Apa alasan wanita Armenia yg udah nenek2 diserang?
Yg pertama, tentunya krn mereka adalah korban yg paling gampang
diserang, krn mereka cuma wanita yg sdh tua dan lemah. Yg kedua, ini
merupakan terorisme thd orang2 Armenia yg Kristen dlm rangka berjihad
di jalan auloh.
Si nabi keparat itu pernah nyerang cewek di rumahnya dgn nyuruh anak
buahnya ngebantai si cewek. Jadi apa yg dilakukan thd nenek2 Armenia
ini ga lbh dr sunnah nabi.
Armenian Women in Istanbul Subject to Racist Attacks
By: Cengiz Çandar for Al-Monitor Turkey Pulse. Posted on January 30.
Read in Turkish
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is fond of reiterating a
line by 13th century Turkish Sufi poet Yunus Emre: “I love the Created
because of the Creator.” While Yunus Emre’s immortal words express the
divine love for God, the central idea of Sufism, Erdogan uses them to
describe what a great sense of tolerance his government, his party and
himself have for “the Other,” especially ethnic and non-Muslim
minorities.
In other words, when he repeats this line — at least once in many
speeches he makes every week — Erdogan aims to demonstrate that Muslim
tolerance has a philosophical background and, thus, underscores the
soundness of his ideology.
But no matter what reason the Turkish premier has for repeating Yunus
Emre’s words, it seems that people who care nothing for them are
living in Turkey, and moreover in its most cosmopolitan city,
Istanbul. In the first month of 2013, one of Istanbul’s ancient
neighborhoods, Samatya, became synonymous with attacks on elderly
Armenian women. With only two years to go before the 100th anniversary
of the great catastrophe that befell Armenians in 1915, the mysterious
attacks, directed at poor defenseless Armenians, have revived the
century-old trauma and sparked fears that racist nationalism in Turkey
may be rearing its ugly head again.
The first omens of the January attacks in Samatya had in fact come the
previous month. A lone 87-year-old Armenian woman was severely
battered in her home in early December and lost an eye as a result of
the assault. On Dec. 28, another Armenian woman, 84-year-old Maritsa
Kucuk, was stabbed to death.
As all mysterious incidents, those attacks on elderly, lone and poor
Armenian women are marked by a pattern of intriguing symbolism. First,
why Samatya?
Samatya is not the only Istanbul neighborhood with a sizeable Armenian
population. Armenians reside in significant numbers also in Bakirkoy
and Yesilkoy, two districts near the Ataturk Airport, as well as in
Pangalti and Kurtulus, in the vicinity of the city center of
Istanbul’s European section. But Samatya has some peculiarities that
distinguish it from the rest.
Until its conquest by the Ottomans in 1453, Istanbul — then capital of
the Eastern Roman Empire and called Constantinople — did not have an
Armenian population. In 1461, Mehmed the Conqueror brought Armenians
to Istanbul from Anatolian towns, mostly from Bursa, and designated
Samatya, on the coast of the Marmara Sea, as an Armenian settlement.
The Armenian Patriarchate was built nearby and became a gravity point
around which the Armenian community expanded.
In other words, Samatya is the oldest Istanbul settlement of the
Armenian community, whose numbers have shrunk from about two million
across Turkey in the early 20th century to just 60,000 people uprooted
from their hometowns and concentrated exclusively in Istanbul. Another
feature that distinguishes Samatya from other Armenian-populated
neighborhoods is the fact that it is home to most of the poorest
members of the community, especially elderly women.
Because of this profile, robbery and theft appear to be the least
probable motives behind the incidents in Samatya. Moreover, all lone
Armenian women who were attacked there in December and January have
another thing in common. They all lived in the vicinity of the church
and were regular churchgoers. Most assaults happened while the victims
were returning home from church.
Those details emerge as a proof that the assailants closely followed
the women, knew their daily routines and deliberately selected them as
targets. Additionally, the fact that the abduction attempt of an
Armenian woman on Jan. 6 was perpetrated by three people wearing ski
masks suggests the involvement of an organized gang and weakens the
credibility of initial official statements describing the attacks in
Samatya as “individual” crimes.
Such explanations have evoked the statements the authorities made
after the assassination of Hrant Dink, the founder and editor of the
bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, who was gunned down on another
January day in 2007 outside the offices of his newspaper. With Turkey
still in shock and Dink’s blood still fresh on the pavement, the
Istanbul police chief had described the murder as an “individual
crime.”
Since then, the murder case of Hrant Dink, one of Turkey’s most
respected democratic thinkers in recent years, has become a major
watershed for the democracy struggle in the country. Tens of thousands
of people in Istanbul stage a march each year on Jan. 19, the
anniversary of the assassination, and hold commemorations outside the
Agos office to make sure the 2007 murder is not forgotten.
In fact, it was Dink’s Agos weekly that brought the Samatya attacks to
public attention, splashing them on the front-page of its two latest
issues. After 83-year-old Sultan Aykar was assaulted on Jan. 22,
liberal-democratic dailies such as Radikal and Taraf followed suit and
the Samatya attacks began to receive coverage in the Turkish media.
Most significantly, Milliyet, a leading mainstream daily, began to
interview neighborhood residents and featured them prominently on its
pages, which in turn, took the issue to the screens of television
channels.
Even though the attacks against elderly Armenian women in Samatya come
as a sign that racist nationalism is attempting to rear its head in
Turkey again, they at the same time demonstrate that Turkey is no
longer the old Turkey.
Thousands of people have mobilized for the Armenian residents of
Samatya and taken to the streets. Two crowded marches were held
separately last weekend, with the demonstrators carrying telling
banners. “Hands off my Armenian neighbor,” one banner read, while
another said: “Won’t let you touch my brother.” Yet another declared,
“We are together with the Armenian people” and the most meaningful of
all was reminiscent of the Spanish civil war: “No passage to racism!”
All those developments appear to indicate that Turkey has passed a
crucial turning point with the funeral of Hrant Dink. His murder had
raised concern of a new peak in rising nationalism in Turkey, but life
in Istanbul ground to a halt the day Dink was laid to rest as 200,000
people joined the funeral procession, carrying banners like “We are
all Armenians” and “We are all Hrant.” This spirit is now revitalized
each time an Armenian is assaulted, offering a much stronger assurance
to non-Muslim minorities, especially Armenians, than Erdogan’s words
of “loving the Created because of the Creator.”
The Samatya attacks have shown that racism is alive in Turkey as a
latent threat. But they have also served as a demonstration that
Turkey now has a civil society that immediately stands up against
racism.
For all those watching the developments with concern, this could be a solace.
Cengiz Çandar is a contributing writer for Al-Monitor's Turkey Pulse.
A journalist since 1976, he is the author of seven books in the
Turkish language, mainly on Middle East issues, including the
best-seller Mesopotamia Express: A Journey in History. He contributed
to two Century Foundation publications: Turkey's Transformation and
American Policy and Allies in Need: Turkey and the U.S. He is
currently senior columnist of Radikal in Istanbul. Çandar was a
special foreign policy advisor to Turkish President Turgut Özal from
1991 to 1993.
Read more:
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/01/istanbul-racist-attacks-armenian-women-samatya.html#ixzz2JZe2bxcK
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