IN SEARCH FOR ISLAMISED ARMENIAN ORPHANS
By Hakob Tsulikian
AZG Armenian Daily #159
07/09/2005
According to a BBC message published in Armenian Mirror Spectator
weekly, a Turkish documentary filmmaker Berke Bas left for his
birthplace of Ordu at the Black Sea to look for Armenian orphans to
shoot a documentary about them. Speaking to her relatives there, she
found out that her parents once adopted at least 5 Armenian children.
No one has so far taken up the story of Armenian children spared by
the Armenian Genocide and converted into Islam. Discussions of the
Armenian Genocide issue incited by Turkey’s furious efforts to join
the European Union were apparently the cause for removing the taboo
from these issues.
“I’m sure it will be difficult. People are unwilling to respond to my
initiative and ask why I dig the past”, Bas confessed, noting that many
Turkish families refuse that they once had Armenians in their families.
“But we know that there were many such families to the extent that the
Ottoman authorities issued a secret order to punish all those saving
Armenian children by hiding them in their families”, Prof. Selim
Deringil of Bosphorus University of Istanbul assures.
“Those Islamised Christians fear to speak about their past. If a Turk
says that his parents were Armenians, he will be labeled “gyavur”
(unfaithful) and classified as an outcast”, editor of Akos newspaper
Hrant Dink said during the talk with Bas.