From: Khatchig Mouradian <[email protected]>
Subject: Commemorating the Armenian Genocide
ZNet | Europe
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Commemorating the Armenian Genocide
by Khatchig Mouradian; April 23, 2006
`Today I bow down before the memory of all Armenians who lost their lives
and look forward to the day when the souls of their grandchildren will
finally be at peace. In order for our souls, however, to be at peace, and
for this country [Turkey] to account for this crime against humanity, I
guess people have to make many more journeys to the past to see the truth,’
says Turkish Human Rights activist Nese Ozan. She is referring to the
deportation and massacre of the Armenians in the dying days of the Ottoman
Empire, a genocide commemorated every year on April 24 by their descendents
around the world.
Although the Armenian Genocide is acknowledged by most genocide scholars and
many parliaments around the world, the Turkish state continues to vehemently
deny that there was a state-sponsored annihilation process that took the
lives of approximately 1.5 million Armenians living in their ancestral
lands. The Armenians were, it argues, the victims of ethnic strife or war
and starvation, just like many Muslims living in the Ottoman Empire during
WWI. Moreover, according to the official historiography in Turkey, the
number of the Armenians that died due to these `unfortunate events’ is
exaggerated.
Ozan, a metallurgy engineer by education, recounts to me how two years ago,
she embarked on a `journey to the past’ to find what is left of the Sourp
Sarkis Church and the Mesropian School, two of the countless reminders in
modern day Turkey of the destruction that befell upon the Armenians in 1915.
`When you asked me to write what I feel about April 24, I remembered how we
stood watching, engulfed in a deep sorrow, the ruins, hiding in them the
memory of the long lost lives,’ says Ozan.
A growing number of intellectuals and activists in Turkey are, like Ozan,
speaking up about the importance of facing the past and recognizing the
horrors committed against the Armenians. In a country shaped with a
predominantly nationalist ideology, in a country where human rights
violations and oppression of minorities had become the norm for the better
part of the 20th century, speaking about one of the greatest taboos in
Turkey could get one in all sorts of troubles. Examples abound. In 1994, for
the first time in Turkey, a book affirming the Armenian Genocide was printed
by publisher Ragip Zarakolu. Soon afterwards, his editorial office was
bombed. More recently, world renowned Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was taken
to court for `denigrating Turkish identity’ by telling the Swiss newspaper
Tages-Anzeiger in February 2005 that `30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians
were killed in these lands [Turkey].’ The court case was eventually dropped.
Many similar cases, however, are pending, and many others have concluded in
prison sentences and fines. Turkish scholars like Halil Berktay and Murat
Belge, who publish and speak in Turkey about the mass annihilation of the
Armenians, are bombarded with hate-mail and are subjected to slanders by
Turkish nationalists.
Mujgan Arpat, a Turkish TV reporter and Human Rights activist, also
commemorates the Armenian Genocide. `For me too, April 24 is the date
marking the start of the Armenian Genocide planned by the leaders of
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP),’ she tells me.
In 1908, the CUP gained control in the Ottoman Empire, with promises of
sweeping reforms and equal rights to all peoples of the empire. However, in
1913, the nationalist faction of the CUP, keen on cleansing Turkey from
non-Muslim peoples, gained control of the CUP and, under the guise of World
War I, embarked on the deportation and the massacre of the Armenians living
in the Empire. `The Armenian Genocide was largely a by-product of the First
World war -as far as its successful execution is concerned. But the
preconditions were already created through an ideology that aimed at
transforming the troublesome heterogeneous social structure of the Ottoman
Empire into a more or less homogeneous one,’ explains Taner Akcam, the first
Turkish Scholar to publicly acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, in his book
`From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide’ (
Zed Books, 2004).
However, this was not the first round of mass- killings against the
Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. As Arpat recounts, `In the
pre-Genocide period, the perpetrators of the 1894-96 pogroms and 1909
massacres, also known as `Hamidiye massacres’, had gone unpunished and this
was one of the factors that encouraged the perpetrators of the Genocide.’
`What stands in the way of Turkey’s confronting its past is the fact that
the Turkish Republic was founded by the very same figures who were in
leading positions in the Committee of Union and Progress,’ notes Arpat.
According to many historians, the Turkish Republic was built on genocide and
the Turkish state understands that recognizing the Armenian Genocide would
shake its foundations. In an interview, Turkish sociologist Fatma Muge
Gocek, an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Michigan,
agrees with them. However, `If there is a foundation and you know there are
problems with it, would you live in that house?’ she asks. `You would know
that at one point, it’s going to cause trouble. You know you’ll eventually
have to fix the foundation. Otherwise, the whole thing will collapse,’ she
notes.
Gocek herself had the following to say to the Armenians commemorating the
91st anniversary of the Armenian Genocide this year: `I want you to know
that as an ethnic Turk I am not guilty, but I am responsible for the wounds
that have been inflicted upon you, Armenians, for the last century and a
half. I am responsible for the wounds that were first delivered upon you
through an unjust deportation from your ancestral lands and through
massacres in the hands of a government that should have been there to
protect you. I am also responsible for the wounds caused by the Turkish
state’s denial to this day of what happened to you back then. I am
responsible because all of this occurred and still occurs in the country of
which I am a citizen. Yet I want to tell you that I personally travel every
year to your ancestral lands to envision what was once there and what is not
now. When I am there, I realize again and again how much your departure has
broken the human spirit and warped the land and the people. I become more
and more aware of the darkness that has set in since the disappearance of so
many lives, minds, hopes and dreams.’
Ayse Gunaysu, an activist from the Istanbul Branch of the Human Rights
Association of Turkey, wrote the following when I asked her about her
thoughts on the Armenian Genocide: `Asia Minor never found peace, happiness
and well-being after the Armenian Genocide. A big curse fell upon this land.
The settlements where once artisans, manufacturers, and tradesmen produced
and traded goods, where theatres and schools disseminated knowledge and
aesthetic fulfillment, where churches and monasteries refined the souls,
where beautiful architecture embodied a great, ancient culture; in short, a
civilized, lively urban world was turned into a rural area of vast, barren,
silent, uninhabited land and settlements marked by buildings without a
history and without a personality.’
Gunaysu continued that, `Governments brought highways and electricity and
water supply systems, which are the symbols of civilization but the land
didn’t even become half as civilized as it was a century ago. The history of
the homeland of Armenians since then has always been marked with bloodshed.
Kurdish uprisings, their violent suppression, massacres never ended. No
democracy prevails; no hope for the future is nurtured. Yes, the Armenian
Genocide left these lands damned. Only agony, deprivation, conflicts,
killings, unsolved murders, disappearances under custody, rapes linger.
Bloodshed continues. It will continue until the day Turkey surrenders to the
call of conscience, sense of justice, and honest confrontation with its
past.’
Unfortunately, 91 years after the Armenian Genocide, there are very few
survivors of the horrors of 1915 who are still alive and who could be
comforted by the words of courageous Turkish-born individuals who
acknowledge their suffering and apologize. The descendents of those
survivors, however, will lay wreaths on genocide memorials around the world
today, knowing that a minority of Turks are also commemorating– in their
own way– with them, in a country that will, hopefully, one day build its
own memorials of the Armenian Genocide.
Khatchig Mouradian is a Lebanese-Armenian writer, translator, and
journalist. He is an editor of the daily newspaper Aztag, published in
Beirut. He can be contacted at [email protected]