Last December, about 200 Turkish academics and journalists challenged a longstanding Turkish taboo when they launched a petition on the internet apologising for “the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915”. To date 30,000 have signed the petition.
The reaction was twofold. The Turkish president, Abdullah Gül, who had earlier attended a World Cup qualifying match between Turkey and Armenia in Yerevan, said that being able to discuss every opinion was the policy of the state. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on the other hand, said there was no need to apologise because Turkey had not committed a crime.
In a further move, Canan Aritman, the Izmir deputy for the opposition Republican People’s party, accused the president’s mother of being Armenian, and when Gül explained that both sides of his family were Muslim and Turkish, she demanded a DNA test. A defamation lawsuit followed which resulted in the president being awarded a symbolic 1 Turkish lira (50p).
Inevitably, after a complaint that the website campaign had violated article 301 of the Turkish penal code for “public denigration of the Turkish nation”, the Ankara public prosecutor’s office investigated the matter. The conclusion, surprisingly, was that there was no need for a criminal prosecution on the grounds that opposing opinions are also protected under freedom of thought in democratic societies. However, the high criminal court annulled this ruling and the issue is still pending.
In recent years, a number of high-profile cases in Turkey have illustrated the fact that public discussion of the events of 1915 is still fraught with risk. Three years ago, the Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted for stating in an interview with a Swiss daily that “30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it”. The charge was dropped on a technicality but it transpired that an ultranationalist gang was trying to raise 2m lira to get someone to kill him.
Another Turkish novelist, Elif Şafak, was also prosecuted under article 301 because a character in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul had raised the issue of the Armenian genocide, but the charge was ultimately dropped because of insufficient evidence. And two years ago, Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian editor, was murdered outside his office in Istanbul by a young Turkish nationalist.
Even on an academic level this topic is controversial. Four years ago, scholars who organised a conference at Bosphorus University on the Armenian issue during the Ottoman empire were accused by the government’s spokesman and minister of justice, Cemil Çiçek, of “stabbing the Turkish nation in the back”. The conference was postponed, but after an international outcry it was finally reconvened at Bilgi University four months later.
More fuel was added to the fire last November when the defence minister, Vecdi Gönül, on the 70th anniversary of the death of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, said: “If there were Greeks in the Aegean and Armenians in most places in Turkey today, would it be the same nation state?”
But a fortnight ago the chief of the Turkish general staff, İlker Başbuğ, in a keynote speech reminded his audience that Atatürk had said it was the people of Turkey, without ethnic and religious distinction, who had founded the Republic of Turkey. If he had spoken of the Turkish people, that would be an ethnic definition.
Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pledged to recognise the Armenian genocide to garner the substantial Armenian-American vote during their presidential campaigns, but now geopolitical reality has set in. On Obama’s visit to Turkey at the beginning of this month, the US president maintained that his views on the incidents of 1915 had not changed and in his statement last Friday on Armenian Remembrance Day he reiterated that stance.
However, without using the dreaded g-word, Obama instead spoke of “one of the great atrocities of the 20th century” and “Meds Yeghern” – the Armenian for the “Great Catastrophe”. His goal was still “a full, frank and just acknowledgement of the facts” and he strongly supported efforts by the Turkish and Armenian people to work through their painful history in an honest, open and constructive manner.
While trying to manoeuvre between a rock and a hard place, Obama was met with criticism from both sides. The chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America expressed his “sharp disappointment” and Erdogan called Obama’s remarks “an unacceptable interpretation of history”.
Nine months after Dink was murdered, his son Arant Dink and another Turkish-Armenian journalist received suspended sentences of one year’s imprisonment for using the term genocide. The Turkish court in its judgment stated: “Talk about genocide, both in Turkey and other countries, unfavourably affects national security and the national interest.”
After the first world war, the treaty of Sèvres in 1920 was the instrument by which the victorious allies dismembered Ottoman Turkey and divided the spoils among themselves. It was only after the Turkish war of independence and a heroic struggle under the leadership of Atatürk that the treaty of Lausanne (1923) established the borders of modern Turkey.
The Armenian diaspora is also responsible for Turkey’s fears of partition. In December 2007, journalist Harut Sasunian, a prominent member of the Armenian community in the US, said the ultimate objective of Armenians was to get recognition of their genocide claims and to obtain territory and compensation from Turkey.
According to the prominent Turkish historian Taner Akcam, “Turkey needs to stop treating the discussion of history as a category of crime”. Perhaps the rapprochement between Turkey and Armenia and the agreement on a “roadmap” to normalise ties will one day lead to that.
Published on : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/apr/29/armenian-genocide-turkey
