Armenian Muslim Hidir Boztas in his yard on April 23, 2013 in the Turkish village of Mazgirt in Tunceli province. For nearly a century, Muslim Armenians kept silent to avoid persecution but now some are openly claiming their roots. BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images[/caption]“For years, I have told my foreign friends that there is no such issue as the Armenian question,” confided a Turkish businessman in his fifties. “Now, I feel cheated,” he said in a private conversation we had recently.
His sense of feeling duped over the facts of what happened to the Armenian community in the last days of the Ottoman Empire is not shared by the majority in Turkey. However, the number of Turkish people who are becoming aware that they were not told the truth is growing by the day.
“Doubt is the key word; it is always growing,” said Cengiz Aktar, an academic who launched an online petition to apologize for the mass killings during World War I, which Armenians say amount to genocide.
“My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to, and the denial of, the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915,” reads the statement that has garnered 32,500 signatures in four years. “The big bulk of the signatures came in the very first months,” said Aktar.
The campaign marked one of the milestones in the changing climate in Turkey concerning the 1915 massacres of Armenians. It would have been inconceivable to undertake such an initiative only a few years before.
In 2005 a conference about Ottoman Armenians, to be held at a Turkish state university, was cancelled at the last minute due to fierce opposition to the meeting; government officials branded the organizers “traitors.” The conference, which questioned Turkey’s official line on the massacres, was held four months later at a private university.
The conference broke a major taboo in Turkish academia. It was followed by further academic research and meetings—not only on Armenians, but also on other non-Muslim minorities such as the Greeks, Jews and Syriac Christians who continued to experience persecution during the Republican era.
“There is certainly change in the society, from the point of total denial to an awareness that something bad has happened,” Garo Paylan, a prominent member of the Turkish–Armenian community, recently told me.
Taboos are also being broken in the publishing and broadcasting sectors, where it is no longer unusual to see programs or books dedicated to the stories of those who discover their ancestors are of Armenian origin, or that members of their families were orphaned after their parents were killed in the massacres.
“There are many in Anatolia who were hiding their Armenian origin [who are] now going public,” said Paylan. “Young generations in Anatolian towns are questioning their parents more on what happened to the Armenians in their city, and older generations are now less shy about telling what happened.”
“Civil society is going through a memory work and it is independent of the government. This is how it should be; so it is a very healthy process,” said Aktar.
The assassination of Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007 also proved to be a turning point as thousands attended the funeral raising banners that read “We are all Hrant Dink.”
Then came another first, in 2010: on April 24, the day Armenians all over the world commemorate the 1915 tragedy, a small group gathered in Istanbul to do the same. While it faced opposition protests, the commemoration made the headlines in Turkey. This year, the commemoration was organized for the fourth time. The opposition protests are fading with each year and cities where commemorations have taken place now include Malatya, Adana, İzmir, Urfa, Diyarbakır and Tunceli.
I believe the democratic reform process undertaken over the last two decades as part of Turkey’s bid to join the European Union played a crucial role in changing the mentality of Turks towards the Armenian massacres. The reforms on fundamental freedoms that gained momentum during the first two terms of the ruling Justice and Development Party have certainly led to an easing in freedom of thought and expression, although this still remains below international standards.
Paylan feels that the Kurdish fight for rights has emboldened Turkish Armenians to become more vocal on the issue; previously, younger generations of Armenians were asked by older generations to remain silent.
The relative political stability in Turkey, economic achievements, as well as a stronger standing in the international arena have certainly boosted self confidence in Turkey, which makes reconciliation with the past easier.
“I saw that the society is much more ahead of the state,” Alexis Govciyan, a prominent member of the French-Armenian community told a Turkish newspaper after attending this year’s commemoration in Istanbul.
