INTELLECTUALS, ACTIVISTS REVEAL HISTORY OF DELIBERATE IGNORANCE OF 1915 EVENTS
16:51, 10 Apr 2015
Siranush Ghazanchyan
Intellectuals and activists gathered in Ä°stanbul on Wednesday evening
for an eventcalled “Confront 1915,” where they peeled away the layers
of history that have been presented by the Turkish government when
discussing the shrouded massacre of Armenians in 1915, Today’s
Zamanreports.
Dr. Ohannes Kılıcdagı, a professor of sociology at Istanbul Bilgi
University and a columnist for the Armenian Agos weekly newspaper,
discussed how Armenians who were deported and survived persecution
were unable to return to their former homeland.
“[The period between] 1918-1920 was actually the time during which
the genocide was most openly discussed in the history of this land,
at a time when the Turkish Republic did not yet exist. After the
Kemalist regime and as the Ankara government began to stabilize
and become rooted, and wars were won … there was then a period of
‘clearing the air.’ What I mean by this is that arrangements were
made to prevent Armenians who were sent away from returning to their
property and possessions,” shared Kılıcdagı.
The Republic of Turkey was established in 1923 after its founder,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and Turkish nationalists had emerged victorious
over Greeks, Armenians and Western forces in the Turkish War of
Independence. Today, despite international pressure, the Turkish
Republic does not recognize the events that took place during the
fall of the Ottoman Empire as genocide.
Kılıcdagı continued his discourse on the perception of history,
explaining: “And then began a period that I call the ‘period of
silence,’ which slowly began to create the perception that nothing
had happened here. Even more so, the perception that there were
never Armenians here [in the first place] was formed,” adding,
“A deliberate ignorance was spread and this was actually successful
to a large extent.”
Kılıcdagı went on to share the results of a survey performed by Dr.
Ferhat Kentel of Ä°stanbul Å~^ehir University. When participants of
the survey were asked, “When do you believe Armenians came to Turkey?”
One-third of the respondents said they believed that Armenians had come
to Turkey after the fall of the Soviet Union, while another one-third
acknowledged that they simply had no idea when the Armenians had come
to Turkey.
“Therefore, we see that two-thirds of Turkish society believe that
a people [Armenians] who were the first people of this land to be
written down in history, who existed here before the Common Era,
are commonly believed to have only arrived at the beginning of the
1990s,” he concluded.
Another speaker at Wednesday’s meeting was prominent human rights
lawyer Eren Keskin, who addressed the audience, saying, “We are very
late to be speaking about this issue.”
In line with Kılıcdagı’s argument that such ignorance was enforced
deliberately by the government, Keskin noted, “I think the Turkish
government has been very successful in its mission to cover up these
events.”
She told a personal story of her first encounter with the tragic past
of the Armenians in Turkey in which she explained how her grandfather
had demanded that her aunt Josephine, an Armenian, convert to Islam
before marrying his son, which she did.
Keskin believes that the example she shared highlights the ongoing
injustice and how the experience in her family, which was discussed but
went undisputed, gave her the opportunity to learn about discrimination
against Armenians from a young age. She then went on to describe her
career as a human rights lawyer with the Ä°stanbul branch of the Human
Rights Association (IHD). She noted that although she believed it to
be quite late, the IHD released a press statement in 2005 recognizing
the events of 1915 as genocide. After the IHD took this stance,
Keskin said they were condemned and their office building attacked.