TURKISH, FOREIGN ACADEMICS HOLD RARE TALKS ON ARMENIAN MASSACRES

Agence France Presse — English
March 15, 2006 Wednesday 4:54 PM GMT

Turkish academics who deny the massacres of Armenians during World
War I amounted to genocide offered a rare olive branch on Wednesday
by inviting foreign opponents to Istanbul to discuss the largely
taboo subject.

Only a dozen or so foreign academics attended the first day of the
conference at Istanbul’s state university, alongside around 60 Turkish
historians and officials who defend Ankara’s official position on
the 1915-17 killings.

But Ara Sarafian, a British historian of Armenian origin, said the
three-day event was “an important first step”, even if genuine dialogue
was conspicuous by its absence.

“We established that despite all our differences, which are extreme
on this subject, we’re able to come under the same roof and voice
our opinions. That’s a fundamental shift, rather than staying outside
and shouting at each other,” Sarafian told AFP.

Turkey categorically denies that Armenian subjects under its
predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, were victims of a genocide but
acknowledges that at least 300,000 Armenians and as many Turks died
in civil strife during the last years of the empire.

Armenians claim up to 1.5 million of their kin were slaughtered in
orchestrated killings.

The conference was only a timid step towards real debate and involved
hardly any of the Turkish intellectuals opposed to the official line
who took part in a ground-breaking conference on the massacres in
September 2005.

That meeting, which Turkish nationalists tried to have banned, was
an attempt not to determine whether the killings amounted to genocide
but rather to openly study and understand them.

But Turkey is under pressure to allow more freedom of speech to
achieve its cherished dream of joining the European Union.

And, in that sense, this week’s event was a watershed, according to
both Sarafian and Edhem Eldem, a Turkish academic who attended the
September forum.

For the first time, books presenting the Armenian view of the killings
were on display, alongside abundant literature upholding the official
Turkish view.

Despite the fact there had been “no real dialogue on the basis of
these papers”, the conference was an important opportunity to let
the Turkish authorities start a debate, Sarafian said.

“For me, it’s also an opportunity to show the books that we
published. It’s the first time these books appear in Turkey like this,”
he added.

Turkish academic Mehmet Saray used the conference to rebuff Armenian
“propaganda” about the massacres and blamed them on “the imperialist
Russian, French and British states, who wanted to carve up the Ottoman
empire and encouraged Armenian nationalism”.

But Yair Auron, an Israel researching the archives of the Jewish
community in Palestine under Ottoman rule, was permitted to openly
use the term “genocide” and appeal to Turks to question their past.

Every civil society has to deal with its past, including the black
pages of this past,” Auron said.

Eldem said many of the intellectuals who took part in the September
2005 conference had been loathe to attend this week’s meeting because
the organisers had not told them until Tuesday what its aims were.

“People were quite reticent to say yes. (They) didn’t want to be used
in the hands of the nationalist establishment,” he explained.

But he praised them for the initiative.

“The fact they invited people who don’t share their opinion is
important. They’ve realised they can’t play this game alone any more,”
Eldem said.