The Christian Science Monitor
September 26, 2005
In Turkey, a first-ever debate about Armenian mass killings
On eve of EU accession talks, a conference on the World War I massacres
stirs controversy.
By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
ISTANBUL, TURKEY – Opposition to a conference about mass killings of
Armenians moved from Turkish courtrooms to the street over the weekend as
scholars discussed the World War I massacres publicly for the first time on
Turkish soil.
Turkish nationalists, who back the official line that there was no Armenian
genocide, sought to make their views embarrassingly plain by hurling eggs
and tomatoes outside Istanbul Bilgi University, a back-up venue used to
skirt a court order Thursday that sought to shut down the conference at
another location.
But participants cast the event as a breakthrough for expanding civil
society – a key issue as Turkey prepares to open talks Oct. 3 over accession
to the European Union. “The most important thing is that this [conference]
is happening at all,” said Cengiz Candar, a prominent columnist for Bugun
newspaper, who was hit by an egg as he spoke outside the conference. “It
will help to recoup some of Turkey’s negative image and, more fundamentally,
its commitment to the EU and democracy.”
Potential EU membership has prompted a raft of democratic changes in recent
years – including more freedom of expression. EU officials say they view the
conference as a benchmark for tolerance, warning after the court ruling of a
“provocation” that could hurt Turkey’s case.
Armenians say that 1.5 million Armenians (historians often count 1 million)
died in the first systematic genocide of the 20th century, at the hands of
Ottoman Turkish forces.
In Turkey, the official version holds that some 300,000 Armenians died as
they took up arms to push for independence and sided with invading Russian
armies. The partisan conflict, Turkey has argued, took just as many Turkish
Muslim lives.
Questioning that version can lead to prosecution of people considered
traitors, the term used by nationalist lawyers who petitioned for the
conference closure. Well-known novelist Orhan Pamuk faces trial in December
for “denigrating” the Turkish state by mentioning an Armenian and Kurdish
death toll during an interview.
Last May, the justice minister said the conference was a “stab in the
Turkish nation’s back,” prompting it to be postponed, and tapping into
hard-line elements.
“Laws change during a war, and when some of your citizens, on your soil, hit
you in the back, then any nation on earth would punish them,” says Volkan
Ekiz, a protester whose group lobbed eggs and tomatoes this weekend as
police looked on.
“It’s not a scientific conference. It’s the Turkish war of independence, and
nobody can say that it’s genocide,” said Uckun Gerai, a central committee
member of the nationalist Worker’s Party of Turkey, outside the conference.
“Turkey has a problem with the US and EU, but it’s a political problem.”
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Abdullah
Gul, keenly aware of the challenges ahead in EU talks, spoke forcefully in
favor of the conference after the Thursday court decision. Mr. Erdogan said
he wants a Turkey “where liberties are practiced to the full.”
Halil Berktay, coordinator of the history department at Sabanci University,
says the opposition was not surprising. “This is a country of more than 70
million, with a strong nationalist past; there are strong forces opposed to
the European Union, to democracy and opening up,” he says.
But, he adds, “the question of what happened in 1915-1916 is not a mystery,
it’s not like we know just 5 percent. We know 85 percent, so the question is
not finding more evidence. The question is liberating scholarship from the
nationalist taboos….”
Finding the balance between modernizing Turkey – the eastern anchor of the
NATO alliance – and dealing with its staunchly statist history has not been
easy. A further challenge is overcoming reluctance in the EU to accepting a
Muslim state.
“Turkey has to confront its history, and the fact of the violence of 1915
and 1916, and lack of accountability, sanctioned more [state] violence,”
says Fatma Muge Gocek, a sociologist at the University of Michigan and a
conference adviser.
“The discourse is not new; the fact that it is said in Turkey is what
matters,” says Ms. Gocek. “They are great developments.”
Candar shares the optimism. “The judiciary is one of the most reactionary
and backward institutions in Turkey, and the illegal [court] verdict
reflects the inherent problems,” he charges. “But the fact that we are
discussing this is ample evidence to be optimistic.”