‘Erdogan, Assassin,’ shout French Armenians on genocide anniversary amid security concerns

Father Gilbert Leonian was fast asleep when they came to burn the church. It was 6am on a Sunday morning in the Paris suburb of Alfortville and he would not be holding a service at the Armenian Protestant church for another few hours. But his wife heard a noise – the sound of a rubbish bin filled with petrol being hurled against the front door – and woke him. By the time he’d opened the window of their first-floor room, directly above the church, it was already lit up by the flames.

“I thought the church had caught fire, that the stairs were on fire, and that we were going to die,” he said.

Luckily for Father Leonian, the flames only blackened the front door of the church. But it was the second attack on his church in a week, coming days after the 2017 visit from the pastor of the Armenian Evangelical Church in Baghdad, and forms part of a growing number of attacks against the Armenian community in France.

“I feel less and less safe in France,” said Veskan,* at a rally in Paris on Saturday to mark the 106^th anniversary of the 1915-1918 genocide, in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire.

France formally recognised the World War One massacres as a genocide in 2001. In February 2019 French President Emmanuel Macron declared that April 24 – the day in 1915 that the killings of Armenians began – would be a “national day of commemoration”.  

More than a century after the massacres, the crowd gathered by a statue of the Armenian composer Komitas in Paris’s affluent eighth arrondissement (district) shouted, "The genocide continues", as they prepared to march along the Seine to the Turkish embassy.

“Erdogan, Assassin,” they chanted amid indignation over the Turkish president’s vehement refusal to recognise the Ottoman Empire's genocide of the Armenians.

Three generations of families, young parents with prams and teenage girls wrapped in the Armenian flag milled around in the bright sunshine ahead of the march. Some carried photos of Armenian resistance heroes; others held banners depicting Erdogan as a devil or a murderer. “Hitlerdogan,” read a banner.

Last year's conflict over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan was also the cause of grief among protesters.

Anger at Azerbaijan's president Ilham Aliyev has been growing after Armenia suffered a crushing defeat and lost vast swathes of territory. “Aliyev, Erdogan get out of Artsaskh,” read one banner, using another name to refer to the disputed territory.

'Erdogan gives them confidence'

But amid the despair of Armenia’s defeat, and anguish over Azerbaijan’s treatment of up to 300 Armenian political prisoners, there was anxiety over the violence stirred up by Turkish ultra-nationalist militias at home in France.

“It’s terrifying,” said Sabrina Davidian, 39, who carried a banner saying ‘Turkey, get out of Armenia’, “that Turkey’s tentacles can reach as far as France. It’s as if Turkey’s hate campaign against the Armenians never ended."

Many at the Paris rally were also troubled by attacks last year in Décines, a suburb of the southeastern city of Lyon.

On October 28, as the Nagorno-Karabakh war raged, hundreds of supporters of the Turkish far-right Grey Wolves militia took to the streets of Décines, calling “Death to Armenians".

“Where are the Armenians?” the attackers cried as they marched through the town, wielding iron bars and national flags and shouting pro-Erdogan slogans as they smashed up Armenian shops.  

“It’s as if we were in 1930s Germany,” said Veskan’s friend, Sevag,* a wiry, animated third generation Armenian, who like many at the rally asked not to give his full name.

“They would never have dared to do that 10 years ago,” he said in the run-up to the commemoration.  

“Erdogan gives them confidence, he finances them, the Turkish embassy here is his backyard,” said Sevag, adding that the Armenian community had begun beefing up security at schools and associations, and started using bodyguards. 

Sevag was outraged that the ringleader of the attacks in Décines, Ahmet Cetin, 23, who publicly incited violence against Armenians on social media, was given just a six-month suspended sentence and a €1,000 fine.  

“Imagine a 16-year-old hearing his words, seeing there’s an Armenian school and thinking, ‘Well I’ll do the job’,” said Sevag. 

Tigrane Yegavian, a journalist and researcher at the CF2R (French Intelligence Research Centre) think tank, warned that the flames of an ancient conflict are being instrumentalised in France.

“What’s happening is very dangerous,” he said. “If nothing is done in France – we're practically headed for a civil war,” he said, adding that the Armenians have never had problems integrating anywhere, only in Azerbaijan and Turkey. 

“I have nothing against the Turks – nothing,” said the writer Ian Manook, 71, whose latest novel was inspired by his grandmother, who was sold to the Turks as a slave when she was 10.

“We share the same food, the same music … nearly the same dances. I blame the Turkish state … and Erdogan is playing with fire.”

France banned the Grey Wolves in November 2020 but no-one at the rally believed they had melted away.

“They’re still out there,” said Pierre*, who wore a T-shirt in support of Artsakh, adding that he was followed in December by a car with the Grey Wolves insignia, and that the driver made the Grey Wolves salutation in the rearview mirror.

But amid concerns that France was not doing enough to prevent attacks against Armenians, there was hope that US President Joe Biden’s recognition of the genocide would lead to broader international support for Armenia.

Macron was the only Western leader to acknowledge that Azerbaijan started the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and accused Turkey of sending 2,000 Syrian mercenaries to participate in the fighting, a move he said “which changes the situation”.  

“We know that intellectually France is behind us. But France has got a financial relationship with Turkey,” said Sevag, adding that France has got to make its mind up. “Either it’s the country of human rights or it’s the country of money.” But he stopped short of taking a side, facing criticism and protests at home from the Armenian diaspora – which numbers between 400,000-600,000 people – that he didn’t do more to support Yerevan.

Turnout at the rally, held amid tight security, was lower than last year because of the Covid-19 restrictions in place – France is still officially under its third national lockdown to stem the spread of the virus – but there was no denying the resolve of those gathered.  

“The Armenians are not an aggressive people,” said Sevag. “But if we’re going to be massacred even in France, we’ve got to do something.” 

*Protesters who asked not to give their surnames