Turkish academics in apology to Armenians

Intellectuals break taboo to acknowledge genocide by Ottoman Turks

By Nicholas Birch in Istanbul

Monday, 15 December 2008
Independent.co.uk Web

Around 200 Turkish intellectuals and academics are to apologise on the
internet today for the ethnic cleansing of Armenians during the First
World War, in the most public sign yet that Turkey’s most sensitive
taboo is slowly melting away.

"My conscience does not accept the denial of the great catastrophe that
the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915," the text prepared by
the group reads. "I reject this injustice and … empathise with the
feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers. I apologise to them."

Turkey accepts that many Armenians were killed during the collapse of
the Ottoman empire, but insists they were victims of civil strife and
that Muslim Turks also died. Most Western historians agree that the
ethnic cleansing that killed roughly 700,000 Armenians amounted to
genocide.

The academics are inviting Turks to sign a petition and add their
voices to the apology. "Our concern is being able to look at ourselves
in the mirror in the morning … freeing ourselves by finally facing up
to the past," said the political scientist Baskin Oran, one of the four
organisers of the initiative.

However, nationalists have reacted angrily to the internet apology
before it has even gone live, saying it is a national betrayal. Counter
campaigns refusing to apologise have sprung up. The head of a
nationalist party with 70 seats in parliament described the initiative
as an example of the "frightening extent to which degeneracy and
corrosion have spread".

The public apology coincides with a diplomatic rapprochement between
Turkey and Armenia, whose shared border has been closed since the
Nagorny-Karabakh war in 1993 and who have been locked in almost 100
years of hostility. President Abdullah Gul made history in September
when he became the first Turkish leader to visit Armenia, and the two
countries have been talking about restoring full diplomatic relations.

Publicly talking about what happened in 1915 remains a sensitive issue
in Turkey. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted
in 2005 for saying a million Armenians had died. In January 2007, the
Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was gunned down by a nationalist
teenager for advocating a more humane debate on the issue.

Yet, while almost every Turkish town has a street named after the chief
organisers of the massacres, the taboo surrounding the Armenian issue
is nowhere near as total as it was a decade ago. Bookshops sell books
by Western and Armenian historians alongside texts written by defenders
of the official Turkish thesis. Universities organise conferences on
the issue. Istanbul galleries run exhibitions of postcards showing the
central place Armenians had in the life of the late Ottoman Empire. And
a 2005 memoir, My Grandmother, in which an Istanbul lawyer recounts her
discovery that the woman who brought her up was born an Armenian,
sparked widespread and sympathetic debate.

One of the first Turks to break the taboo was the historian Halil
Berktay, who received death threats for months after telling a Turkish
newspaper in October 2000 that he believed the Ottoman Empire committed
genocide. Today, he is convinced the space for intelligent debate is
growing. "Beneath the bluster," he says, "the Turkish establishment
position is crumbling."