NY Times says Turkey hid documents on dark pages of its history

11.03.2009 12:54

Yerevan (Yerkir) – According to a long-hidden document that belonged to
the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians
disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916.

In Turkey, any discussion of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians can
bring a storm of public outrage. But since its publication in a book in
January, the number–and its Ottoman source–has gone virtually
unmentioned.

`Nothing,’ said Murat Bardakci, the Turkish author and columnist who
compiled the book.
The silence can mean only one thing, he said: `My numbers are too high
for ordinary people. Maybe people aren’t ready to talk about it yet.’

For generations, most Turks knew nothing of the details of the Armenian
genocide of 1915 to 1918, when more than a million Armenians were
killed as the Ottoman Turk government purged the population. Turkey
locked the ugliest parts of its past out of sight, keeping any mention
of the events out of schoolbooks and official narratives in an
aggressive campaign of forgetting.

But in the past 10 years, as civil society has flourished here, some
parts of Turkish society are now openly questioning the state’s version
of events. In December, a group of intellectuals circulated a petition
that apologized for the denial of the massacres. Some 29,000 people
have signed it.