Turkey Should Talk More With Armenian, Other Diaspora: Minister

Assyrian International News Agency AINA
April 27 2013

Turkey Should Talk More With Armenian, Other Diaspora: Minister

Posted GMT 4-27-2013 7:44:17

Culture and Tourism Minister Ömer Çelik has said Turkey should try to
establish tighter dialogue with the descendants of Armenians who left
Turkey in 1915 when they were being massacred en masse.

Çelik, who last month called on all minorities who left Turkey to come
back, was quoted by the Agos newsweekly as saying that all minorities
in Turkey had experienced some sort of a trauma because nation-state
building here attempted to homogenize people and produced a sort of
nationalism and “Turkism” foreign to even ethnic Turks.

In the establishment of modern Turkey, Çelik said the state wanted to
make itself a nation to manage and not the other way around. “Our
strongest moments in history were during times when we could retain
our cosmopolitan structure. The more we shed our cosmopolitan
character, the more vulnerable we made ourselves,” he stated.

He also said that Syriac [Assyrian] and some Jewish groups in Europe
wrote back to him after his call last month that they had intentions
to return, but they also had reason to hesitate. He said people expect
to see legal assurances, but noted that a change of mentality is more
important than legal assurance.

“Today, the past mentality of Turkey has become marginalized, and it
doesn’t give us the opportunity to reproduce our past [diversity].”
The minister also said the Interior Ministry was working on programs
that will make it easy to return citizenship to members of minority
groups who were deported or otherwise forced to leave the country.

“In the past, when the history of the Turks and Armenians could not be
spoken about independently of each other, those trying to generate
racism in the name of ‘Turkism’ attempted to define the Turkish
identity as a reactionary identity in relation to ‘other’ identities,
and they presented the Armenian identity and other identities as the
‘other’.”

He said some identities that were “anti-Turkish” were born out of
this, such as the “genocide lobby” formed by the Armenian diaspora
from Turkey. “The diaspora that is made up of Armenians of Anatolian
descent is a diaspora of Turkey,” he said, adding that the genocide
lobby has now turned into an economically lucrative sector for some.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress