Washington Post
Beliefs Endure as Believers Move On
Turkish Nationalism Reflected in Southern Town’s Growing Homogeneity
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 5, 2005; Page A14
MIDYAT, Turkey
On the day the genies show up, seemingly everyone in this historic
town in southeastern Turkey heads for the door.
“On Black Wednesdays, you have to go to picnics and stay outdoors,”
said Summeyye Saltik, 15, on the playground of the local primary
school where attendance dipped, as it always does, on the second
Wednesday in March. “If you’re indoors, genies will visit your house.”
PHOTO
Children in Midyat raise hands to indicate if they believe genies
visit local houses. The belief is one of the last cultural remnants
of the Yazidis, most of whom have left the town.
“Because the houses used to belong to them and they come to claim
them,” added a classmate, Bushra Gokce.
“They can be anybody,” explained a third girl, Serap Ceylan. “They
can be Muslims or anybody who lived here before.”
That makes the possibilities almost endless in Midyat, which over the
centuries has been inhabited or visited by people of a vast assortment
of faiths, including the Yazidis, the obscure sect that introduced
the town to the springtime escapes of Black Wednesday.
But while the Yazidi wariness of house-haunting genies has spread to
many other groups in the area, the number of Yazidis has dwindled
considerably. Of about 5,600 Yazidis who lived in the area in the
1980s, only 15 are left.
Midyat, a town that predates Christianity and Islam, once reflected
the deep diversity of a region where faiths overlapped and conquering
armies advanced and retreated. Scholars say its very name may be a
mix of Farsi, Arabic and Assyrian that translates as “mirror.”
But what this town of 57,000 reflects these days is a growing
sameness. The Armenian Christians who built many of the old city’s
medieval stone buildings disappeared in the early 20th-century conflict
that Armenians and many historians have called genocide. The Assyrian
Christians who long accounted for the majority in Midyat have been
reduced to just 100 families.
As for the Yazidis: “They were not causing any problems, but it was
still better that they left,” said Nazete Koksal, an ethnic Kurd
seated on a sofa under the arched stone roof of a house her husband,
an Arab, bought from a Yazidi family.
“They’re dirty,” Koksal said. “Their religion is dirty. They pray to
the devil. We pray to God.”
Still, she expressed some nostalgia for the days before so many groups
fled her city. “Before they left, we used to be friends,” she said.
In some ways, present-day Midyat reflects the founding principles of
modern Turkey. Rising from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic
sultanate that tolerated religious minorities as second-class citizens,
the Turkish republic was founded on a fierce assertion of national
identity. The concept of Turkishness rooted the new nation-state firmly
in the hills of the Anatolian peninsula once known as Asia Minor. But
it also denied the notion of any other identity existing there.
More than 80 years after the republic was formed, anti-minority
feelings can run close to the surface. Last year, an ultranationalist
literally tore to pieces a human rights report on minorities before
television cameras. In eastern Turkey this month, unemployed youths
were hired to portray Armenians in a civic skit depicting a conflict
with Turks that was more even-handed than history suggests; municipal
workers reportedly had refused to take part.
Here in the southeast, official policy meant people who spoke Kurdish
and called themselves Kurds were, officially, “Mountain Turks.” Their
eventual insistence on maintaining their ethnic Kurdish identity
helped spark a separatist war that killed 30,000 people, most of them
Kurdish civilians, during the 1990s.
The conflict took a toll on other minorities as well.
“We tried to be out of it,” said Isa Dogdu, an Assyrian standing
in the doorway of a church that dates from the 7th century. As a
religious minority, however, the Assyrians felt pressure both from
the Kurdish guerrillas and from Turkish Hezbollah, radical Islamic
guerrillas whom the government secretly armed as a proxy force. When
government officials showed up at the church, said Dogdu, a religious
instructor, they asked why young people in its annex were not being
taught in Turkish. Assyrians, who in the 1st century formed the
world’s first Christian community, still learn a version of Aramaic,
the language Jesus spoke.
Persecution, Dogdu said, “was not done very openly, but sometimes it
was deliberate. For instance, there were some murders of prominent
persons. If you murder a prominent person, other people have fear.”
Today, about 500 Assyrians live in Midyat. Sunday services rotate
among the four churches that remain in the medieval splendor of the old
city. In recent months, small groups of Assyrians have begun returning
from abroad to build homes, mostly in isolated villages. But Dogdu’s
weary smile suggested the downward trend would not be easily reversed.
“When you have a majority population and it goes down to less than
1 percent, what do you think?” he said.
The exodus of the Yazidis was more stark. By official count, Turkey
had 22,632 members of the sect in 1985. Fifteen years later, their
numbers had dropped to 423. In the area around Midyat, the exodus
was even more dramatic.
“In the last 20 years, everybody moved,” said Mostafa Demir, 22, whose
family left Midyat in 1990. “Nobody was really telling them to leave,
but the relations were not that warm.”
Centuries ago, Muslims slaughtered Yazidis by the thousands as
devil worshipers. Yazidis, whose faith draws on several sources,
including Zoroastrianism, believe the fallen angel who became Satan
later repented, returning to grace after extinguishing the fires
of Hell. Yazidis envision him as a peacock, a main symbol of their
religion.
In modern Midyat, Demir said, their persecution was more apt to appear
as mockery. Demir recalled merchants at the town market drawing a
circle in the dirt around Yazidi customers. Yazidis, whose theology
does not allow them to break a circle, would stand there indefinitely.
But things grew worse when the Kurdish rebellion erupted. Many
Yazidis, who claim to speak the purest Kurdish, identified with the
rebels. That made them targets of Turkish troops and Hezbollah, who
“pushed the Yazidis out of here to get their lands,” said Fars Bakir,
an elderly Yazidi who lives in a mud-daubed house in a hamlet called
Cilesiz, or “Without Suffering,” in a lush valley bordering Syria.
As a condition for joining the European Union, Turkey recently passed
new legal protections for minorities. But Bakir, who fled to Germany
for several years, said he and his wife came home primarily because
of homesickness, not faith in new laws.
Turkey differs with the European Union on the definition of
minority, insisting on its definition of nationhood grounded in
Turkishness. Baskin Oran, a University of Ankara political scientist
active in minority human rights, discounted the new laws as “a
revolution from above. It’s more or less easy to change laws. But it
is much more difficult to change the mentality of the people.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress