Armenian Women in Istanbul Subject to Racist Attacks
The attacks on elderly Armenian women in Samatya show that racism is alive in Turkey as a latent threat, but also serves as a demonstration that Turkey now has a civil society that immediately stands up against racism, writes Cengiz Çandar.
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.
