Posted on Sun, Apr. 24, 2005
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Turkey faces up to dark legacy

Armenians mark the 90th year since the start of genocide at Turkish hands.

By Louis Meixler

Associated Press

ANKARA, Turkey – When a leading Turkish novelist said earlier this
year that one million Armenians were murdered in his country during
World War I, he broke a deep taboo.

Three lawsuits were filed against Orhan Pamuk, accusing him of
damaging the state. “He shouldn’t be allowed to breathe,” roared one
nationalist group. In Istanbul, a school collected his books from
students to return to him. On a news Web site, the vote ran 4-1
against him.

Turkey’s mass expulsion of Armenians during World War I – which
Armenians say was part of a genocide that claimed 1.5 million lives –
is a dark chapter rarely discussed in Turkey or taught in its schools.

But slowly the veil is being lifted. One reason is that Turkey is more
open and democratic today. Another is its ambition to join the
European Union; French President Jacques Chirac has said Turkey must
first acknowledge the killings.

Turkey is also eager to counter Armenian diaspora groups that are
pushing European governments and the United States to declare the
killings to have been genocide.

Finally, the approach of April 24 has intensified the focus on the
issue: Today is the 90th anniversary of the date Armenians mark as the
start of the killings.

“We are mutually deaf to each other,” said Yasar Yakis, head of the
Turkish parliament’s European Union Affairs Committee, who invited two
ethnic Armenians in Istanbul to address his committee. “Perhaps if we
can create a climate in which we listen to what the other side has to
say, we might meet in the middle.”

Turkey has long denied the genocide claim, saying the death toll of
1.5 million is wildly inflated and that both Armenians and Turks were
killed in fighting during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Turks
who describe it as genocide have on occasion been prosecuted, and
Turkey often gets into diplomatic tussles with governments it suspects
of taking the Armenian side. It is one of the reasons Turkey and
neighboring Armenia have no diplomatic relations.

Turkey also fears that if the genocide claim is recognized, Armenians
will use it to demand compensation – either money or lost land.

Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul insists that to call what occurred
genocide is “pure slander,” and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
has said that all countries should open their archives to scholars to
examine whether the event was genocide.

A Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Committee, partly funded by the U.S.
State Department, first met in 2001, bringing together leading Turks
and Armenians, while intellectuals such as Pamuk, whose novels have
won critical acclaim in the United States, are playing a key role in
opening up the debate.

The taboo is diminishing, said Hrant Dink, editor in chief of Agos, a
weekly Armenian newspaper in Istanbul. “The box has been opened. It
cannot be closed anymore.”

The subject needs to be dealt with gently because “the stubbornness on
both sides is so great,” said Vamik Volkan, a member of the
reconciliation committee. “It was not in the history books.”

Volkan said he grew up knowing nothing about the Armenian tragedy and
first learned of it in the 1950s when he met an Armenian American at a
dinner in the United States. “He turned red and had a seizure when I
told him I was a Turk,” Volkan recalls.

For Turkey, the issue goes beyond the killings of Armenians to the
whole trauma of losing its once-mighty Ottoman Empire.

As the Muslim empire faltered, minority Armenian Christians began
asserting their identity. During World War I, amid fears of Armenian
collusion with the enemy army of czarist Russia, Armenians were forced
out of towns and villages throughout the Turkish heartland of
Anatolia, and many died.

“The Armenians were relocated because they cooperated with the enemy,
the Russians, and they… killed Ottoman soldiers from behind the
lines,” Yakis, the lawmaker, said.

Armenians, however, say the killings were part of a planned genocide.

Volkan, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of
Virginia, said that after the war, the new Turkish republic “wanted to
look forward and not backward.”

Pamuk dropped his bombshell in February in an interview with the Swiss
newspaper Tagesanzeiger, talking of Armenians as well as Turkey’s
modern-day Kurdish minority.

He said, “Thirty thousand Kurds have been murdered here, and one
million Armenians, and nobody dares to mention that. So I do it. And
that’s why they hate me.”

The reaction to Pamuk was largely hostile, but a few newspaper
columnists defended his freedom of speech

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress