Cengiz Aktar: Turkey will be liberated if it faces up to the truth of
what happened to its missing Armenians in 1915

14:31 17/04/2010 » Politics

Not many borders are closed in our globalized world, but the frontier
between Armenia and Turkey is still a dead zone where the railroad
stops, Thomas de Waal writes in The Foreign Policy.

People on both sides of this closed border want it open as it will
contribute to the economic boost, the columnist says. In a
conversation with Thomas de Waal, Turkish academic Cengiz Aktar said
that Turkey will be liberated if it faces up to the truth of what
happened to its missing Armenians, at the catastrophe of 1915 when the
entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia was deported or killed
in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire.

Aktar initiated an Internet petition apologizing for the "Great
Catastrophe" of 1915 (adopting the Armenians’ own phrase for the
tragedy) and expressing sympathy for "my Armenian brothers and
sisters."

More than 30,000 Turks have signed it — remarkable for a country
whose schoolbooks were, until recently, saying that Armenians killed
Turks in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire and not the other way
around. It is not an easy process, but the taboo on discussing the
issue of what happened to the missing Armenians has now been lifted in
Turkey.

Last October, the Armenian and Turkish presidents, Serzh Sargsyan and
Abdullah Gul, moved to sign two protocols on normalizing relations,
pledging that, once the documents were ratified by their countries’
parliaments, the closed border would open within two months. Six
months on, insecurities and local politics are again winning the day,
and the protocols are in trouble. Turkish leaders are postponing
ratification of the agreements, the source says.

`What has gone wrong? Ankara has gone cool on the process, saying it
wants to see progress on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over
Nagorno-Karabakh — even though the conflict is not mentioned in the
protocols. The Turks clearly did not expect the furious reaction the
rapprochement would have with Azerbaijan. The latter has been lobbying
hard and effectively against the protocols, and its fears are
understandable — it is worried that if the Armenia-Turkey border
opens, a key lever of influence on the Armenians to make concessions
over Nagorno-Karabakh will be lost,’ the columnist writes.

Source: Panorama.am