As night fell on the bucolic northern Indian hamlet of Mahaban, Gopi Chand Yadav gathered blankets and a flashlight to spend the night sitting on a wooden platform in his field. His task: to use bamboo sticks to ward off stray cattle from intruding and eating a maturing mustard crop.

Like Yadav, many thousands of farmers stay awake to guard their farms over a cold winter or face losing their crops to the cattle – a double whammy for growers already reeling from a plunge in crop prices.

While stray cows ambling around towns and villages have always been a feature of life in rural India, farmers say their number has increased sharply in recent years to the extent that they have become a menace, and blame the policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.

Protecting cows – considered sacred to Hindus – was one of the measures meant to shore up support in the heavily populated, Hindi-speaking belt across northern India that has been a heartland of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP). Instead, it is creating a backlash, even among Hindu farmers.

“We already had enough problems and now the government has created one more,” said octogenarian farmer Baburao Saini from Kakripur village, about 85km from the capital, New Delhi.

“For the first time, we’ve been forced to stay in the fields to protect our crops”.

More than 50 farmers Reuters spoke to in Mahaban and nine other villages in Uttar Pradesh state said they would think twice before voting for Modi’s BJP in the next general election, due by May.

The cattle issue and low farm prices are major reasons behind their disillusionment with a party that most say they voted for in the last election in 2014.

Modi swept Uttar Pradesh at that poll, winning 73 of 80 seats in India’s most populous state, with rural voters swayed by a promise of higher crop prices, and as Hindu farmers supported the BJP amid tensions with the minority Muslim community.

As Hindus, we treat cows as sacred but these unwarranted measures have upended the economics of farming

Deepak Chaudhary, farmer

Cow protection

Modi is trying hard to claw back support among India’s 263 million farmers and their many millions of dependents after the BJP lost power in December to the opposition Congress in three big northern states where agriculture is a mainstay.

Farmers keep cows to produce milk, cheese and butter, but to harm or kill a cow, especially for food, is considered taboo by most Hindus.

Most states in India have long outlawed cow slaughter, but after coming to power in 2014 the BJP ratcheted up its distaste for trade in cattle, launching a crackdown on unlicensed abattoirs in Uttar Pradesh and on cattle smuggling nationwide.

At the same time, a wave of attacks on trucks carrying cattle by Hindu vigilante groups has scared away traders, most of whom are Muslims, bringing to a halt the trade even in bullocks, which are not considered sacred. Rising sales of tractors and increasing mechanisation mean that more animals are redundant for use in farming.

The farmers Reuters spoke to said they revered cows as most devout Hindus would, but a sudden halt in the trade of cattle had hit the rural economy. In their view, the government should come up with more cow shelters and let cattle traders deal in other animals without fear of attack.

“The government has only enforced the laws by closing down unlicensed abattoirs and cracking down on cattle smuggling,” said BJP spokesman Gopal Krishna Agarwal, who added that he runs a cow shelter of 1,300 cattle. “We’re not trying to hurt either any community or the rural economy”.

Crop trampled

Fodder prices have gone up by more than a third in the past year and most farmers cannot afford to keep cows after they stop producing milk, said farmer Rajesh Pahalwan as he smoked a hookah pipe in the village of Manoharpur. Six farmers sitting with him mainly nodded in agreement.

In India, the world’s biggest milk producer, about 3 million cattle become unproductive every year. In the past, Hindu farmers would sell unproductive cows to Muslim traders and about 2 million of these would end up smuggled to Bangladesh for meat and leather. But that trade has now been throttled by the government crackdown, trade and industry officials say.

That has led to many unproductive cattle being abandoned, farmers said, but governments – both state and federal – have failed to construct new shelters, leaving rising numbers of stray cattle that are feeding on crops, or even garbage.

“The government clearly did not think of alternatives before putting these curbs in place,” said farmer Deepak Chaudhary, who grows wheat on the outskirts of Mathura, considered to be the birthplace of the Hindu God Krishna.

“As Hindus, we treat cows as sacred but these unwarranted measures have upended the economics of farming”.

The government did provide some relief in its interim budget last week as it announced a cow welfare programme costing 7.50 billion rupees ($104.6m) in the year beginning April.

But there are hardly any “adequate measures to rehabilitate” cattle, said Fauzan Alvi, vice-president of the All India Meat and Livestock Exporters Association.

‘Investment went down the drain’

“Forget about cows, we cannot sell even a single animal to even our relatives thanks to cow vigilante groups which are aided and abetted by the BJP,” said the wheat farmer Chaudhary.

Modi has in the past condemned violence by cow vigilantes, but critics and opposition politicians say some of the right-wing Hindu groups involved have links to his party, a charge the BJP denies.

Nearly 85 percent of India’s farmers own less than 2 hectares (5 acres) of land, so even a relatively small area damaged has a big impact on their livelihood.

Only two weeks ago, some cattle ravaged an acre of wheat grown by farmer Chandra Pal in the Mathura district of Uttar Pradesh.

“My investment went down the drain after some stray cattle trampled and ate up the crop,” he said.

Many farmers in Uttar Pradesh are now using barbed wire to stop animals from entering their farms, but that is expensive.

“We have been at the receiving end of anti-farmer policies of the government and the problem of stray cattle is just another blow to us,” said farmer Amar Chand, from Maholi village who voted for Modi in 2014.

“Unlike the previous general election, farmers are not solidly behind Modi, who’s on shaky ground this time round.”

Yerevan, Armenia – Vahe Hovhannesian, a 31-year-old jeweller and Syrian refugee, sits by his work table in a studio in Yerevan. 

An empty coffee cup, full ashtray, pliers, monocular glass loupe and weighing scale are scattered in front of him, along with a small pile of gold chains. His fingertips are stained black and he is sizing an engagement ring. In the corner of his cramped studio, a small portrait of Jesus hangs on the wall.

Outside, merchants barter and sell rings, bracelets, watches and other jewellery under the glare of fluorescent lights. It is a typical morning at World of Gold, a market in the Armenian capital.

Hovhannesian is one of tens of thousands of Christian Armenians who have returned in the wake of Syria’s civil war. Two years ago, he was living in Aleppo, dodging snipers on his way to work.

“Every day leaving my apartment, I knew that I could not turn right,” Hovhannesian said.

“I should always go to the left, otherwise I might be killed. There was a small territory in our district I had to cross to go to my workplace. I knew that there was a sniper and I was running so that he could not target me. Every day I had to run.”

Vahe Hovhannesian is one of more than 20,000 ethnic Armenians who returned to their homeland after fleeing Syria’s civil war [Dorian Geiger/Al Jazeera]

In early 2016, before Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s offensive on Aleppo, a rocket exploded in front of Hovhannesian’s house.

“The rocket fell right on our building,” he said. “It was useless to run or try to hide.”

The explosion nearly levelled their home.

“At that moment I realised that I had to leave Syria.”

Hovhannesian hired a taxi that drove him, his ageing parents, and his cat, Vito, to the Lebanese border. From there, they hitchhiked to Beirut, where they boarded a flight to Yerevan.

“We could take only our personal belongings and clothes. We left everything there, the apartment was fully furnished. We left the key to our neighbour.”

Ethnically Armenian, Hovhannesian is one of at least 22,000 Syrian-Armenian refugees who have travelled to the country since Syria’s conflict erupted in 2011.

Hovhannesian’s family’s journey, or return, has been in the making for over a century, beginning with the 1915 mass killings allegedly by Ottoman forces, which Armenians describe as genocide. Thousands were deported at the time.

For Christian Armenians, Aleppo became a sanctuary.

“Armenians have lived in Syria for centuries,” said Adam Pomiecinski, a professor of ethnology and anthropology at Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz University.

“A large diaspora was created after the Armenian genocide. The memory of this trauma is an important part of [their] cultural heritage.”

Markets like Yerevan’s World of Gold employ hundreds of Syrian Armenian jewellers [Dorian Geiger/Al Jazeera]

Armen Minassian of the Idea Foundation, an NGO that provides humanitarian assistance to refugees in Yerevan, said: “We know first-hand what it is to be a refugee.”

Syria’s acceptance of a Christian Armenian diaspora a century ago, Minassian said, is one of the driving factors behind contemporary Armenia’s willingness to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian-Armenians. 

The Armenian government grants citizenship and employment rights to Syrian refugees who can prove their Armenian lineage. 

Hovhannesian’s parents were naturalised after they presented documents showing they were members of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

“It was only natural to welcome refugees to Armenia from Syria, [and] not only to those of Armenian descent,” he explained.

Hovhannesian lives with his brother Zareh and parents, Andranik Hovhannesian and Vergin Khachaturyan in an apartment. His parents were living in southeast Turkey when violence unfolded in 1915.

They settled in Aleppo in 1946, where they found a home for 70 years. Hovhannesian’s father supported the family by frequently traveling to Libya for work.

Prior to the Syrian conflict, neither Vahe nor his parents had set foot in Armenia.

Arriving as a refugee was “numbing”, he said. 

“My first days in Yerevan where quite difficult.”

The former Soviet Republic of Armenia is the poorest country in the South Caucus region, according to the International Monetary Fund [Dorian Geiger/Al Jazeera]

Adjusting to a lifestyle in a country that leans west politically, after surviving war in Syria, was jarring.

“Although I knew Armenian, I couldn’t understand when people were saying to me. They were using so many Russian words and expressions in their speech. I had never heard a single Russian word in my life before.”

A weak Armenian economy, lack of employment opportunities, low salaries, and high housing costs have made life challenging.

“They’ve had to start from zero, and obviously, they’ve had their difficulties,” said Hratch Tchilingirian, a sociologist and associate faculty member at the University of Oxford, who specialises in Middle Eastern and Armenian studies.

“The challenge that Syrian Armenians in Armenia face is economic,” he added.

Many have taken up trade work. 

But the influx of so many Syrian-Armenians is perhaps most palpable in the service industry; dozens of restaurants offering Syrian culinary staples have popped up across the capital.

This is good news for Hovhannesian, too, who misses Syrian food.

“If we miss Syrian culture, we go to Syrian restaurants in Yerevan where we have the same food and music we had in Aleppo.”

Hovhannesian often works 12-hour days in the studio with Zareh, also a jeweller.

If life in Yerevan has felt alien, jewellery making has brought a sense of belonging.

“Jewellery is the profession of Armenians,” said Hovhannesian. “Our ancestors brought this culture with them when they were escaping from western Armenia.”

When he was 13, he dropped out of school. Hovhannesian’s uncle, a jeweller in Beirut, persuaded him to move to Lebanon where as a teenager, he first learned to work with precious stones and metals.  

“I like this craft. If I try myself in any other sphere I wouldn’t reach this level of mastery.”

We’ve been jewellers and metallurgists since time eternal. Armenians are to jewellery, what the Swiss are for watches.

Pierre Akkelian, co-founder of the Armenian Jewelry Foundation

Hundreds, if not thousands, of ethnic Armenians who arrived from Syria, work as jewellers.

One floor above Hovhannesian’s studio, another Syrian Armenian, Vrezh Srapian, meticulously paints silver pomegranate pendants with acrylics. 

Each piece fetches about 700 Armenian Dram ($1.50).

“I have to pay for our apartment rent, studio rent, and earn our living,” said Srapian, who left Syria in 2011. “Yesterday we left studio at 10:30 pm. It was early, sometimes we leave at 1am.”

Pierre Akkelian, co-founder of the Armenian Jewelry Foundation, said the craft was “part of Armenian DNA”.

Akkelian, who also grew up in Aleppo, settled in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1970.

“It goes back to the beginning of history. We’ve been jewellers and metallurgists since time eternal. Armenians are to jewellery, what the Swiss are for watches,” he said.

Since Syrian government forces recaptured Aleppo more than nearly two years ago, life has quietly resumed, but at a steep price – the Armenian diaspora there has been altered. 

In the end, Syria’s civil war, which will enter its eighth year in March, forced an exodus of roughly 70,000 ethnic Armenians. Today, just 30,000 remain. Though a vast number returned to their homeland, tens of thousands of Syrian Armenians are now scattered throughout Lebanon, Canada, the US and Europe.

“Everything has changed,” said Hovhannesian, who has given up hope he’ll ever return to Syria. “People I knew are not there anymore. Nothing will be the same.”

After a rocket nearly levelled Hovhannesian’s home in Aleppo in 2016, he and his parents left Syria in search of a better life[Dorian Geiger/Al Jazeera]

With additional reporting by Arman Gharibyan in Yerevan: @armangharibyan

Athens, Greece – Turkey chose the day of the Greek prime minister’s visit to the country while placing a $6.1mn bounty for the capture of eight Turkish army officers seeking asylum in Greece.

Just days earlier, the National Security Council in Ankara issued a demand for their extradition despite Greece’s Supreme Court forbidding it on humanitarian grounds.

The court’s decision is unreviewable. But Turkey blames the men of helping to plot a failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in July 2016 before commandeering a helicopter to flee to Greece.

To the conservative Greek opposition, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras walked into a trap.

“This visit is poorly prepared by the Greek side, and augurs ill for Greek interests and Greek-Turkish relations,” said Greek shadow foreign minister Yiorgos Koumoutsakos.

In the last two years, Greece has registered record numbers of territorial and airspace violations by Turkey in the Aegean.

“For the last 18 months, Turkey has toughened its rhetoric and backed that up with actions,” said Angelos Syrigos, an expert in international law at Panteion University in Athens.

“The result is that the two countries are in a state of constant confrontation. Nothing has happened to make us believe in a breakthrough,” added Syrigos who is also a candidate with the conservative New Democracy party.

According to one retired Greek diplomat, Tsipras took the political cost of an embarrassing visit to Ankara to establish a line of communication with Erdogan amid worsening relations.

Erdogan’s visit to Athens 14 months ago remains a watershed moment in Greek-Turkish relations.

In addition to extradition of the officers, Erdogan demanded an amendment of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923.

The treaty not only delineated the Turkish state, it also normalises Greek-Turkish relations after a century of war. In Greek policy circles, it is considered untouchable. The call to revisit it suggested a broader revisionism of the Greek-Turkish status quo.

As a signatory to the International Law of the Sea, Greece claims the right to extend its territorial waters to 12 nautical miles (22.2 nautical km). It currently stands at half of that.

Because Greece owns thousands of islands, doing so would give it possession of almost three quarters of the Aegean. Turkey has threatened to go to war if that happens.

Last October, outgoing Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias announced imminent plans to move down this path by extending Greece’s territorial waters along its mainland coasts and Crete. The move left out the most contested area of Aegean islands. But the intent was clear.

“Our foreign policy… is addressing and implementing the expansion of our sovereign territory for the first time since the absorption of the Dodecanese islands,” said Kotzias, referring to Greece’s formal inclusion in 1948 of the last territory neighbouring Greece with a Greek population.

“The most important thing for Turkey is the Aegean,” said Kostas Yfantis, an international relations expert at Kadir Has and Panteion Universities.

“Although we in Greece say that Turkey is the revisionist actor in that relationship, Turks say it is Greece because the status quo of territorial waters in the Aegean is six nautical miles and Greece wants to expand to 12 nautical miles and change the status quo.”

Continental shelf

Greece and Turkey are also in a spat over delineation of their continental shelf, an area beyond territorial waters where states enjoy the right to exploit undersea resources.

Last October, Turkey sent a drilling ship to explore the seabed near Cyprus for oil and gas. This was in response to a similar exploration by the Cypriots.

A 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus after a Greek-inspired coup continues to divide the island and poison Greek-Turkish relations.

Hydrocarbons have deepened the disagreement. Turkey now also threatens to explore for hydrocarbons in areas Greece claims for its own continental shelf.

Syrigos believes hydrocarbons have been at the root of the disagreements all along.

“The potential for oil under the Aegean in the 1970s led Turkey to dispute the continental shelf of the Aegean and following that, almost all the entire legal regime of the Aegean,” said Syrigos. 

“Right now it disputes whether the small islets not specifically named [in international treaties] belong to Greece, Greece’s airspace, Athens’ Flight Information Region, Greece’s Search and Rescue jurisdiction, the continental shelves established in the eastern Mediterranean.”

Such Turkish disputatiousness and Greek defiance nearly led to war in 1996, when Greece and Turkey sent warships and helicopters to the Imia islets in the east Aegean.

Three years later, massive earthquakes rocked Istanbul and Athens within months of each other. The two governments sent search-and-rescue teams to each other’s aid, and the atmosphere between them improved dramatically.

Kotzias was defiant in announcing Greece’s imminent expansion of territorial waters.

“In our view, the correct policy is not to say ‘we won’t extend our territorial waters because we’re in the middle of a negotiation with Turkey about the continental shelf’, nor to wait until that negotiation is over, because we’re then depriving ourselves of a right.”

In December 1999, Greece lifted its long-standing veto on Turkish membership talks with the European Union, and the two countries started exploratory talks that came close to resolving their territorial differences in the Aegean.

But Greece then hesitated to commit to any deal. Eighteen months ago, Turkey abandoned the talks altogether. Their relationship sweetened only to become bitter again.

Despite their need to re-establish a bilateral forum to discuss differences, expectations are kept to a low pitch.