Georgian Armenians uneasy with opening of Turkish border: report

Georgian Armenians uneasy with opening of Turkish border: report

PanARMENIAN.Net - A few weeks ago, residents of the Georgian border village of Dadash, the majority of them Armenians, blocked the main highway connecting the country with Turkey. Their aim, they said, was to call attention to rampant lawlessness in the area since the opening of the border post with Turkey in 2015, Eurasianet.org says.

In particular, they assert that their livestock is being stolen, blaming Turks in neighboring towns.

A member of Georgia's parliament, Enzel Mkoyan, visited the village the day after the protest to hear out their grievances. A large majority of area residents is ethnic Armenian.

Residents told him that cameras on the Turkish side showed that the stolen animals had indeed been taken over the border. They also maintained that local authorities have been of little help.

The problem is not new, residents complained. A village nearby, Kartsakhi, staged a similar protest in 2015, threatening to obstruct the construction of a new international railway through the area unless the authorities took action to find stolen property.

Mkoyan promised help. “I called all ministries – the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Foreign Ministry, and also the border police,” he told the crowd. “They are all worried about what happened and they promised to help. The state is behind you.”

The nearby border crossing, between Çıldır in Turkey and Kartsakhi, was reopened in 2015, after being closed for 10 years, amid growing ties between Tbilisi and Ankara. Georgia’s leadership has been cultivating its relationship with Ankara in recent years, in a bid to attract foreign direct investment and further its own NATO ambitions.

The situation around Akhalkalaki is particularly sensitive due to the high density of Armenians living there. After the Russian Empire conquered the area in 1828, many Muslims fled to the Ottoman Empire and the tsarist government resettled the area with Armenians, “seeing them as more reliable than the local Muslims,” according to Timothy Blauvelt, a historian of Georgia at Ilia State University in Tbilisi.

Amid the genocide against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, the south of Georgia took in many people who were fleeing the massacres. “Most of us have family from Kars and Erzerum” in Turkey, Marabyan said. “We became a region of refugees.”

Fear of Turkey has only heightened in recent years. Shortly after the border opened, someone using red paint wrote “we will return” in Turkish on the old Ottoman fortress silently watching over Akhalkalaki, local media reported.

Others complain the open border is accelerating Akhalkalaki’s economic malaise. Turkish citizens regularly visit to buy food, cigarettes and gasoline, all of which are cheaper than in Turkey. Prices are reportedly rising as a result.

There’s also the issue of brothels and prostitution. Several brothels have opened in Akhalkalaki and neighboring Akhaltsikhe, which – locals say – was unheard of before the Turkish border opened.

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