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Liberal Turks Call Pogrom A 'Genocide'

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  • Liberal Turks Call Pogrom A 'Genocide'

    LIBERAL TURKS CALL POGROM A 'GENOCIDE'
    By Iason Athanasiadis

    Washington Times
    http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/30/ liberal-turks-call-pogrom-a-genocide/
    April 30 2009

    Lend credence to the stance of Armenians about history

    ISTANBUL | A group of Istanbul's liberal intelligentsia clustered
    outside the Tutun Deposu gallery, an old tobacco warehouse in a
    working-class neighborhood of Istanbul to mark the anniversary of a
    1915 pogrom.

    Inside the renovated building, an all-female choir performed a
    selection of folk songs from the musical traditions of minorities
    persecuted during the last spasms of the Ottoman Empire.

    "The reason we call what happened a genocide," said Eren Keskin, a
    Turkish lawyer with a history of challenging the state, "is because the
    destruction wreaked on these lands was not just to the Armenians, but
    to their culture, too. Buildings, churches and cemeteries were razed."

    One of the most emotional issues bedeviling Turkish society today
    is what exactly happened in 1915 to Turkey's Armenian minority. The
    Ottoman Empire was collapsing as a new republic emerged. Newly released
    files of Ottoman official Enver Pasha reveal the disappearance of
    almost a million ethnic Armenians from population records between
    1915 and 1916.

    The Istanbul-based think tank European Stability Initiative issued a
    report on the eve of the April 24 anniversary criticizing the Turkish
    government for spending considerable political capital on fighting
    pro-genocide campaigns. "This is a battle Turkey cannot win," the
    report said.

    The day before the anniversary, the Turkish Foreign Ministry announced
    it was moving to end its 16-year blockade of Armenia that was imposed
    as a gesture to fellow Turkish ally Azerbaijan resulting from a 1993
    war over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

    However, bad blood between Turkey and Armenia goes back further,
    to the Cold War that pitted Turkey against Armenia, which was then
    part of the Soviet Union.

    During his election campaign, President Obama promised America's
    Armenian community to recognize the 1915 pogrom as genocide.

    He backed away from his pledge after a successful visit to Turkey
    in April, during which he is credited with helping to broker a
    breakthrough in Turkish-Armenian relations.

    Turkish society has largely ignored the events of 1915, which
    go untaught in public schools. Children hear little about the
    disappearance of their Armenian compatriots on forced marches across
    the Ottoman Empire's former Arab provinces of Syria and Iraq.

    Inside the anniversary ceremony, black-and-white images were broadcast
    on a screen of some of the 250 Armenian notables detained in Istanbul
    in 1915, at the beginning of the persecution.

    "Turkish society has been led to think that on 24 April, Armenian
    terrorists and criminals were arrested," said Ayse Gunaysu, one
    of the organizers. "But they were lawyers, jurists, publishers,
    intellectuals."

    The event organized by the Turkish Human Rights Association (THRA)
    is only the second public commemoration of the 1915 events in the
    Turkish Republic's 86-year history.

    "Twenty years ago, this would have been impossible," said publisher
    Rober Koptas, pointing at the activity around him. "In the long run,
    what we're doing today will give us a space to talk about issues such
    as the Armenian question, democratization and freedom of speech."

    About 150 participants crowding into the art gallery knew well not
    to tread on red lines in a country where "insulting Turkishness"
    is a punishable crime.

    In 2007, a prominent Armenian newspaper publisher was assassinated
    by right-wing extremists, sparking mass protests.

    "As long as it's not seen as a straightforward political meeting,
    it doesn't upset the nationalists," said Adnan Eksigil, the owner
    of Tutun Deposu and director of a cultural organization involved in
    resuscitating the cultures of Anatolia.

    Turkey admits that hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished in
    1915 but presents its own actions as legitimate self-defense. It
    blames the killings variously on the fog of war or on the purported
    collaboration of its Armenian citizens with an uprising sponsored by
    czarist Russia. Nationalist circles sometimes support the ethnic
    cleansing of Turkey's minorities as an essential component in
    constructing an ethnically homogeneous modern state.

    In December, Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul publicly stated that the
    deportation of Greeks and Armenians was a "very important step"
    in the construction of a Muslim national bourgeoisie.

    "If there were Greeks in the Aegean and Armenians in most places in
    Turkey today, would it be the same nation-state?" Mr. Gonul asked.

    "I don't know what words I can use to explain the importance of the
    population exchange, but if you look at the former state of affairs,
    its importance will become very clear."

    Kerem Oktem, a research associate at St. Anthony's College, Oxford
    University, said that Mr. Gonul's remarks, while racist, also
    reflect a widely held consensus "that the emergence of modern Turkey
    was predicated upon the removal or destruction of its non-Muslim
    communities."

    Today, there are signs that Turkish society is opening up to the
    idea of debating its past. Two films have been released in the past
    year that challenge the official narrative: an examination of a 1955
    state-sponsored pogrom against the Greeks and a biography of Turkish
    leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk that breaches historical taboos, such
    as his drinking habit.

    In December, 200 Turkish intellectuals launched an Internet petition
    titled "I Apologize."

    Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacted angrily, saying there was
    "no reason" to apologize. Sixty former ambassadors rallied to publicly
    call the petition an act of betrayal.

    However, such debates hardly percolate beyond elite intellectual and
    political circles. In the working-class neighborhood around Tutun
    Deposu, none of the locals accepted there had been a genocide.

    "I don't think the Turks were involved in a genocide," said Mustafa
    Ozel, a worker in a print shop. "Since the Ottoman period, we Turks
    have been peaceful and based our behavior on justice and a peaceful
    society."

    Feyzi Atak owns the Bahceli Cafe next to the Tutun Deposu gallery. His
    exclusively male clientele gathers throughout the day to play cards,
    drink tea and smoke cigarettes. The often unemployed locals from the
    surrounding area were poles apart from the sophisticated crowd inside
    the gallery.

    "I'm against the debate of what our grandparents did to each other,"
    said Mr. Atak as he sat alongside two friends, one of whom wears
    a lapel pin of the Turkish flag. "It just clouds our children's
    judgment."

    "The Armenians are wrong to make such a fuss about it," said Fatma
    Ciftci, a passer-by. "The Armenians maintained very good historical
    records while the Ottomans didn't, and that was the gravest historical
    mistake we made."

    Turkey recently announced that it has opened up its Ottoman-era
    historical archives to inspection. Though the term "genocide" had
    not been coined yet in 1915, the U.S. ambassador at the time found a
    more-graphic term to describe the events in his urgent reports to the
    State Department, describing the systematic slaughtering of Armenians
    as "race murder."

    Iason Athanasiadis is reporting from Turkey on a grant from the
    Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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