and the St. Jerome neighborhood of Marseilles, the so-called Kurdish-Armenians are seen as the “guardians” and “backbone” of the local Armenian Apostolic churches. Their children fill the Armenian language classrooms, often helping their Kurdish-speaking parents communicate with social workers and community leaders. “They have introduced major demographic changes into our communities,” says a second-generation Belgian-Armenian. “The new-comers are in the majority now and it is no secret that they have altered the face of the Armenian community here. These people are unique because of where and how they preserved their faith and Armenian heritage.” But who are the Kurdish-Armenians, where did they come from, how did they settle in Europe and are they integrating into their new homelands. There are no historical records about their past, but through interviews and informal conversations with their elders, and observing them in their own environments, it is obvious that they are as Kurdish as they can be in their manners, language and customs, but nevertheless, fanatic Armenians when it comes to their Christian faith and roots. Most of them, and interestingly enough the older generation, can recite the Lord’s Prayer (Hayr Mer) in Armenian along with sections of the Divine Liturgy (Holy Badarak), but that’s as far as their “knowledge” of their ethnic tongue goes. At home their language of communication is Kurdish, even with their very young children. Apart from church-related gatherings, they socialize only with fellow refugees and the ethnic Kurdish communities of their immediate neighborhoods. Mesrop Afshar is one of the pillars of the Kurdish-Armenian community of Brussels. “I think I am 57,” says Afshar, who looks more like 67, if not a few years older. He remembers growing up in fear in a small town in southeastern Turkey where 40 Armenian families had no choice but to keep a very low profile among a predominantly Kurdish population of 7,000. “I believe we are originally from the city of Van, but I am not sure,” he said through an interpreter, a younger member of the “Sirnak clan” who had the opportunity to study at the boarding schools of the Armenian Patriarchates of Istanbul and Jerusalem. Afshar also remembers with a deep sense of awe his grandfather’s Bible and tales from his grandmother relating to their roots in the Armenian town of Van only 150 kilometers to the north in Turkey. “Fear and a sense of pressure were constant companions. The pressures were great, but our elders constantly reminded us that we were Armenians despite the loss of our language,” Afshar said. “Our elders used to say they survived the first massacre of Armenians at the hands of the Ottomans in the 1890’s by escaping from Van south to Sirnak where 40 families settled,” he said. Up until 1908, there was an Armenian school and church in Sirnak. Sirnak’s Armenians had relatively few problems until the 1915 Genocide when most of the local population and Armenians living in a number of other villages in the area were wiped out. Some were forced to convert to Islam while others escaped across the border to Iraq. Those who made it to Iraq settled in the Kurdish town of Zakhu, where 70 Armenian families reportedly still live. While no Armenian is being taught, the Armenian school and St. Mary’s Church are still open. Zakhu and Sirnak are only 50 kilometers apart, but in a sea of Kurdish population and with the long-standing feud between Turkey and Iraq, communication between the two Armenian minorities has been minimal. “We were kept apart because of a multitude of complex demographic and geo-political reasons. We lived in a cocoon,” a Sirnak elder said. Those who survived the 1915 Genocide and somehow remained in Sirnak under the tutelage of local Kurdish chieftains did not know if there were any other Armenians left on the face of the earth. They were alone, isolated, and surrounded by Kurds in the region of southeastern Turkey which the Kurds call “Kurdistan”. They lost their language, took on Kurdish surnames to “camouflage” their identity and for more than 50 years struggled against total assimilation into the Kurdish landscape. “I was born in Sirnak and the only Armenians I knew were those in and around our small town. We did not know if other Armenians had survived the massacres,” Afshar said during a recent interview conducted partly in fragmented Turkish or through interpreters — other Kurdish-speaking Armenian immigrants who had learned Armenian since leaving Sirnak nearly 15 years ago. “We could not go around trumpeting our heritage. You might find it difficult to understand, but for all practical purposes, we lived quietly as Kurds of Armenian descent by adhering to our Armenian Christian faith. It was this faith that kept us together as Armenians at a time when we had lost everything else. We were cut off from other Armenians. Our language was gone, so was our literature and history, but our faith was intact.” An Assyrian Orthodox priest came to Sirnak from nearby villages under the cloak of darkness to baptize the newborn, sneaking out before daybreak to avoid attracting the attention of the town’s Kurdish population. Weddings and funerals were done in the same way. “Among ourselves, we were Armenians. As our children were baptized, we gave them Armenian names like Sarkis, Tavit, Noubar, Kevork and Saro but out on the streets we were like the rest of the town’s population. We had Kurdish surnames like Euz, Yalik, Odemish, Yajir, Birgin,” Afshar said. One fateful day in 1965, however, the isolation of the small Armenian population of Sirnak was broken. As if by fate — or sheer accident — an Italian missionary working with the region’s Assyrian Christian minority was informed of “these other Christians” in Sirnak. “This papaz (priest) came and talked to us and later went to Istanbul and briefed the late Patriarch Shnork Kaloustian of our existence. “It was not much later that we saw the first Armenian priest since the Genocide. In time, his visits became more and more frequent. Our teenagers were taken to the Armenian Patriarchates first in Istanbul and then Jerusalem for education and finally, thanks to Patriarch Kaloustian, the entire population of Sirnak and Silope began evacuating in 1980 to Belgium, France and a small group to Holland,” Afshar said with an emotional voice. By 1986, the entire population of Sirnak and Silope were out ... saved from imminent annihilation as Armenians. Today, this peculiar “branch” of the greater Armenian family numbers several thousand citizens clustered around Armenian churches in their adopted homelands. Testimony by first generation Armenians in Brussels and Marseilles is overwhelming. “Their faith in the Armenian church is very strong. For them, the church is not folklore or tradition. It is treated as a national treasure and that’s why the presence of these Kurdish Armenians has given a new lease to our religious life,” says one Marseilles resident.

That fellow was created by Turkey and by the atmosphere of that time in general. And not to forget the clumsy but still oppressive Turkish mindset and Kurdish clan structure. The great irony is that Öcalan got a scholarship by the state in the late sixties and studied at the Ankara University S.B.F. (Faculty of Political Sciences). That school is based on the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration the den of French officialdom and is better known as Mülkiye which was founded in Ottoman times. All Turkish diplomats and other senior public servants such as governors and all Interior Ministry officials are from that school. I know that Apo -his nom du guerre- desperately wanted to become a diplomat. I wonder which Ambassadorship post he would have had, had he chosen a different path. When the Student disturbances that swept Europe found its way to Turkey, Ankara University and O.D.T.U (Middle East Technical University, another university in Ankara) were the bastions of the Turkish student movement. Apo briefly flirted with Turkish nationalism and took part in their group meetings. What happened afterwards is a mystery. While most of these leftists students had a "miraculous" Road to Damascus experience and became the giddy liberal elite of today, Apo apparently got stuck somewhere. He never graduated and worked as a municipal worker in Diyarbakir for a while before he disappeared in 1975.

That was quite an interesting article and I have to agree with most of his assessments. Kurdish nationalism is a relatively late phenomenon and because it came so late to the international stage it is a highly irrational and virulent one. You can only talk about a nation if it has a unified language which isn't the case when it comes to the Kurds. We are Turkish Kurds who are Kirmancis, the most numerous but also the most assimilated ones. In fact besides my uncle not one of us speak can speak it. I don't agree with the author that there is unity out of diversity. The Zazas don't consider themselves as Kurds, so it is better to respect their wishes. The desire of a Kurdish nationhood and the geographical area where we live is what keeps this mystique alive. There is no concrete Kurdish national identity but a romantic one which only exists in some peoples dreams like the author said. The Kurds are similar to the Berbers, Tamazights and Romanies. All are nomad dwellers in spirit. There is no likelihood that statehood will ever be realised for these people. It wasn't meant for them. There so much to write on this but that's my take for today.

From the National Geographic, June 1978: I had come here on a spring afternoon in the company of an Armenian priest from Istanbul, a quiet man of middle age. For him it was an act of faith, and a sadness. His people had been gone six decades. We watched Kurdish children play in the dirt road. Other people, he said, taken over many Armenian villages – Kurds here, Turks elsewhere. His face was impassive: Land is to be used, people must live. Leaving the stricken church, he touched hand to heart. Such churches were common in Turkey, he murmured, prey to the elements and vandals, ruins of a civilization. There were two in the nearby city of Malatya. We would soon be going to Malatya. Another sorrow lay deep. I felt it though I am an odar – foreigner, in the Armenian language. The priest gripped my arm. “Armenians are still being driven from remote villages,” he said grimly. “It is the old hatred. Sometimes a young girl is abducted, or a husband killed. They cannot bear to stay on their land after that. They make their way to the patriarchate in Istanbul. We give them shelter and find them homes.” I looked out to the distant Euphrates, not wanting to hear such agony. The river was a glinting ribbon on its timeless run to Mesopotamia. The priest spoke again. “Once Armenians were heavily concentrated in eastern Turkey. Only a few remain. In all the interior, only three churches are working. Malatya has none. But some of my flock are there, and much time has passed since my last visit. Tonight we will meet in a house.” He smiled for the first time. “You shall see the joy of Armenians renewing their faith.” A few hours later, after darkness fell, the city’s few Armenian families filled a small living room to overflowing. The priest and his deacon, richly robbed, led them in prayer and song in the dim glow of a ceiling light, while incense smoldered. It was, I thought, as if a band of early Christians had gathered furtively in a cave to worship. Children were baptized, Communion given. One aged, failing woman, scarf on head, knelt with tears of happiness falling. Earlier she had despaired. I sat with her afterward. “We are sheep without the shepherd,” she said. “At last the shepherd came – and he forgave me.” Forgave? She had broken the pre-Communion fast. Faint with hunger, she had eaten a handful of raisins. In torment she had approached the priest, confessed, and been absolved. I saw no greater joy that night. The old fear was present too. As we left a girl stopped me. “Do not forget us,” she pleaded softly. “We are alone here. We are always afraid that something will happen to cause trouble.”

I doubt that would be the case. Any assertion of Armenian identity will most probably be surpressed especially if they became an Armenian enclave/satellite in a Turkish sea. They only have a chance if they join their brethren in Istanbul. There they will be safe from repercussions and under the protection of the foreign establishment there.

I think religion has more to do with it. The Hamshen Armenians joined the Turkish fold a long time ago. Some of them still might speak Armenian, but they are more or less assimilated and rather hostile if you make any reference to Armenians. My father told me an interesting story about his time when he did his military service in Ordu not far from where the Hamshen Armenians live. There was an Armenian doing his military duty there as well and their squadron came upon a group of villagers who invited them for lunch. When his friend heared the villagers say some words in Armenian, he was amazed and spoke to them in Armenian. The villagers were dumbstruck and asked him which village he came from. When he told him that he was Armenian they said that they are speaking their own language! I don't if they were aware, but maybe thirty years or so there were still some Armenian Shangri-la's lost in some valleys and insurmonutable mountains. Then they are Kurdicized Armenians who still retained their religion. They mostly lived in the Mush area but most of them left for Istanbul and Europe. The best known were the Armenian Varto clan who lived in Varto. They spoke Kurdish and tenaciously clinged to their religion as a reminder of their Armenian heritage. They survived the genocide because they were a respected and most importantly armed clan who would not have themselves pushed around. After the Varto earthquake in 1966 and increasing pressures from other Kurdish clans they moved to Europe. Most of them settled down in Marseilles and Brussels. A few live in Switzerland. They must number around 2000, if I'm not mistaken. I think religion is the main factor for Armenian self-preservation in this regard. Those who stayed in the Armenian Apostolic Church preserved the Armenian ethos and spririt. You can't say the same thing for the Muslim Armenians since they weren't touched, but only a insignificant number of Christian Armenians survived.

Why the incredulity? You are not the owner of this forum ain't ya?

You are the one with interjections. You can keep your advice to yourself smilie face.

You must be giving a self-definition of yourself. Your Brain Is that all you have got? Resorting to insults and cheapshots, because you're not capable enough to even articulate one sentence. There is a saying in your language: "Kızım sana söyledim gelinim sen anla". It seems to fit you.

You have a personality problem girly. Rolling eyes and (dim)witty comments are your trademark then?

You get a rash whenever the word Kurd is mentioned. Strange indeed.