YES, BUT WHO ARE TO APOLOGIZE TO MY GRANDMOTHER AND GRANDFATHER?

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D ec 17 2008
Turkey

"My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the
denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were
subjected to in 1915.

I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings
and pain of my Armenian brothers. I apologize to them."

This public statement, signed by about 100 liberal intellectuals and
posted on the Internet for wider involvement has, as one expects,
ushered in heated debates. This was obviously the inevitable
result. Issuing a counter-statement, more than 50 retired diplomats
argued that the intellectuals’ apology was a misguided initiative,
which is "disrespectful to our history and also to our people who lost
their lives in violent terrorist attacks during the history of the
republic and also during the last years of the Ottoman Empire." The
retired ambassadors claimed that the "forced immigration of Armenians
in 1915 gave bitter results under the conditions of war, but the
pain of the Turks is no less than the Armenians, due to the Armenian
insurgence and terrorism."

The statement noted that in terrorist acts, which resumed in 1973,
many diplomats and their relatives were killed, and asked: "Have
the people who launched the flawed campaign of apology ever thought
that the people who were killed or victimized by Armenian terrorism
throughout history also deserve an apology?" The retired diplomats
suggest that if the aim of the intellectuals’ statement is to improve
relations between Turkey and Armenia, the proper way to do this is
not to make concessions like unilateral apologies, but to mutually
recognize borders and territorial integrity. "If it is inevitable, the
pain that both sides suffered during the history should be shared,"
the retired ambassador claimed, and called on the Armenian side
to apologize.

Which of the statements is more just or more correct? Before
discussing this question, let me tell you two short stories about my
late grandparents.

It was 1915 or 1916. My grandmother was seven years old. She lived in
the village of Orduzu in the province of Malatya. She was the only
girl in a family of seven brothers, at a time when the number of
males in a family connoted the "power" of that family. Moreover, her
mother had died before she was able to have memories about her. All
the uncles of this little girl, except the oldest one, and her father
had been recruited by the army and mobilized to defend the eastern
provinces, which had been occupied by the Russians cooperating with the
Armenians. None of them came back from the war. Her oldest uncle, who
lost all of his brothers in the war and become poorer as a result of
the war, took care of her, my grandmother, but he had nothing to give
but misery to her. She was married before she was 14 years old. But
bad luck followed her. Her husband died in a work accident when she
had just given birth to their first child at a young age. Whenever my
late grandmother remembered the dramatic day when her father left or
whenever she told that sorrow that lingered in her memory and heart
like a darkest stain, she would turn into a seven-year-old orphaned
girl — even at the age of 80.

The time of the second story, too, should be about the same. This time,
the place is a village in Bingöl province. This village suffered a
tragedy in which Armenians indiscriminately killed many people. The
people who survived the massacre fled to western parts of Anatolia
on foot and in convoys. A five- or six-year-old boy whose relatives
had all been killed by Armenians managed to find a place in one of
these convoys. Without any relatives or guardians, this little boy
was transferred from one convoy to another until he came to one of the
mountainous villages of Malatya. He managed to survive with help from
other people. As he grew stronger, he started to work for villagers
to earn his living. He finally arrived in my grandmother’s village,
where a relatively rich villager for whom he was working helped him
marry my grandmother, who was a widow with a child at that time. My
late grandfather, who died before my grandmother, was always searching
for any trace of his family past. When he eventually learned that
one of his cousins was living in the Karakocan district of Elazıg,
I saw that he was so happy, as if he felt he had been reborn at the
age of 70. I cannot find the words to describe how that little girl,
who had grown considerably older when she met my grandfather and
her children, reconnected my grandfather with all his past and the
relatives he had lost.

Such great sorrows that I, personally, would never want to experience
are the things people tend to forget. But, whatever advancements it
makes, humanity always lives side by side with history. The important
thing is to accept that history with its good and bad memories. Today,
some people have apologized for all the pains of the years of mutual
wars as if they had been suffered only by one side. To say that one
is sorry shows, of course, wisdom. Can an irrelevant apology not be
construed as nothing but done out of inferiority complex. If they
feel the urge to apologize for something, then they should say that
they apologize for their apparent lack of knowledge of history.

Everyone suffered their share of the sorrows of World War I. Neither
Armenians, Turks or Kurds can claim to have suffered more or less. If
an apology should be made for these sorrows, then it should be made
mutually and simultaneously by everyone involved. Moreover, if the
Turks had intended to commit systematic genocide on the Armenian
people, they would have done it easily at the time when their power
was at its peak. If, as claimed, there was a systematic genocide,
why the Ottomans chose to do it at the time they were at their weakest
needs some explanation.

People who have even a bit of respect for history would accept that
neither mutual tragedies suffered in conflict nor forced immigration
would be accepted as genocide or ethnic cleansing. What happened
is nothing but mutual fighting with its ensuing pain. The forced
immigration was nothing but the unsuccessful transfer of Armenian
citizens who cooperated with Russians to another area of the Ottoman
Empire. Some understand this forced immigration as an expulsion of
Armenians out of the country. But, at that time, Syria was no different
than Anatolia in terms of being part of Ottoman territory. Moreover,
Armenians in western provinces were not forced to emigrate.

Now that a rush of apologies has started, I think that I, too, deserve
to receive an apology for the Armenian massacres which orphaned my
grandmother and grandfather at an early age.

–Boundary_(ID_IpUL4sQrJBDx3LFta4ii0A)–