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Turkish writers bring the personal back into the Armenia controversy
Nicholas Birch
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday December 9 2008 08.00 GMT
Two years ago, researching a story about the desertification of the central Anatolian plateau, I spent a day driving around with a journalist from a local town. A former military officer, Bulent was a man of wide interests. He was working on a dictionary of the local dialect. He was hugely knowledgeable about the early Christians who had carved troglodyte churches into the vast sinkholes that dot the region. "It is a pity they had to leave," he said.
Later that evening, I read his column in the copy of the newspaper he had given me. It was a blinkered, nationalist tirade. I did a double-take. Was this the same man I had met?
"That's his Ataturk voice," a Turkish friend joked. "All Turks have an Ataturk voice."
The sometimes shocking disparity between what Turks say in public and what they say in private is nowhere clearer than on the issue of what happened to the Ottoman Empire's Armenians after 1915.
In the once heavily Armenian areas in the southeast of the country, villagers freely admit that what happened amounted to mass murder on a grand scale. "Our grandfathers killed them and moved in," one imam in a village near Silvan told me. "Their bones are still visible at the foot of that cliff over there."
Both locally and internationally, meanwhile, public debate continues to betray a depressing fixation with dry statistics and terminologies. It was genocide. No, it was civil war. 1.5 million people died. Rubbish, the death toll was at most 200,000, and more Muslims died than Armenian Christians.
"Such debates hide the lives and deaths of individuals and do nothing to encourage people to listen," says Fethiye Cetin. A lawyer, Ms Cetin is the author of perhaps the most striking example of recent efforts inside Turkey to sidestep the taboos surrounding 1915.
Published in English this spring by Verso, her intensely moving 2005 memoir My Grandmother tells of how she learned as a student that the woman who had brought her up had been born an Armenian. It ends, a year after her grandmother's death, with Cetin travelling to America to meet Armenian cousins she previously didn't know existed.
The greatest advocate inside Turkey for a more humane debate was Hrant Dink, the Armenian-Turkish journalist gunned down by an ultra-nationalist teenager in January 2007. His death shed light on much that is ugly in Turkey today.
But many say it also sparked an unprecedented wave of activism among civil rights movements working on issues ranging from women's rights to the Kurdish question. "I think people realised there was no point in waiting any more," says Nil Mutluer, a feminist activist.
The four authors of last week's public apology for the events of 1915 were all Hrant Dink's friends. One of them heads a pressure group which aims to ensure his murderers are brought to justice. The other three write for the weekly newspaper – Agos – of which Dink used to be editor.
In their statements to the press, none of them have dwelled on Dink. Yet in emphasizing the importance of that most private of things – personal conscience - they are very much following the path that he opened up. Whether they will follow him all the way into a court appearance under charges of "insulting Turkishness" remains to be seen.
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