The Age, Australia
Jan 11 2010

Living out Turkey’s hidden historyDAN BILEFSKY, ISTANBUL
January 11, 2010 .
Fethiye Cetin has special hopes for a Turkish-Armenian accord.

FETHIYE Cetin still recalls the day her identity shattered.

She was a young law student when her beloved maternal grandmother,
Seher, took her aside and told her a secret she had hidden for 60
years: that Seher was born a Christian Armenian with the name Heranus
and had been saved from a death march by a Turkish officer, who
snatched her from her mother’s arms in 1915 and raised her as Turkish
and Muslim.

Cetin’s grandmother, whose parents later turned out to have escaped to
New York, was just one of many Armenian children who were kidnapped
and adopted by Turkish families during the Armenian genocide, the mass
killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks between
1915 and 1918.

Now Cetin, a prominent advocate for the estimated 50,000-member
Armenian-Turkish community and one of Turkey’s leading human rights
lawyers, believes a moment has arrived in which Turkey and Armenia can
finally confront the ghosts of history and possibly even overcome one
of the world’s most enduring and bitter rivalries.

In October, Turkey and Armenia signed a historic series of protocols
to establish diplomatic relations and to reopen the Turkish-Armenian
border, which has been closed since 1993. The agreement, which has yet
to be ratified in the Turkish or Armenian parliaments, has been
vociferously opposed by nationalists on both sides. It could help to
end landlocked Armenia’s economic isolation, while lifting Turkey’s
chances for admission into the European Union.

But Cetin argued that the most enduring consequence could be helping
to overcome mutual recriminations. She published a memoir about her
grandmother in 2004, deliberately omitting the word ”genocide”
because she believes that using it erects a roadblock to
reconciliation.

”Most people in Turkish society have no idea what happened in 1915,
and the Armenians they meet are introduced as monsters or villains or
enemies in their history books,” she said.

”Turkey has to confront the past, but before this confrontation can
happen, people must know who they are confronting. So we need the
borders to come down in order to have dialogue.”