ARMENIA AT CROSSROADS

Personal comments on the Seminar given by Gohar Ghandilyan.

Armenia is a country with a bitter history, especially that related to the Twentieth Century. Armenians have a big concern about one of the most horrible instances of ethnic cleansing: The Armenian Genocide.

The area comprised between the Anatolian peninsula and the Caucasus has always been home to very diverse cultures, religions and languages. The Ottoman Empire extended throughout all this region until the beginning of XX Century. During the Ottoman Empire, Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, Jews lived in a relative peace and mutual understanding. The Ottoman Empire had regional governments (Eyalets-Viyalets) and religious authorities (Millets) that made its government an almost federal government. However, at the beginning of the XXth Century, a group of Turkish students and army officers called the Young Turks started campaigns of reform for the Ottoman Empire, in what resulted in its final dismantling. The Young Turks supported the creation of a modern secular state, ethnically Turkish and free from the old feudal Ottoman structures.

World War I came in 1914 and the look for enemies became easy in a multicultural Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Armenian community was blamed for possible conspiracy against the Ottomans and their possible union with Russia. It is because of this that a process of ethnic cleansing against Armenians began in this region, a process that killed around 1 million Armenian Ottomans, who died either as the result of massacres or as the result of forced evictions.



These events, which are still today alive in the modern Armenia as an open wound in their recent history, have never been recognized by the Turkish government and are taboo in the Turkish society. As a matter of fact, talking about the topic or raising the possibility of naming what happened as “genocide” is considered a crime against the Republic, under law 301, and can end up with prison charges. This is what actually happened to Nobel Prize Laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Turkish mainstream opinion considers the facts happened at the time as the consequence of war and, even amongst the most progressive spheres, disregards the topic as exaggerate and considers the denomination of “genocide” as inappropriate. Not only this, but a whole range of international organizations and lobbies have been created in order to campaign against the recognition of such events. An important part of this campaign is funded and instigated by the Turkish institutions through their education programs and their ministry of culture, who has created parallel historical events in which the victims of the genocide were Turks at the hands of Armenians. Examples of this are the museum of Van, in which there was supposed evidence of a genocide of Turks on the hands of Armenians, or a DVD which was given for free with Time Magazine in 2006, in which pure defamation was thrown to the Ottoman Armenian community and a Turkish genocide at the hands of them was depicted.

However, it is a fact that most serious historians and scholars recognize the veracity of the events and the intentions of the Ottoman authorities to expell Armenians from the future Turkey, the same way Kurds were opressed and still are in some way in South-Eastern Anatolia. Things are starting to change and now we can see even Turkish scholars that assert the veractiy of the Genocide, as we can see in the following speech by professor Taner Akçam: