Nine-year-old Ninua Saliba played hide-and-seek outside a seventh century church as village men drank tea, chatted in a language similar to Jesus' and waited for a Christmas visit by the local Turkish governor.
The politician's stop and the calm in the ancient village would have been inconceivable just a few years ago when the tiny Christian community in southeastern Turkey was caught in the middle of fighting between Turkish troops and Kurdish rebels.
PHOTO: AP
But a sharp decrease in fighting and Turkey's focus on democracy and human rights as it seeks to join the EU, are boosting hopes that one of the world's oldest Christian communities can rebuild itself in its spiritual heartland.
Turkey, which faces European pressure to return displaced villagers to the region and to grant more rights to minorities, is encouraging thousands of Assyrians to come back, and dozens have returned, Assyrians say.
Governor Osman Gunes' visit to Assyrian towns and monasteries underlined the new spirit.
"If there hadn't been peace, we wouldn't have returned,"said Ninua's father, Erden, who left with his family for Switzerland more than 20 years ago and was back for his first Christmas in Haberli.
"We're here to live in solidarity with the other villagers," he said, as his wife Sara offered cookies to visitors sitting by a Christmas tree in their house.
Saliba said he easily secured Turkish permission to return and build a three-story house of stone that towers over the village. But he said Haberli suffers frequent power cuts and lacks a public sewage system.
Unlike officially recognized religious minorities such as Jews and Greek Orthodox Christians, schools aren't allowed to teach Syriac, a modern version of the Aramaic spoken in Jesus' time. So there's no suitable school for Saliba's three Swiss-raised children who speak Syriac, but not Turkish.
An EU report in October said "very few" Assyrians have returned due to harassment by pro-government Kurdish militiamen and paramilitary police.
The Assyrians encapsulate the complexities of a country that is mostly Muslim, professes strict secularism and shrinks from any recognition of ethnic pluralism. A sign at the entrance to Haberli proclaims that ``The motherland is a whole and cannot be divided -- a tacit warning to Kurdish rebels and anyone else seeking separate status.
The Assyrians have mostly sought to stay neutral between the government and the Kurdish rebels, but neutrality has sometimes made their loyalties suspect on both sides. That, and a lack of jobs, have pushed many of them to emigrate, reducing the number of Christians in the region to an estimated 4,000 at most. Saliba said that 30 years ago, around 75 families lived in Haberli. About 20 families remain.
Human rights groups say soldiers forcibly emptied thousands of villages throughout the region to deprive the Kurdish rebels of local support. Fikri Turan returned from Germany to the village of Sarikoy to find his house occupied by pro-government Kurdish militiamen who refused to leave until the governor personally intervened.
Turan spent Dec. 25 at the fourth century Mor Gabriel monastery, one of the world's oldest, where visitors from Europe attended early morning services and ate traditional Christmas meals of boiled meat with onion.
For Assyrians, the clashes of the 1980s and 1990s were the most recent in a series of challenges to a community that traces itself to the pre-Christian Assyrian Empire. According to tradition, Assyrians began adopting Christianity in the first century AD, 600 years before the region was conquered by Arab Muslims.
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of parliament and former British economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule. The Bangladeshi Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near Dhaka, the capital. Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed
APPORTIONING BLAME: The US president said that there were ‘millions of people dead because of three people’ — Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskiy US President Donald Trump on Monday resumed his attempts to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for Russia’s invasion, falsely accusing him of responsibility for “millions” of deaths. Trump — who had a blazing public row in the Oval Office with Zelenskiy six weeks ago — said the Ukranian shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered the February 2022 invasion, and then-US president Joe Biden. Trump told reporters that there were “millions of people dead because of three people.” “Let’s say Putin No. 1, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, No. 2, and
RSS