TURKEY AND ARMENIA: CAN THEY SHAKE THAT HAND?

Forbes
Sept 4 2009

On television they look just like my people–cynical, gloomy and
forever complaining.

I am talking about Armenians–street interviews with residents of
Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, who sound just as skeptical as Turks about
this week’s sudden announcement by the two neighbors to "normalize"
relations.

That normalcy, of course, is arriving about a century after the
two peoples faced each other in a brutal civil war. Hundreds of
thousands of Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire were deported
and massacred in 1915 in what is now eastern Turkey, in a period of
turmoil and violence that Armenians call "genocide" and Turks insist
was "killing by both sides."

Anatolia was "ethnically cleansed" of its Armenian heritage early
last century, but the ghosts of unspeakable deeds have never quite
left the crime scene. Since the founding of modern Turkey in 1923 by
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turks have been grappling with "the Armenian
issue" one way or another, facing in recent years an ever-widening
international campaign to recognize and condemn.

For Turks and Armenians, the issue has always been semantics–whether
or not to use the g-word in describing 1915. The majority of Turks
believe, and were taught in school, that the killings were not
officially sanctioned and do not amount to genocide. To Armenians on
the other hand, 1915 is what the Holocaust is to Jews–the single most
defining moment in establishing a national identity and a nation-state.

So it made great sense this week for the official announcement to
avoid the question of genocide altogether. Similarly left out was the
issue of Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed enclave that Armenians seized
from Turkey’s close ally Azerbaijan.