Petition seeks to smash Turkish taboo over Armenian massacre

Last Updated: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 | 3:24 PM ET Comments8Recommend26

CBC News

A group of 200 Turkish intellectuals is tackling one of the great taboos of Turkish society — the 1916 massacres of Armenians in the country.

A group of writers, journalists and academics, many of them prominent members in their fields, has posted an online apology for the killings and invited ordinary Turks to sign it.

“My conscience does not accept that [we] remain insensitive toward and deny the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected in 1915,” reads the apology, posted online on Monday.

‘Many djinns are out of their bottle, and many taboos are becoming public and people are freely discussing them.’—Cengiz Aktar, professor at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University

“I reject this injustice, share in the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers, and apologize to them.”

The apology stops short of using “genocide” to describe the massacres because use of the word would be “extremely counterproductive,” according to Cengiz Aktar, one of the authors of the petition.

More than 6,200 ordinary Turks had signed the petition as of Tuesday morning, when Aktar, a professor of European union studies at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University, spoke with CBC’s Q cultural affairs program.

“We have not had the opportunity to talk about these horrible things in the last 92 years and we told ourselves maybe we will offer a forum to the ordinary Turks to apologize, to make their conscience talk,” Aktar said.

The treatment of Armenians in Turkey has been such a taboo that Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk faced prosecution after he said in an interview that a million Armenians had died.

Aktar’s friend, the Armenian journalist and editor Hrant Dink, was shot and killed last year after being prosecuted over his comments about the massacre.

But Aktar insists there have been changes in Turkish society and attitudes that encouraged the intellectuals, who range across the political spectrum, to come forward.

“When I had the idea of starting an online petition, I had the feeling, this feeling that there is something in the heart and minds of the Turks regarding these events. And it doesn’t necessarily correspond what the Turkish state is telling them the past 90-plus years,” he said.

‘Taboos becoming public’

Turkey has been reforming itself in an effort to join the European Union, and reforms implemented in 2002 and 2004 “are conducive for a freer environment and a more worldly culture, and we are now collecting the fruits of that,” Aktar said.

He said he was partly motivated by the killing of his friend, Dink, but also by Turkey’s increasing openness.

“Many djinns are out of their bottle, and many taboos are becoming public and people are freely discussing them,” he said.

One potential benefit would be fewer attempts at censorship of journalists or writers who mention that period of history.

Using the word “genocide” might have polarized the issue and made it less likely that ordinary people would take notice, Aktar said.

The government has not responded to the petition, though the two ruling nationist parties have condemned it.

However, Turks themselves seem interested and each signature on the petition makes it more likely that the government will have to respond in some way, he said.

“I would dream of sizable figure by end of year to give the world a very strong message,” Aktar said.

Historians estimate that, in the last days of the Ottoman Empire, up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks.

Armenians, including many in the diaspora spread across Europe and North America, have long pushed for the deaths to be recognized.

Turkey and Armenia recently have taken steps toward repairing ties, with President Abdullah Gul becoming the first Turkish leader to visit Armenia this September.

There are also steps being taken to reopen the border between the two countries, closed since 1993, when Turkey protested Armenia’s occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh.

With files from Q, Associated Press