TURKISH INTELLECTUALS APOLOGISE FOR ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

EurActiv
Dec 18 2008
Belgium

An initiative by Turkish intellectuals to close a painful chapter
of the region’s history by apologising for the mass killings of
Armenians by the Turkish army in 1915 has irked the authorities in
Ankara. The apology, made through an online petition, triggered a
wave of counter-initiatives on the Facebook social website.

More than 13,000 people, mostly Turks, have signed an online petition
initiated by a group of Turkish intellectuals, who issued an apology
on the Internet for the World War I massacres of Armenians by the
Ottoman army.

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died during forced removals from
what is now Eastern Turkey, but Turkey denies this was "genocide".

Stopping short of using the word "genocide", the petition, entitled
‘I apologise’, reads:

"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 empathise with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers. I
apologise to them."

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the initiative made
no sense.

"They [the intellectuals] must have committed genocide because they are
apologising. The Turkish Republic has no such problem," Erdogan stated.

Several Turkish diplomats and lawmakers condemned the apology and
hundreds of Turks joined groups that popped up on Facebook with titles
such as "I am not apologising". A foreign ministry spokesperson denied
that the counterstatements were organised by the authorities.

President Abdullah Gul refrained from directly criticising the
petition, saying the initiative was proof that everything could be
openly discussed in Turkey.

Turkish-Armenian writer Hrant Dink was killed last year after
openly saying that the events of 1915 were genocide. Before that,
Dink was tried for "insulting Turkishness" under controversial
legislation condemned by the EU. Orhan Pamuk, the novelist and 2006
winner of the Nobel prize for literature, was tried under similar
circumstances. Pamuk said in 2005 that a million Armenians were killed
in 1915, but nobody in Turkey dared to talk about it.