The Scotsman, UK
Sept 25 2005
Turkey split by ban on Armenian massacre conference
JON HEMMING
IN ISTANBUL
HUNDREDS of Turkish nationalists chanting slogans and waving flags
protested yesterday against a controversial academic conference on
the First World War massacre of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.
The conference had been due to open on Friday at two universities in
Istanbul but a last-minute court order blocked it, causing acute
embarrassment to the Turkish government just days before the start of
its EU membership talks.
Organisers circumvented the court ban by moving the conference to a
third university in the city.
“This conference is an insult to our republic and to the memory of
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,” Erkal Onsel, head of the Istanbul branch of
the left wing but nationalist Workers’ Party, told protesters
gathered outside the private Bilgi University.
Atatürk is revered for founding the modern Turkish republic out of
the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923.
The demonstrators chanted slogans such as “Treason will not go
unpunished” and “This is Turkey, love it or leave it”.
The issue of the Armenian massacres is highly sensitive in Turkey.
Armenia and its supporters around the world say some 1.5 million
Armenians died in a systematic genocide committed by Ottoman Turkish
forces between 1915 and 1923.
Ankara accepts that many Armenians were killed on Turkish soil during
and after the First World War, but says they were victims of a
partisan conflict that claimed even more Turkish Muslim lives as the
Ottoman Empire was collapsing. It denies any genocide.
But in a bid to defuse the issue, the government has opened up
Turkey’s archives to scholars, saying it has nothing to hide, and has
urged Armenia and other nations to do likewise.
The academic conference was originally scheduled for May but was
cancelled after justice minister Cemil Cicek accused those backing
the genocide claims of “stabbing Turkey in the back”.
This time, with a nervous eye on Brussels as the clock ticks towards
the start of its long-delayed EU entry talks on October 3, the
government has strongly backed the conference.
The court banning order, announced on Thursday evening just before
the conference was due to start, drew swift condemnation from prime
minister Tayyip Erdogan as well as from the European Commission,
which spoke of a “provocation” by anti-EU elements.
“If we have confidence in our own beliefs, we should not fear freedom
of thought,” Erdogan told a separate gathering of academics in
Istanbul yesterday.
“I want to live in a Turkey where all freedoms are guaranteed,” the
prime minister said.
Lawyers behind the original court ban condemned Bilgi University’s
decision on Saturday to host the event regardless.
“We will file a legal complaint against all of those people behind
this conference,” lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz said.
The court blocked the conference pending information on the
qualifications of the speakers and also wanted to know who was
participating and who was paying for it.