Turkish Christians took the first step toward embittered Armenians declaring: ‘We came to share your pain’, as they stood before TV cameras on 11 April at the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan.
‘We have come here to apologise for what our ancestors did, to ask for your forgiveness,’ two spokesmen for the Turks went on to say. Shocked viewers across Armenia watching the Azdarar TV news channel could hardly believe their eyes and ears. Turks, claiming to be Christian? And laying wreaths at the nation’s genocide memorial? How could Turks, of all people, come to Armenia to honour the memory of more than a million Armenian Christians who had been slaughtered 100 years ago by their own forefathers, the Ottoman Turks?
Holding hands
Gathered around the monument’s eternal flame, the more than 20 Turkish citizens spoke out simply and repeatedly: ‘We plead with you, if you can, to forgive us and the crimes of our forefathers.’
Significantly, the Turks were joined by a number of local Armenian Christians who formed a huge circle, holding hands together around the memorial as they prayed aloud in Turkish and Armenian for their nations and peoples.
The Turkish Christians’ visit to Armenia was the latest step in an unprecedented reconciliation initiative between Turkish Protestants and Armenian evangelicals during the past year. Organised informally by several Turkish pastors from Muslim backgrounds, the gatherings first began with diaspora Armenians in California and New Jersey, followed by an Istanbul weekend between some 90 Turkish and Armenian participants.
For the past 100 years, Turks and Armenians have remained outspoken enemies. Their historic enmity, rooted in the Armenian genocide of 1915, is both political and ethnic, but also religious. Early in the fourth century, the Kingdom of Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion. But the rulers of the crumbling Ottoman Empire which carried out the genocide were Muslim Turks.
In today’s Turkey and Armenia, strong nationalist elements in the current political climate are so prevalent that the Turkish and Armenian Christians who spoke about their reconciliation gatherings requested strict anonymity for their own protection.
An uprooted people
An estimated 2 million Armenians had been living in central Anatolia and the eastern regions of what is now modern-day Turkey for two millennia. But after the Ottoman regime-ordered massacres and forced deportations began in April 1915, within two years up to 1.5 million had died. The survivors had either been forcibly converted to Islam or managed to escape into the Syrian desert.
A Kurdish pastor stressed that the solution to the enduring pain was a spiritual one, which had to be built around honest, personal relationships. ‘We went as individuals. We didn’t go in the name of our churches. To meet face to face, in person, to hear from these Armenian brothers and sisters and pray with them was healing for both sides. The seeds of reconciliation have been planted, to grow and spread.’
‘This has all developed personally, through the Holy Spirit’s orchestration in our hearts’, one Turkish pastor said. ‘Politics can’t resolve this’, another said. ‘The United Nations has tried, so has the United States, to restore relations between Armenians and Turks. But they couldn’t reconcile us.’
‘Politicians are stuck in the quagmire of pride, politics and getting votes’, another Turkish church leader stated. But recently, he said: ‘Church leaders of both peoples are seeing that we must take the steps of following Jesus, in humility and forgiveness, to see reconciliation and overcome this century of pain.’ ‘Until now’, another confessed, ‘we forgave with our mouths, but not with our hearts.’
Facing the past
For the first time, many Armenian Christians said they now realised how painful it is for the 5,000 ethnic Turks and Kurds who have converted to Christianity in Turkey in the past few decades to face the truth about the Armenian genocide.
Like other Turkish citizens, they were angered by the revenge murders perpetrated by Armenian assassins, who killed some 40 Turkish diplomats and officials during the 1970s and 1980s, allegedly to avenge the Armenian genocide.
But this violence only stiffened Turkey’s resolve to continue to deny the Armenian genocide, deepening the society’s resentment against Armenians as a people.
Asked what the reconciliation effort really accomplished, one Turkish pastor said simply: ‘We want our fellow citizens, Turks and Armenians alike, to ask us: “What kind of God can bring two enemies together like this?” ’
