AZG Armenian Daily #073, 23/04/2005

World Press

FACING HORRIBLE PAST

International printed media, including Turkish press, continues addressing
the 90th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The correspondent of
influential English The Economist wrote an article from Turkish town of
Diarbeqir about Zekai Yilmaz, a Kurdish health worker, who was 12 when he
found out that his grandmother was Armenian. “She was speaking in a funny
language with our Armenian neighbor”, he recalled. “When they saw me they
immediately switched to Kurdish”. The mother explained that she was wounded
by a bayonet while 13-year-old and she accidentally remained alive lying
among the dead. Yilmaz’s father found her, healed, cared for her and then
converted into Islam and married. “But she remained Armenian at the bottom
of her heart”, Yilmaz said.

Such stories are especially widespread in western regions of Turkey where
once (before the WW I) a well-off Armenian community used to live. Traces of
their culture are seen today inside beautiful stone churches that are either
razed or turned into mosques.

The journalist goes on telling that the Kurds explained their participation
saying that Turks promised to give them the Armenians’ lands and a “corner
in heaven” for killing non-believers.

The journalist sees “hopeful signs” in Turkey where it was banned to talk
about the Genocide. He makes an example of Halil Berktay who wrote in
Milliet that the Armenians underwent “ethnic cleansing” and lawyer Fethiye
Cetin who wrote about her Armenian grandmother in a book that awaits its 5th
publication and finally about “the new platform of Armenian-born women”.

The next article belongs to Elif Safaq, correspondent of Turkish daily News,
who wrote that she first heard the word “Armenian” while eavesdrop on
conversation of old Muslim women. She recalled her childhood in Istanbul
where women praised bread — “yufkas” — that Armenian bakers baked. Her
questions remained unanswered then. The women fall silent suddenly. “I
understood later that I posed wrong questions. Silence is more telling while
the word ‘Armenian’ is mentioned. The present generation can utter that word
without fearing problems but they have nothing to tell because they know
nothing. The history is not only what is written. Those women, our old
grandmothers know things that the chauvinistic Turkish historians would
prefer never uttered. But we need to listen to these grannies as they
remember and have much to say”, she wrote. “How to bring their experience
out, how to decipher the silence?”, Safaq asks at the end of the article and
states confidently that “we have to pay attention” to the oral speech of
these oppressed women.

Prepared by Hakob Tsulikian