Turks seek a fresh look at past
By Nicholas Birch
Washington Times, DC
March 26 2005
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
ISTANBUL — A hidden Armenian minority, after living in the shadows
for decades, is coming forward to tell stories of a 1915 massacre in
books and newspapers, and prompting Turkey to re-examine its past.
A group of senior politicians from Turkey’s governing and main
opposition parties last week called for the events of 90 years ago to
be “researched under United Nations arbitration.”
“If there is a need to settle accounts with history, we are
ready,” they said.
Next month, Armenians all over the world will mark the 90th
anniversary of the massacres — an event that successive governments
in Turkey have denied took place.
Fethiye Cetin was a student when she discovered her grandmother
Seher’s secret.
Seher, a pillar of a typical Turkish family, had been born an
Armenian named Heranush, and was 9 years old when the massacres
started in 1915.
She cowered in the churchyard as men from her village were slain
and thrown into the river.
Forced with other women and children onto the road to Syria, she
was abducted and handed over to a police corporal. He raised her as
his own child.
Such tales are common in Turkey’s eastern provinces. Locals
called people like the grandmother “those the sword left behind.”
What makes her story unusual is that the granddaughter made it
into a book.
“She had hidden the things she told me for over 60 years,” said
Miss Cetin, a lawyer who works from a small office in Istanbul. “I
felt they needed to be given a voice.”
But she also wanted to help move the debate away from barren
disputes over terminology and statistics: 300,000 killed? 800,000
killed? 1 million killed? Genocide? Ethnic cleansing? An unfortunate
side effect of civil war?
Such arguments, she said, “hide the lives and deaths of
individuals and do nothing to encourage people to listen.”
Turks certainly have been listening to her. Published in
November, “My Grandmother” is already into its fifth edition.
Miss Cetin has lost count of the number of phone calls and
letters she has received, of support, or from people with similar
stories to tell.
“When books like this come out, even people with very different
family histories begin to realize they aren’t the only ones to
question what they have been taught,” she said.
Miss Cetin first published a summary of her grandmother’s history
in an Istanbul-based Armenian newspaper in 2000. The article was
ignored. “I could not have published my book back then,” she said.
In January, an Istanbul gallery hit the headlines with an
exhibition of 500 postcards showing Turkish Armenians between 1900
and 1914.
“The history taught in schools is told as if only Turks had ever
lived in Anatolia, no one else,” curator Osman Koker told reporters.
“That is deeply unhealthy.”