Associated Press Worldstream
April 14, 2005 Thursday 8:36 PM Eastern Time
Turkish taboos falling as Turkey grapples with the World War I
massacre of Armenians
by LOUIS MEIXLER; Associated Press Writer
ANKARA, Turkey
When one of Turkey’s most respected authors shattered a deep taboo by
saying earlier this year that 1 million Armenians were murdered in
Turkey during World War I, the reaction was overwhelming.
Three lawsuits were filed against Orhan Pamuk, accusing him of acting
against the state. “He shouldn’t be allowed to breathe,” said one
nationalist group. In Istanbul, a school began collecting Pamuk’s
books from students to return to him. The vote was 4-1 on a news Web
site that Pamuk’s statement was “treacherous” rather than “freedom of
expression.”
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 one of the most sensitive subjects in Turkey, a dark chapter of
history barely taught in school and rarely discussed.
But slowly the veil of silence is being lifted, in part because of
European Union pressure on Turkey to come to grips with its past.
Turkey, which vehemently denies the killings were genocide, is also
eager to counter Armenian diaspora groups that are pushing European
governments and the United States to declare the killings genocide.
Increasing democratization in Turkey is also encouraging more people
to both speak out and listen.
“We are mutually deaf to each other,” said Yasar Yakis, head of
parliament’s European Union Affairs Committee who has 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.
Intellectuals like Pamuk have played a key role in raising the issue,
and Turkish and Armenian groups have held meetings in recent years
aimed at breaking the ice between the two sides.
“The subject is more and more no longer a taboo in this country,”
said Hrant Dink, editor in chief of Agos, a weekly Armenian newspaper
in Istanbul. “The box has been opened. It cannot be closed anymore.”
Recently, both Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign
Minister Abdulla Gul have addressed the issue, apparently in hopes of
heading off the Armenian push for international recognition. Erdogan
said that all countries should open their archives to scholars to
examine whether the event was genocide, and Gul called the claim of
genocide “pure slander.”
Over the years, Turkey has repeatedly denied the genocide claim,
saying that the Armenian 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.
But mostly there has been silence on the Turkish side.
“I grew up knowing nothing, absolutely nothing about the Armenians’
situation,” said Vamik Volkan, a member of the Turkish-Armenian
Reconciliation Committee. “It was not in the history books.”
The reconciliation committee, partly funded by the United States,
brought together leading Turks and Armenians starting in 2001 and has
fostered wider cultural exchanges.
Volkan, who was raised in the Turkish part of Cyprus, said he first
learned of the massacres in the 1950s after moving to the United
States and meeting an Armenian-American at a dinner. “He turned red
and had a seizure when I told him I was a Turk,” Volkan recalls.
He said the subject needs to be dealt with gently because “the
stubbornness on both sides is so great.”
For Turkey, the issue is not only confronting the killings of
Armenians, but looking back at the loss of the Muslim Ottoman empire.
As the empire faltered, minority Armenian Christians began asserting
their identity. During World War I, amid fears of Armenian
cooperation with the enemy army of Christian Czarist Russia,
Armenians were forced out of towns and villages throughout eastern
Anatolia, historians say. Many were killed, others died of disease
and starvation.
“The Armenians were relocated because they cooperated with the enemy,
the Russians, and they … killed Ottoman soldiers from behind the
lines,” Yakis said.
Volkan, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of
Virginia, said that after the brutal war the new Turkish republic
“wanted to look forward and not backward.”
“This silence is not in relation to Armenians alone,” Volkan added.
“Turkish silence was that we lost an empire. Turks never mourned over
losing prestige and empire because the Turkish loss was incredible.
Millions died.”
Turkey also fears Armenians will use the genocide claim to press for
compensation – either money or lost land.
Still, editor Dink sees Turks moving toward confronting their past
“at a very slow pace and with great difficulty.”
“A real democracy does not have the luxury of hiding taboos under the
carpet,” he said, “and in this process of speaking a solution will be
found.”