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Nicola Migliorino* “Kulna Suriyyin”? The Armenian community and the State in contemporary Syria1 Résumé. “Kulna Suriyyin”? La communauté arménienne et l’État en Syrie contemporaine. Par une rapide présentation d'ensemble de l'expérience arménienne en Syrie depuis les années 20 (intégration en masse suite au génocide), cet article démontre que l'apparition de régimes centralisateurs et autoritaires dans les années 50 et 60 a considérablement limité l'autonomie communale des Arméniens, et par là même altéré leur stratégie d’auto-préservation culturelle. L'article suggère cependant de manière critique que depuis la prise de pouvoir du Président Hafiz Al-Asad en 1970, la situation de la communauté arménienne s’est relativement améliorée. Bien que reniant officiellement leur validité, le régime syrien continue d’utiliser l’observance de pratiques ethniques et sub-ethniques comme liens entre les divers composants de la société syrienne. Ce contexte a permis aux Arméniens de créer quelques espaces protégés où la com- munauté peut continuer à préserver – dans certaines limites, et malgré des difficultés d’ordre économique croissantes – sa diversité. Abstract. Through a brief overview of the Armenian experience in Syria since the 1920s (post- genocide mass resettlement), the article shows that the emergence of centralising, authoritarian regimes in the 1950s and 1960s has substantially restricted the communal autonomy of the * Honorary Research Fellow, IAIS, University of Exeter UK. Assistant Professor, Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco. 1. Parts of this article are to appear in a single-authored book on the experience of the Armenian community in Lebanon and Syria (Berghahn Books, 2007). REMMM 115-116, 97-115 98 / Nicola Migliorino Armenians, with the result of damaging their strategy of cultural self-preservation. The article critically suggests, however, that since President Hafiz Al-Asad seized power in 1970, the position of the Armenian community has partially recovered. While officially denying their relevance, the Syrian regime has continued to use ethnic and sub-ethnic allegiances as channels to connect with components of the Syrian society. This context has created for the Armenians some protected spaces where the community could continue to preserve – within certain limits, and among increasing economic difficulties – its diversity. During a press conference held at the end of the Ba‘th party congress of June 2005 official spokeswoman Minister Bouthaina Sha‘aban offered a rare Syrian public statement on the question of ethno-cultural diversity within the country. In what appeared as a reference to the issue of the Kurds, Sha‘aban said that “ethnic diversity is national wealth that should be maintained”. She added, on the other hand, that the recognition of diversity should always take place under the “umbrella of national interest”.2 It might be observed that Sha‘aban’s statement hardly announced a revolution in the Syrian approach towards the question of ethnicity, or that it may well represent just another example of “regime cosmetics”, or political window dressing: the statement, and the Ba‘th party’s discussion of the issue of diversity, came in a phase of particular tension regarding the Syrian-Kurdish dossier, and in the context – more in general – of mounting pressures for political change and liberalisation in the country. Nevertheless, it appears important. It signals that the regime is aware that the question of ethno-cultural diversity cannot be simply swept under the rug, and that efforts aimed at political liberalisation (or simply at the reform of the current political system) are bound to pose the question of how to deal with the country’s plurality of ethno-cultural backgrounds. It also shows that the regime is ready to make references to the question in public, a fact that marks perhaps an interesting change of approach in itself. The question of ethnicity has been in fact one of the most persistent taboos in the Syrian official discourse over the last decades. The regime has granted forms of recognition to the country’s traditionally rich religious diversity, but it has systematically played down the existence of allegiances to distinct communal or ethno-cultural identities and – most crucially – it has severely obstructed their autonomous political mobi- lisation. The question of diversity touches in fact the very core of the Syrian regime’s legitimacy. While in Lebanon the coexistence of ethno-cultural groups was structured on the basis of consociational agreements and constitutional practices, in Syria a similar approach was rapidly demised after 1949. In particular, since the Ba‘ath revolution of 1963 the public ethno-cultural identity of the Syrian society has been top-down shaped by the party’s version of Arab and Syrian nationalism (Valter, 2002). 2. ‘Baath Conference Ends with Mild Recommendations’, The Syria Report, 16 June 2005. “Kulna Suriyyin”? The Armenian community and the State… / 99 The extent to which the regime has been successful in creating an overarching Arab-Syrian identity may be the object of debate. Surely, a gap between public discourse and social reality continues to be clearly perceivable in today’s Syria: Syrians are generally well aware of the diverse ethnic, cultural, and religious make-up of their towns and villages, and of the role that ethnicity plays in Syrian politics, but so they are about the regime-imposed red lines concerning discussion on the issue in public spaces. Both the regime and the society at large appear to be aware of the gap, and often find it convenient to resort to a neutral and still not untrue formula: “kulna suriyyin”, “we are all Syrians”. But what exactly this neutral formula hides is hard to tell. What happens within the diverse communal spheres that exist in contemporary Syria, far from the spotlights pointed at an authoritarian, highly centralised government? If it’s clear that the diverse ethno-cultural identities have not been erased by the project of construction of a national Arab-Syrian identity, in what sense, and in what aspects they were maintained? How did they manage to “survive” and develop, through decades of national ethno-cultural policy? This article wishes to contribute to answering these questions by present- ing aspects of the experience of the Armenian community. The Armenians of Syria, Christian and non-Arab in a prevailingly Arab and Islamic country, can speak their non-Semitic language and write using their own alphabet; they run a number of communal institutions including schools, cultural clubs, welfare and recreational organizations; they maintain links with the Armenian diaspora worldwide and with the Republic of Armenia. By many standards, this community of perhaps 90,000 people3 represents an extreme case of cultural diversity within contemporary Syrian society, one that has seemingly found and cultivated a “diverse” way of being Syrian. A community with a mission: (re)constructing Armenia in Syria The exceptional cultural diversity of the Armenians of Syria must be studied with the background of the circumstances in which the bulk of the contemporary community was formed during the twentieth century. Certainly, the presence of Armenians in Syria is considerably older: the Armenians, whose ancient home- land is located in the mountainous plateau between Eastern Anatolia and the southern side of the Caucasus, were for centuries a component of the human geography of Aleppo and of many other centres of the Levant, where they were often engaged in trade and crafts (A.K. Sanjian: 1965). However, there is no doubt that most Armenians of Syria can trace back their family history to the mass population displacements that began during the genocide of 1915-1916. By 3. Estimate put forward by the Armenian Apostolic Prelacy of Aleppo, November 2003. Author’s interview. REMMM 115-116, 97-115 100 / Nicola Migliorino the end of WWI, and during the eventful years that followed it, large numbers of survivors found themselves resettled as refugees in the new countries formed in the post-Ottoman regional order. Syria took arguably the largest part: by the mid-1920s Aleppo and its environs, the valley of the Euphrates, the Jazeera, but also Hama, Homs, Damascus, and even the far Dera‘a, all hosted an Armenian refugee population (Hovannisian, 1974; Topouzian, 1986).4 From the very first days of their new condition of refugees, the Armenians worked hard to reconstruct and keep alive an Armenian world in exile. In the span of a few years this new Armenian world began to emerge and take shape in the refugee camps or in purpose-built Armenian residential quarters. A new Armenian social fabric made of families, of re-established marital practices, of neighbourhoods and economic networks was gradually formed; a new system of Armenian institutions (including churches, schools, charities, cultural associations, and so on) also appeared, catering for the material and spiritual needs of the community. Ever since, throughout the nine decades after the genocide, the Armenian determination to maintain a distinct communal cultural identity has remained one of the key defining traits of their presence in Syria, almost a communal ‘mission’. The exilic reconstruction of Armenia that began after WWI raises a number of interesting questions that regard, on the one hand, the causes for the rapidity and relative success of the process, and – on the other – the nature and content of the reconstruction itself. Undoubtedly, the speed of the reconstruction was in part determined by sheer need. Stranded in a dramatically different environment – at least in part hostile – where locals even spoke a different language, refugees tended to rely on each other, to look for (or to try and reproduce) the traditional communal procedures for dealing with crisis. As a part of this, for instance, the refugees regarded dispersion as a threat to their security and preferred to remain concentrated (Greenshields, 1981). But also, the determination to reconstruct was stemming from a strong traditional non-assimilatory communal solidarity, in part reinforced by the awareness of the fact that the genocide could have indeed wiped out Armenian culture altogether.

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