Turkey’s Armenian community gets back children’s camp

Turkey’s Armenian community gets back children’s camp –

Members of Turkey’s Armenian community pray together in an Armenian church in Istanbul, Dec. 28, 2011.  (photo by REUTERS/Murad Sezer)

By Barın Kayaoğlu

Al Monitor

Turkey’s Armenian community finally won back Camp Armen last week. The Gedikpasa Armenian Protestant Church in Istanbul now owns the deed to the former orphanage and children’s camp, offering a ray of hope to Turkish Armenians and other non-Muslim minorities. The episode, however, illustrates the many obstacles that non-Muslim foundations in Turkey must overcome to re-acquire their lost properties or buy new ones.

At one level, the story is the sort that deserves a “life is beautiful” tagline, a tale that restores one’s faith in humanity. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Tuzla children’s camp on Istanbul’s Asian side served Turkey’s Armenian community both as an orphanage and summer camp, bringing together some 1,500 children from all over the country with the aim to strengthen their cultural and communal ties.

In a beautiful and romantic twist, Camp Armen was also where Turkey’s legendary public intellectual and social activist Hrant Dink (who was killed in 2007 by an ultranationalist for advocating peace and reconciliation between Turks and Armenians) spent some of his formative years and met his wife, Rakel. Not surprisingly, many focused on the sentimental aspects of the camp’s return. While the Turkish Armenian newspaper Agos wrote that “Camp Armenbelongs to the children once again,” Garo Paylan, an Armenian member of parliament with the Peoples’ Democratic Party, said the return of the camp “would please Hrant Dink’s spirit.”

In fact, Camp Armen had stood in sad solitude for too long. In the early 1980s, the Turkish state shut down the camp and turned the land over to the former owner (a Turkish Muslim) who had sold it to the Armenian foundation in 1962. Citing wrong-headed legal decisions going as far back as 1936, which curtailed non-Muslim foundations’ ability to buy, purchase and maintain property — houses of worship, buildings, schools and land — the state also claimed that Camp Armen helped to train Armenian militants who assassinated Turkish diplomats at the time. Although the owner of the land was open to selling back to Armenians, he was legally barred from doing so until the late 2000s, when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government changed the laws that restored non-Muslim foundations’ property rights.

Yet, even legal changes were not enough. Continuing uncertainty and a sclerotic regulatory and bureaucratic environment meant that Fatih Ulusoy, the latest owner, sat on extremely valuable land that he could not sell to those who wanted it most. When Ulusoy finally decided to tear down the old buildings and open the area for development, the Gedikpasa Armenian Church took its case to court. Thanks to a direct intervention from Prime Minister and AKP Chairman Ahmet Davutoglu, it took only 175 days between the attempted demolition of the camp and its return to the Armenian community.

Baskin Oran gives credit to the AKP government for its role in Camp Armen’s return to its rightful owners. He told Al-Monitor, “I applaud the AKP’s endeavors on this front and for treating non-Muslims better than secular Kemalists.” Oran, however, also expressed suspicion about the ruling party’s motives. He said, “The AKP only wants to create an image of tolerance and trivialize its mistreatment of other groups. [Camp] Armen was returned for the purpose of propaganda only four days before the [Nov. 1] elections and to get Armenians to vote for the AKP.” Oran, professor emeritus at Ankara University’s prestigious faculty of political science and a prolific writer on minority rights in Turkey, argued that “non-Muslims are so fed up with their lot that they feel grateful to anyone who gives them anything.”

Indeed, the curious case of Camp Armen underscores a fundamental problem facing Turkey’s non-Muslim citizens. In the aftermath of the 1936 precedent and subsequent court decisions, the Turkish state took over many non-Muslim foundations’ properties. Because hundreds of thousands of Turkish citizens of Armenian, Greek and Jewish origins have emigrated in the past half-century, there simply are not enough people to pursue cases like that of Camp Armen.

The problem is much bigger than properties. A recent report by the Freedom of Belief Initiative, a civil society group in Turkey that focuses on improving freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief, draws clear connections between non-Muslim foundations’ property rights and their communities’ access to houses of worship. The report argues that the new laws that AKP-majority parliaments passed in 2008 and 2011 have not helped non-Muslim minorities from a legal standpoint. Mine Yildirim, who heads the Freedom of Belief Initiative, maintains that “a more comprehensive law must be passed to facilitate the return of properties that could not be returned [under the previous law the AKP passed in 2008-11].”

Freedom of religion brings us to questions of citizenship in a Muslim-majority country that still pretends to be secular. Aykan Erdemir, nonresident fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington and a former member of the Turkish parliament, told Al-Monitor, “The slow pace and the arbitrariness of the restitution of minority properties is one of the key challenges to institutionalizing equal citizenship in Turkey.”

He said, “So far, the restitution process has worked haphazardly, often dependent on the discretion and ‘good will’ of public officials.”

“Each act of restitution is a positive step forward,” Erdemir said, adding, “The arbitrariness of the Turkish state’s restitution policy ends up reinforcing discrimination and exclusion of Turkey’s non-Muslim citizens. Turkey’s minorities do not demand compassion or tolerance from the government — they simply want their rights, just like Muslim citizens of the country.”

Yildirim agrees. In fact, she points out how Alevi and Sunni Muslim groups also had their houses of worship and congregation (tekke ve zaviye) confiscated in the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, Yildirim argues, improving legal conditions for non-Muslim foundations would also help Turkey’s Muslim majority.