Salt Lake Tribune, Utah
April 17 2005
Author assailed for acknowledging Armenian massacre
Lifting the veil: Fellow Turks criticize him for bringing up dark
history
By Louis Meixler
Photo: Turkish author Orhan Pamuk caused a controversy when he said
1 million Armenians were murdered in Turkey during World War I. Many
Turks dispute the charge. (Associated Press file photo)
ANKARA, Turkey – When a leading Turkish novelist said earlier this
year that 1 million Armenians were murdered in his country during
World War I, he broke a deep taboo.
Three lawsuits were filed against Orhan Pamuk, accusing him of
damaging the state. ”He shouldn’t be allowed to breathe,” roared
one nationalist group. In Istanbul, a school collected his books from
students to return to him. On a news Web site, the vote ran 4-1
against him.
Turkey’s mass expulsion of Armenians during World War I – which
Armenians say was part of a genocide that claimed 1.5 million lives –
is a dark chapter rarely discussed in Turkey or taught in its
schools.
But slowly the veil is being lifted. One reason is that Turkey is
more open and democratic today, another is its ambition of joining
the European Union; French President Jacques Chirac has said Turkey
must first acknowledge the killings.
Turkey is also eager to counter Armenian diaspora groups that are
pushing European governments and the United States to declare the
killings genocide. And the approach of April 24, the 90th anniversary
of the date Armenians mark as the start of the killings, is focusing
attention on the issue.
”We are mutually deaf to each other,” said Yasar Yakis, head of
parliament’s European Union Affairs Committee, who invited two ethnic
Armenians in Istanbul to address his committee.
”Perhaps if we can create a climate in which we listen to what
the other side has to say, we might meet in the middle,” Yakis said.
Turkey has long denied the genocide claim, saying the death toll
of 1.5 million is wildly inflated and that both Armenians and Turks
were killed in fighting during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Turks who describe it as genocide have on occasion been prosecuted,
and Turkey often gets into diplomatic tussles with governments it
suspects of taking the Armenian side. It’s one of the reasons Turkey
and neighboring Armenia don’t have diplomatic relations.
Turkey also fears that if the genocide claim is recognized,
Armenians will use it to demand compensation – either money or lost
land.
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul insists that to call it genocide is
”pure slander,” and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said
that all countries should open their archives to scholars to examine
whether the event was genocide.
A Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Committee, partly funded by the
U.S. State Department, first met in 2001, bringing together leading
Turks and Armenians, while intellectuals such as Pamuk, whose novels
have won critical acclaim in the United States, are playing a key
role in opening up the debate.
For Turkey, the issue goes beyond the killings of Armenians to the
whole trauma of losing its once mighty Ottoman Empire.
As the Muslim empire faltered, minority Armenian Christians began
asserting their identity. During World War I, amid fears of Armenian
collusion with the enemy army of Christian Czarist Russia, Armenians
were forced out of towns and villages throughout the Turkish
heartland of Anatolia and many died.
”The Armenians were relocated because they cooperated with the
enemy, the Russians, and they . . . killed Ottoman soldiers from
behind the lines,” Yakis, the lawmaker, said.
Armenians, however, say the killings were part of a planned
genocide.
Volkan, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of
Virginia, said that after the war, the new Turkish republic ”wanted
to look forward and not backward.”
Pamuk dropped his bombshell in February in an interview with the
Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger, talking of Armenians as well as
Turkey’s modern-day Kurdish minority.
He said that ”30,000 Kurds have been murdered here and 1 million
Armenians and nobody dares to mention that. So I do it. And that’s
why they hate me.”
The reaction to Pamuk was largely hostile, but a few newspaper
columnists defended his freedom of speech.