The prime minister looks on a city’s works, and despairs
Turkey and Armenia
Jan 13th 2011 | ANKARA | from PRINT EDITION
STATUES in Kars are not safe when Recep Tayyip Erdogan is around. When Turkey’s prime minister visited the city last year, the local mayor, who belongs to Mr Erdogan’s mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party, sought to avoid his ire by ordering the removal of a public fountain featuring bare-breasted nymphs. Last week, during another trip to Kars, which lies about 45km west of the border with Armenia, Mr Erdogan called for the demolition of a local monument designed to promote reconciliation between Turks and Armenians. The statue, of two 30-metre-tall concrete figures reaching out to each other, was, he said, a “freak”.
Mr Erdogan insisted that his distaste was purely aesthetic. Yet some suspect him of pandering to nationalist sentiment in the run-up to elections in June. Many Turks see the statue as an admission of Armenia’s charge that the slaughter of up to 1.5m Armenians by Ottoman forces in 1915 amounted to genocide. In 2009 the then mayor of Kars, Naif Alibeyoglu, who had commissioned the statue, was forced out under pressure from Mr Erdogan and the city’s 20% ethnic Azeri population (egged on by Azerbaijan, which disliked Turkey’s efforts to make peace with Armenia).
Mr Erdogan has backed away from a set of protocols signed with Armenia in 2009 that foresaw the establishment of diplomatic relations and the reopening of borders. These were sealed in 1993 after Armenia’s short war with Azerbaijan over the mainly Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Mr Erdogan insists that the protocols can only be ratified if Armenia withdraws from seven regions it occupies around the enclave. Armenia is threatening to scrap the deal altogether.
But there is also a whiff of Islamic orthodoxy in the air. Mr Erdogan’s tirade against the Kars statue included references to Hasan Harakani, an ancient Muslim scholar buried nearby. “They erected a strange thing next to his mausoleum… it is unthinkable,” he complained. Many Muslim scholars consider statues to be idolatrous, and other AK officials have not disguised their aversion to them. Ankara’s mayor, Melih Gokcek, has systematically dismantled statues erected by his pro-secular predecessors. “I spit on this kind of art,” he once said.
Mehmet Aksoy, the designer of the Kars monument, says that the government risks being seen as “the Taliban” if it presses its demands. But Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has backed his boss, arguing that Mr Aksoy’s work fails to blend into the Seljuk, Ottoman and Russian character of the city. He might have included Kars’ Armenian legacy, but that is being erased. A long-abandoned tenth-century Armenian church recently reopened—as a mosque.
from PRINT EDITION | Europe
via Turkey and Armenia: Two vast and ugly blocks of stone | The Economist.