In an Armenian Activist, Turkey’s Purge Victims Find a Friend, a Braveheart and a Passionate Defender

Turkey’s rapidly shifting political complexion upends century-old public perceptions among and about communities. An Armenian activist emerges as a hero for Turkey’s forgotten purge victims after her heroic battle for their cause.

Activist Natali Avazyan.

As political authorities unleashed the demons of a repressive regime in the aftermath of an ill-fated coup attempt in 2016, to defend purge victims was to risk one’s professional job, security and even freedom.

Only a few people came out to defy the threat of imprisonment and social ostracization when they, with all available means at their disposal, displayed unyielding support for people who were dismissed by blanket decrees during the emergency rule and who were condemned into a protracted social death.

Natali Avazyan, with her large following on Twitter, was and is one of them. A Turkish citizen of Armenian origin, Avazyan did what many Turks or Kurds failed to do — she rose to the occasion to unflinchingly support the cause of purge victims during the most repressive episodes of the post-coup clampdown, which, even three years after the coup and one year after the end of the emergency rule, shows no signs of winding down.

She heroically embraced the cause of KHK people, a term particularly attributed to sacked public workers. As an emerging customary practice, good deeds and good people never go unpunished in contemporary Turkey. Being a Samaritan to extend your hand to a group of purged people is strictly prohibited by unwritten laws and customary practices inherently embedded in the government’s opaque management style that came to characterize the abiding arbitrariness in legal and political affairs in the post-coup era.

Avazyan, the mother of more than 700 imprisoned babies, the friend of 50,000 or so unjustly jailed government critics and the defender of all kinds of oppressed, was detained by police on Tuesday. Earlier in the day, she informed the public on Twitter about the police raid and search at home.