Truth over Armenian massacres beginning to prevail

Irish Times
Apr 23, 2005

Nicholas Birch

TURKEY: Whatever happened to Armenians in 1915, the survivors have
carried a burden for 90 years. But the space for intelligent debate is
growing rapidly in Turkey, reports Nicholas Birch

April 24th, the date Armenians worldwide have chosen to mark the mass
deportation and murder of their kin by the Ottoman Empire, has always
been an uncomfortable time for Turkey. Each year, eyes in Ankara turn
nervously to Washington. What will the US president say in his annual
address to the diaspora? Last year, when George Bush talked of
“annihilation”, there were sighs of relief here. Another year gone
without a mention of genocide.

This year, the 90th anniversary of the massacres, the tension is if
anything higher. Though senior Turkish government ministers took the
unprecedented step last month of calling for the events of 1915 to be
“researched under United Nations arbitration”, since then, if
anything, they have redoubled their efforts to avoid confronting their
country’s past.

“They allege one million people were killed,” head of the state-funded
Turkish History Foundation Yusuf Halacoglu told state officials last
week. “But where are the bodies? One million people do not just
disappear into thin air.” The total number of Armenian casualties, he
added, could not exceed 100,000.

But as the story of Fethiye Cetin shows, the official discourse slowly
seems to be losing ground among ordinary Turks.

Cetin had always assumed the grandmother who brought her up was Seher,
pillar of an apparently typical Anatolian family. It wasn’t until she
was a student that she learned the truth.

“My father, mother and brother are in America,” Seher, who was by then
in her 70s, told her. “If anybody can find them, you can. Find them
for me.” Gradually, the old lady told the rest of her story. Her name
was Heranush, and she had been born an Armenian. Nine when the
massacres started, she had cowered in the churchyard as the village
men were murdered and thrown into the river. Forced with other women
and children to begin walking south to Syria, she was abducted and
handed over to a police corporal. He brought her up as his own child.

Such tales are common in Turkey’s eastern provinces. Locals called
people like Heranush “those the sword left behind”. What makes her
story unusual is that her granddaughter decided to make it into a
book.

“She had hidden the things she told me for over 60 years,” explains
Cetin, sitting in her small Istanbul law office. “I felt they needed
to be given a voice.” She also wanted to help move the debate away
from barren disputes over terminology and statistics: 100,000 killed,
no 500,000, no one million; genocide, no ethnic cleansing, no the
unfortunate side effect of civil war.

Such arguments, she says, “hide the lives and deaths of individuals
and do nothing to encourage people to listen”. Turks have certainly
been listening to her. Published last November, My Grandmother is
already into its fifth edition. Cetin has lost count of the phone
calls and letters she has received, of support, or from people with
similar stories to tell.

Cetin attributes the success of her book to the growing impatience
Turks feel for the various state discourses – on Armenians, Kurds,
Turkish identity – that have traditionally held sway in Turkey.

“People appear to accept the official version. In fact they don’t,”
she says. “When books like this come out, even people with very
different family histories realise they aren’t the only ones to
question what they have been taught.”

The new spirit of openness is nowhere more evident than on the
Armenian issue. Five years ago, the taboo was almost total. Cetin has
no doubt her book would not have been accepted in 2000, when her
grandmother died. Now there are Armenian cookery books and
novels. This January an Istanbul gallery hit the headlines with an
exhibition of 500 postcards showing Turkish Armenians between 1900 and
1914.

“The history taught in schools is told as if only Turks had ever lived
in Anatolia, no one else,” curator Osman Koker told reporters. “That
is deeply unhealthy.”

He might have added that Turkish schoolchildren, including children of
Istanbul’s 50,000-strong Armenian community, are now obliged by law to
write essays refuting evidence of the “so-called genocide”.

One of the first Turks to break the Armenian taboo was historian Halil
Berktay, who in October 2000 raised a storm of protest when he told a
Turkish newspaper he believed the events of 1915 were indeed
genocide. Today, he is convinced the space for intelligent debate on
the past is growing rapidly.

“Beneath the bluster,” he says, “the Turkish establishment position is
crumbling.”

What angers him, though, is the politicisation of the Armenian issue
in the EU. Poland’s parliament recognised the Armenian genocide last
week, joining France. Right-wing politicians in France and Germany
have over the past few months implied Turkey should too, if it wants
to join the EU.