FOR ARMENIAN STUDENTS, STUDYING TURKEY POSES A DILEMMA
Today’s Zaman
May 20 2009
Turkey
It is a small class of 12 master’s students in the department of
Turkology at Yerevan State University. For almost all of the Armenian
students, Turkey is as close as a stone’s throw even though the border
remains closed, but Turks are as far away as one can ever imagine.
"What does the word ‘Turk’ tell you?" was the question asked on
Monday by a group of Turkish journalists who are in Yerevan for
the International Hrant Dink Foundation’s Turkey-Armenia Journalist
Dialogue Project, funded by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Association.
In response, only one student said "just human," in contrast with
the others who said they remember "genocide" when they hear the word
"Turk."
Ashkhen Babayan said she had been to the Turkish city of Antalya and
had interacted with Turks and found them quite personable.
Another student, Anahit Veziryan, said she would go to Turkey one day
to find the house where her father lived in the eastern Turkish city
of Van.
"My father described the house that he once lived in but was forced to
leave by the Turks," she said, adding that she couldn’t do it right
now. When asked why, she had difficulty describing her feelings of
fear toward Turks, but her professor helped.
"Is it safe for an Armenian to go to Turkey?" asked Ruben Melkonyan,
professor of Turkology at the university.
"Our hope is with the Turkish people who are democrats and who can face
the truth. I agree with Hrant Dink, who said Turkey can consolidate
its democracy from within. I can’t say that all Turks are bad," he
added. And the truth, according to him, is that the Turkish belief
that there was no "genocide" against the Armenians in 1915 is not
right. "Your official thesis is based on lies, and ours is the truth,"
he emphasized. "The recognition of genocide also has a legal aspect,
as well as political. An apology is not enough; Armenians should be
compensated financially," he said.
The young students have been carrying the heavy baggage of another
official thesis, the thesis of Armenia. Even though they study
Turkology, they face a dilemma: They want to know everything about
Turkey, but from a distance, because in their minds, the "Turk"
is a horrible creature.
‘Telling stories, interaction will help’ Melkonyan said the "trauma
of genocide" has been handed down to generations of people in Armenia,
as assassinated Turkish-Armenian journalist Dink put it, and the only
way to overcome it is by "storytelling." He said there were examples
of it in Turkish literature, as seen in the books of Fethiye Cetin,
Yusuf Bagcı and İrfan Pala.
Professor Melkonyan said he was from the eastern Turkish city of MuÅ~_
and had visited his village in the province, but he was not welcomed.
Aris Nalcı from the International Hrant Dink Foundation based in
Ä°stanbul invited the students to Turkey for an internship at the
Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos. He also said there were currently two
interns from Yerevan State University at Agos.
Addressing the students, Nalcı said: "You know how to deal with this
trauma. You cannot learn about Turkey just by reading the books given
to you in Armenia. You should read books from Turkey, too."
‘Turkey should stay out of Karabakh dispute’ Melkonyan said Armenia
and Azerbaijan were independent countries, so they could settle their
disagreements over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh without
Turkey’s interference.
"Turkey should not interfere in the Karabakh row," he told a group
of Turkish journalists this week as he answered questions regarding
Turkish-Armenian relations. "Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey are
independent states."
Armenian leaders have criticized Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan for making the normalization of ties with Armenia conditional
on a settlement in Nagorno-Karabakh during a visit to Baku last week.
He said he, his students and the department of Turkology follow the
developments in Turkey closely. "We read Turkish newspapers every day,"
he said.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress