TACKLING THE TURKISH TABOO
Robert Ellis

guardian.co.uk
Wednesday 29 April 2009 19.30 BST

Public discussion of the Armenian genocide is still risky, but signs
that Ankara is softening its stance are encouraging

Last December, about 200 Turkish academics and journalists challenged
a longstanding Turkish taboo when they launched a petition on the
internet apologising for "the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman
Armenians were subjected to in 1915". To date 30,000 have signed
the petition.

The reaction was twofold. The Turkish president, Abdullah Gul, who
had earlier attended a World Cup qualifying match between Turkey and
Armenia in Yerevan, said that being able to discuss every opinion was
the policy of the state. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
on the other hand, said there was no need to apologise because Turkey
had not committed a crime.

In a further move, Canan Aritman, the Izmir deputy for the opposition
Republican People’s party, accused the president’s mother of being
Armenian, and when Gul explained that both sides of his family were
Muslim and Turkish, she demanded a DNA test. A defamation lawsuit
followed which resulted in the president being awarded a symbolic 1
Turkish lira (50p).

Inevitably, after a complaint that the website campaign had violated
article 301 of the Turkish penal code for "public denigration of the
Turkish nation", the Ankara public prosecutor’s office investigated
the20 matter. The conclusion, surprisingly, was that there was
no need for a criminal prosecution on the grounds that opposing
opinions are also protected under freedom of thought in democratic
societies. However, the high criminal court annulled this ruling and
the issue is still pending.

In recent years, a number of high-profile cases in Turkey have
illustrated the fact that public discussion of the events of 1915 is
still fraught with risk. Three years ago, the Nobel prize winner Orhan
Pamuk was prosecuted for stating in an interview with a Swiss daily
that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands
and nobody but me dares to talk about it". The charge was dropped on
a technicality but it transpired that an ultranationalist gang was
trying to raise 2m lira to get someone to kill him.

Another Turkish novelist, Elif Å~^afak, was also prosecuted under
article 301 because a character in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul
had raised the issue of the Armenian genocide, but the charge was
ultimately dropped because of insufficient evidence. And two years
ago, Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian editor, was murdered outside his
office in Istanbul by a young Turkish nationalist.

Even on an academic level this topic is controversial. Four years
ago, scholars who organised a conference at Bosphorus University
on the Armenian issue during the Ottoman empire were accused by
the government’s spokesman and m inister of justice, Cemil Cicek,
of "stabbing the Turkish nation in the back". The conference was
postponed, but after an international outcry it was finally reconvened
at Bilgi University four months later.

More fuel was added to the fire last November when the defence
minister, Vecdi Gönul, on the 70th anniversary of the death of the
founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, said: "If there were
Greeks in the Aegean and Armenians in most places in Turkey today,
would it be the same nation state?"

But a fortnight ago the chief of the Turkish general staff, Ä°lker
BaÅ~_bug, in a keynote speech reminded his audience that Ataturk
had said it was the people of Turkey, without ethnic and religious
distinction, who had founded the Republic of Turkey. If he had spoken
of the Turkish people, that would be an ethnic definition.

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pledged to recognise the Armenian
genocide to garner the substantial Armenian-American vote during
their presidential campaigns, but now geopolitical reality has set
in. On Obama’s visit to Turkey at the beginning of this month, the
US president maintained that his views on the incidents of 1915 had
not changed and in his statement last Friday on Armenian Remembrance
Day he reiterated that stance.

However, without using the dreaded g-word, Obama instead spoke of
"one of the great atrocities of the 20th century" and " Meds Yeghern"
– the Armenian for the "Great Catastrophe". His goal was still "a
full, frank and just acknowledgement of the facts" and he strongly
supported efforts by the Turkish and Armenian people to work through
their painful history in an honest, open and constructive manner.

While trying to manoeuvre between a rock and a hard place, Obama
was met with criticism from both sides. The chairman of the Armenian
National Committee of America expressed his "sharp disappointment"
and Erdogan called Obama’s remarks "an unacceptable interpretation
of history".

Nine months after Dink was murdered, his son Arant Dink and another
Turkish-Armenian journalist received suspended sentences of one
year’s imprisonment for using the term genocide. The Turkish court in
its judgment stated: "Talk about genocide, both in Turkey and other
countries, unfavourably affects national security and the national
interest."

After the first world war, the treaty of Sèvres in 1920 was the
instrument by which the victorious allies dismembered Ottoman Turkey
and divided the spoils among themselves. It was only after the Turkish
war of independence and a heroic struggle under the leadership of
Ataturk that the treaty of Lausanne (1923) established the borders
of modern Turkey.

The Armenian diaspora is also responsible for Turkey’s fears of
partition.

In December 2007, journalist Harut Sasunian, a prominent member of
the Armenian community in the US, said the ultimate objective of
Armenians was to get recognition of their genocide claims and to
obtain territory and compensation from Turkey.

According to the prominent Turkish historian Taner Akcam, "Turkey
needs to stop treating the discussion of history as a category of
crime". Perhaps the rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia and the
agreement on a "roadmap" to normalise ties will one day lead to that.