A municipality in southeastern Turkey has completed the controversial construction of a ‘People’s Garden’ and banquet hall on an Assyrian and Armenian graveyard, the Duvar news portal reported on Monday.
Ordered by a government-appointed mayor, the Dargecit district municipality, controlled by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), completed the project partnership with Dicle Development Agency (DIKA).
The mayor had ordered the initiation of the construction of a wedding hall and park under the title ‘Saray Neighborhood Recreation Project’, in March 2016. The municipality had targeted the Assyrian and Armenian cemetery as the plot to carry out the construction.
After March 31, 2019, local elections in Turkey, the municipality that was still under control of the AKP, kept the project going, regardless of the warnings of the people who resided in the neighborhood.
The project cost 1.27 million lira.
Neighborhood residents condemned the municipality, stating that the area, named ‘Tibrik’ – where the construction took place – was a cemetery that belonged to the Assyrians and Armenians.
An Assyrian resident, Abdul Mesih Ergun, narrated that he saw a ‘cross’ on the grave cover of a child he cleaned at the construction site. Even then, the municipality declined to stop the process.
“There were also Assyrians and Armenians in Dargeçit. This was a Christian cemetery. The graves have no religion, no language, and no race. Building an entertainment center and park on a cemetery is not morally and conscientiously appropriate,” grieved Ergun.
Turkey’s history with Armenians and Assyrians is contentious, with the country’s former Ottoman rulers accused of the mass killings of as many as 1.5 million Armenians and as many as 300,000 Assyrians.
The figures are disputed, but several countries labeled the deaths of the Armenians as a genocide.
The latest to call for it to be labeled is the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted overwhelmingly on October 29 to formally recognize the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 as genocide.
Although Turkey accepts that many Armenians had died in deportations and fights between 1915-17, it continues to reject the label of ‘genocide’, arguing that around 500,000 Ottoman citizens were killed by Armenian insurgents back then, during the clashes of World War I.
Several historians and Armenians highlight that only 400,000 Armenians were left in Turkey by 1922, whereas their population was around 2 million in 1914.
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The post Turkish municipality builds over Assyrian and Armenian cemetery appeared first on IPA NEWS.
from IPA NEWS https://ipa.news/2019/11/12/turkish-municipality-builds-over-assyrian-and-armenian-cemetery/
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