GASPAR AGHAJANIAN: LINGUIST, MAGISTRATE AND MIDDLE EAST EXPERT

The Times (London)
September 20, 2007, Thursday

Gaspar Aghajanian, linguist, magistrate and Middle East expert,
was born on April 16, 1911. He died on August 31, 2007, aged 96

Middle East expert and magistrate whose turbulent, polyglot life
typified the dislocations of the Armenian diaspora

Gaspar Aghajanian was an archetypal member of the Armenian diaspora.

His life was twice disrupted by political violence -in 1948 in
Palestine and 1974 in Cyprus – but each time, with the courageous
support of his wife Astrid, herself a survivor of the disasters which
befell the Armenians in Turkey in 1915, he created a new career in
a new country.

Aghajanian was born in 1911 in Jerusalem, where his family had been
part of the Armenian community for generations. His most thrilling
memory as a boy was hearing the rumble of heavy guns outside the city
as the Turks, Gaspar’s conscripted father among them, were pushed
north by Allenby’s army in 1917. Many of Jerusalem’s ethnically mixed
inhabitants were ambivalent in their allegiance to their Ottoman
rulers, and British rule, under the mandate of the League of Nations,
was to start with generally preferred.

Aghajanian attended Armenian, Italian and English schools, and also
spoke French, Arabic and Hebrew fluently, as well as a smattering of
Greek, Turkish and Aramaic.

In 1928 he began a legal career as a clerk in the Jerusalem law courts
and steadily worked his way up, using evening classes at the government
law school to obtain his diploma. He was appointed notary public
of Haifa in 1938 and in 1945 chief clerk of the Jerusalem District
Court. In the war he joined the Palestine Volunteer Defence Force,
trained with a heavy AA battery and was in action against enemy bombers
attacking from Vichy- controlled Syria. He was again promoted in 1947
to be magistrate in charge of the courts at Tiberias and Safad. His
ability to speak and listen to all concerned in their own languages
proved a huge asset in a society which became increasingly polarised
as the British Mandate drew to a close.

There was the occasional lighter moment -on one occasion a complainant
swore that a donkey in the caravan of a Syrian merchant was his and
that it had been stolen the previous year. "Who can tell one ass
from another?" said the merchant dismissively. "Stand back," said
Aghajanian, "and give the beast space."

All waited, breathless. The animal meandered about, as though getting
its bearings, and then trotted straight to the litigant’s stable and
into its old stall. Case proved.

In March 1948 fighting broke out between Jews and Arabs in Tiberias,
and Aghajanian sent his wife and their two daughters to safety in
Transjordan, as it then was. He had married Astrid Topalian in 1942,
and for her this was a second flight. Her family had lived in the
Armenian area of Turkey, and when the First World War started the
Turkish Government had feared that sympathy for the advancing Russians,
their fellow Christians, posed a security risk, and that the Armenians
must be moved. The policy was arguably defensible, but the manner
of its execution was barbarous. All the menfolk in Astrid’s family
were shot, and the women and children of her village were herded on
the long trek across the mountains in appalling conditions. When the
remnants of her group reached what is now Syria they were in a state
of collapse, dying by the day. In desperation Astrid’s mother threw
herself on a pile of dead bodies, her baby beneath her. The guards gave
a few desultory pokes with their bayonets and left. Mother and child
were succoured by wandering Beduin, and eventually reached Jerusalem.

Aghajanian struggled to keep the administration of justice alive in
the dying days of the mandate, but a month after his wife’s departure
he was told by the beleaguered British Police that his safety could
no longer be guaranteed, and he joined his family across the Jordan,
where for a time he acted as legal representative for the British
Council. While in Amman he was summoned for an interview with
King Abdullah, who offered him a judgeship in Transjordan, and it
says much for his reputation that when he later met a Jewish legal
acquaintance in Nicosia he was assured the same offer would hold good
if he returned to the new state of Israel. Wise in his generation,
and foreseeing a troubled Middle East, he declined both suggestions.

He was by now a British citizen, and considered making a legal career
in London, but the offer of a job with the American radio-monitoring
station in Cyprus was a bird in the hand which he dared not let go.

He was rapidly promoted, first to be Middle East unit chief and then
to be in charge of quality control for the whole station.

The Aghajanians made a delightful new home in Kyrenia, which they
named Jerusalem Cottage. Gaspar retired in 1971, and they intended
to end their days there.

But in 1974 Turkey, alarmed by the strength of the Enosis movement
for union with Greece, invaded the north of the island to protect
the Turkish minority -an action for which Britain, as one of the
guarantors of the political status quo in Cyprus, bore a grievous
responsibility. Despite holding British passports, the Aghajanians,
mindful of 1915, fled south for their lives, leaving all their
possessions, convinced that death awaited them if they remained. They
were flown to Britain by the RAF and once again started from scratch.

Again, Gaspar’s gift of languages and deep understanding of Middle East
politics proved the key. In 1975 he joined the Ministry of Defence
and to his surprise found that in fact he was working within MI5. He
would never talk about this work, but he was so valued that he did
not fully retire until 1983, by when he was well over 70.

He devoted part of his retirement to a fruitless attempt to
obtain compensation for his losses in Cyprus, but Turkey refused to
acknowledge his British citizenship because of his Armenian name, and
he found the Foreign Office reluctant to make forceful representations
on his behalf to a Nato ally.

He and Astrid were eventually able to set up house again, in Sussex,
and their home became a place of pilgrimage for many friends and
relations, who by then regarded Gaspar as the family patriarch. He
was a man of absolute integrity and no small wisdom.

He is survived by his wife and their two daughters.