ASIA/TURKEY - Controversy over a Docu-film dedicated to the "Islamized" Armenians after the 1915 massacres

Tuesday, 25 June 2019 middle east   oriental churches   armenian genocide   islam  

Altan Sancar (Agos)

Istanbul (Agenzia Fides) - The documentary "The hidden Cross", produced by the two journalists Altan Sancar and Serhat Temel, which traces the life of the "Islamized" Armenians after the 1915 massacres in the Diyarbakir region, was screened in public for the first time on June 16, at the Diyarbakir Congress Center, belonging to the City Council.
After the screening, the documentary became the target of a series of critical articles published in the Turkish Islamist daily Yeni Akit, which began to denigrate the film by presenting it as an anti-Turkish operation inspired by pro-Western circles also connected to Kurdish groups close to the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party, defined as "terrorist organization" by both Turkey and the US).
"The pro-PKK circles" wrote Yeni Akit about the documentary "support the Western theses and blame Turkey for committing the Armenian genocide. These circles, which want to tell the exodus of 1915 as a massacre of Armenians, help and facilitate those abroad who are trying to put Turkey in a corner. The director Altan Sancar, who introduces himself as the nephew of an Armenian, supports the genocide thesis in his film "The Hidden Cross". Sancar himself announced, on his Twitter account, the intention to: initiate legal proceedings against the daily newspaper Yeni Akit, indicating the Islamist newspaper as the person responsible for any future attacks on him or his colleague Serhat Temel.
In recent years, studies and research that refer to the phenomenon are multiplying – which are still poorly defined, at least from a quantitative point of view - of the so-called "hidden Armenians" or "crypto-Armenians", the descendants of Armenians who converted at the time of the persecutions, to which must be added the Armenian children adopted at that time by Turkish or Kurdish families, after the death of their natural parents, and who discovered their roots only later. (GV) (Agenzia Fides, 25/6/2019)


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