Escaping a vile past
A move towards detente with Armenia will lift the taboo and ease
Turkey’s path to EU membership
Christopher de Ballaigue

guardian.co.uk,
Sunday 3 May 2009 23.00 BST

During the past week, 10 Turkish soldiers have been killed in fighting
with militants from the Kurdish – nationalist PKK, the country’s top
soldier has – denied involvement in a – conspiracy to overthrow the
mildly Islamist government of Recep Tayyip – Erdogan and the prime
minister has talked down the prospect of better relations with Armenia,
Turkey’s old foe to the east. If this looks like a snapshot from the
bad old days, look again: Turkey’s demons, militarism and ethnic
hatred, wear a – ragged air.

That’s the hope that brought President Barack Obama to Turkey at the
end of his European tour, and which emboldened him to urge Turkey’s
admission into the European Union, meet a top Kurdish nationalist and
advocate a concession to the country’s Greek minority. Most important,
Obama endorsed a process of negotiations with Armenia. On 23 April, the
Turks and the Armenians announced agreement on a plan to normalise
relations. The small print will need to address the restoration of
formal ties and the reopening of the land border. Progress could snag
on a parallel, territorial dispute, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, a
Turkic nation supported by Ankara. The Turkish and Armenian governments
are vulnerable to hawks. But the main obstacle is the past.

Turkey has abandoned its insistence that there is no such thing as a
Kurd ` only a "mountain Turk". The Greeks, old Aegean rivals, are now
friends. But a taboo remains: the suffering of Anatolia’s Armenian
inhabitants when, in 1915, fearful they would act as a fifth column for
invading Russians, the Ottoman Turks deported them south. The process
led to the death of at least a million Armenians, in what much of the
world considers a genocide. As successor state to the Ottomans, modern
Turkey denies the charge, but at a heavy cost.

Until recently, this process had been distinguished by revenge attacks
by Armenian terrorists on Turkish diplomats, anti-Armenian tirades in
Turkey and, most galling for the Turks, an effective Armenian campaign
to persuade several countries to recognise the genocide. As recently as
2007, Hrant Dink, a prominent member of Istanbul’s small Armenian
minority, was gunned down by a Turkish nationalist and Turkey’s
Nobel-prizewinning novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was forced into exile for
speaking his mind about the Armenian tragedy. It seemed that Turkey
would retreat into isolation.

That has not happened. Turkey is a nation of commerce and a regional
power. What could be more natural than detente with its neighbour? This
is what many Turks want; 30,000 have signed a petition apologising for
1915, for which act of atonement they may be investigated legally. So
the present, and the future, line up against the vile past.

For the last three years this vileness has been my companion as I
tramped around the remote district of Varto in eastern Turkey. Home to
Kurds, Turks, Armenians and Alevis (a religious minority), Varto was
not only the scene of an appalling massacre of Armenians in 1915; its
Alevi population was ravaged by Armenian revenge squads and locals have
since been active in the Kurdish nationalist movement. History had been
silenced, and it took me months to extract information from a
distrustful people. But this process needs to be replicated across
Anatolia. And it is Turks, not foreigners, who must lead the way.

That would make Turkey, already a strong contender for EU membership,
difficult to resist. Obama has done his bit. For the people of this
conflicted part of the world, knowing the past may prove the best way
of escaping it.