Joint Declaration: Enough with this Turkey!
On the occasion of the Dersim Conference held at European Parliament on November 13, 2008, five Brussels organisations belonging to different communities coming out from Turkey issued the following joint declaration:
For three millennium, Anatolia has been the homeland or have passed through it countless people. It is a land where coexisted and coexist today Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Jews, Zazas, as well as a number of other minorities such as Lazes, Circassians, Pomaks, Yörüks, and others. Certain of these people and the majority have adopted the Apostolic Christianity, others have converted to Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy, some became Nestorians or Chaldeans; while others turned Sunni Muslims, Shiites or Alevi Muslims; and still others remained Yezidis or Mazdeists or kept their shamanic beliefs.
This coexistence naturally led to disputes – sometime very violent – but it led also and above all to a cultural closeness and to an ethnic intermingling which challenge all ideologies that are based on racial or linguistic purity: today, the overwhelming majority of Turkey’s inhabitants are of mixed origins.
However, the Ottoman Empire and then after it the Kemalist republic have artificially reshaped the land’s multy-ethnic identity by reducing the dominated people into slavery, by denying their identity, and then by promoting the doctrine of the Turkish “race” as the “essential being”. This fascist like thinking has led the authorities perpetrate abominable mass murders such as:
- The Armenian and Assyro-Chaldean Genocide (1915-1916)
- The Koçkiri massacre of Kurds, Alevis and Kizilbachs (1919-1921)
- The brutal expulsion of Greeks (1923-1924)
- Massacres of Kurds and Assyrians after the revolt of Sheikh Said (1925-1928)
- The Dersim Massacre of Kurds, Alevis and Kizilbachs (1935-1938)
- The iniquitous laws and the deportations of Armenians, Jews and Greeks (1942)
- Pogroms of lstanbul and Izmir against Greeks, Armenians and Jews (1955)
- War against Kurds (since 1984)
It has to be recalled, that since its creation, the Kemalist republic targets and represses all political opponents to the regime, whatever their ethnic origin, including Turkish democrats.Lastly, the ultranationalist and genocide denial policies of Ankara utilise the Turkish immigrants in the European countries and with the complicity of certain local European political leaders incite them to hatred towards the Armenian, Assyrian and Kurdish communities.
Facing this ideology to hate and its bloody consequences, the peoples of Anatolia:
- Rebuke the idea of any racial of religious supremacy and reaffirm their indefectible attachment to the individual fundamental rights of all the Turkish citizens as well as to the collective rights of the people living in this State;
- Reject the fiction of a monolithic Turkey as extolled by the Turkish State and, on the contrary, call upon the State to pride on the ethnic wealth and diversity of the Anatolian people;
- Ask again the Turkish State to rehabilitate itself in rehabilitating the victims of its past exactions, in committing itself on the path of the political recognition of these exactions and in giving an end to their denial or glorification;
- Proclaim their conviction that the incapacity of Turkey to progress on the path of democracy, as well as the state of economical and social backwardness of its eastern provinces are closely linked to the war conducted by this State towards its own citizens;
- Reaffirm their commitment to keep on the political struggle so that Turkey recognize, denounce and disassociate from its past and present crimes; to transform it into a democratic State which would respect its minorities as its various political forces, united in their diversity.
Association of the Democrat Armenians of Belgium
Associations of the Assyrians of Belgium
Kurdish Institute of Brussels
European Armenian Federation
Info-Turk Foundation
PKK WEB SITESINDEN DIGERALINTILAR
Intellectuals Launch A Campaign To Apologize Armenians
“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. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers, I apologize them.”
This is the text of the campaign that was introduced by Journalist Ali Bayramoğlu, professors Baskın Oran and Ahmet İnsel and Dr. Cengiz Aktar, with the support of some the other academicians. The text will be opened for signature in the internet for one year, starting on the new years day.
Aktar told Tülay Şubatlı of daily Vatan why they were apologizing:
“We are apologizing for not being able to discuss, not talk openly about this topic for such a long time, nearly one hundred years.”
Aktar described the purpose of the campaign as such:
“What happened to the Armenians is not well-known; people are forced to forget it, and the subject is highly provocative. The Turks have heard this mostly from their elders, their grandfathers. But, the subject has not become an objective historical narrative. Therefore, today many people in Turkey, with all the good intentions, think that nothing happened to the Armenians .”
“The official history has been saying that this incident happened through secondary, not very important, and even mutual massacres; they push the idea that it was an ordinary incident explainable by the conditions of the First World War. However, unfortunately, the facts are very different. Perhaps there is only one fact and it is that the Kurds and Turks are still here, but the Armenians are not. The subject of this campaign is the individuals. This is a voice coming from the individual’s conscience. Those who want to apologize can apologize, and those who do not should not.” (BIA, December 5, 2008)
Nationalists react to intellectuals’ courageous apology
Turkey’s nationalists have been incensed about a group of Turkish intellectuals who recently apologized publicly for the “great disaster Ottoman Armenians suffered in 1915” in a country where even discussing Armenian claims of genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire can be cause for arrest.
The reaction to a petition initiated by a group of intellectuals, led by popular professors Baskın Oran and Ahmet İnsel and journalists Ali Bayramoğlu and Cengiz Aktar, personally apologizing for the forced deportation of Armenians from their homes in the Turkish heartland in 1915, has shown yet again how courageous one must be to publicly announce his or her unorthodox opinions in Turkey, particularly if those opinions contradict the official ideology.
In a phone interview with Today’s Zaman, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) deputy for Erzurum Zeki Ertugay accused the signatories of being in “a state of hysteria.” He stressed that it was not Armenians who suffered at the hand of Ottoman Turks, but Turks who were assaulted by Armenians. “Erzurum suffered most from that cruelty.
Every house has memories of people butchered by Armenians. I regard apologizing to the Armenians as an insult to the Turkish nation. People who call themselves intellectuals have not even been enlightened about their own history. A stain of shame like genocide has never taken place in the history of the Turkish nation. If there is somebody who needs to apologize, it is the Armenians and the Western states that provoked the Armenians against the Turks by promising them a state of their own.”
Behiç Çelik, a MHP deputy from Mersin, was equally enraged. “It is impossible to refer to these people as intellectuals. The so-called intellectuals trying to apologize to Armenians do not know the past. They don’t know history. There has never been any genocide in the history of the Turkish nation. Apologizing even for the deportation is not acceptable, because deportations have been carried out by many nations, not just Turkey. The US relocated Native Americans, Russia deported the Kazaks and the Crimean Tatars. Their intellectuals never apologized to anybody.”
Ultranationalist media outlets and pundits were also furious. The Yeni Çağ (New Age) daily referred to the petition as a “campaign to smear Turkey.” Yusuf Halaçoğlu, a well-known ultranationalist who formerly headed the Turkish Historical Society (TTK), said the real target here was connected to Turkey’s new foreign policy initiative, started in early September with President Abdullah Gül and Foreign Minister Ali Babacan visiting Yerevan for a soccer match between the national teams of Turkey and Armenia. “The aim here is to foment public opinion to be able to take that earlier initiative to the next level,” Halaçoğlu said.
He said only 22,000 people died before 1915, the year of the forced deportation. “Will they apologize for those, too? Or will the Armenians announce with whom they cooperated when the Ottoman Empire was fighting world powers? Are they going to publicly announce how many Armenians were part of the French and Russian armies at the time? Armenians, as people who cooperated with the enemy in their own countries, have lost this war. This is the state of affairs as it stands today,” he said.
Historian Cemalettin Taşkıran was quoted in nationalist newspapers as saying, “This is the biggest betrayal that could be shown to our forefathers.” Taşkıran said the campaign was set up to hurt the unity of the Turkish nation and to prepare the way for Turkey’s eventual recognition of Armenian claims of genocide.
The intellectuals’ group is calling on other people to sign the petition posted online, which reads as follows: “I cannot conscientiously accept the indifference to the great disaster that Ottoman Armenians suffered in 1915, and its denial. I reject this injustice and, acting of my own will, I share the feelings and pains of my Armenian brothers and sisters, and I apologize to them.”
The organizers of the campaign have underlined that first they will collect signatures from intellectuals and they will then open a secure Web site to collect signatures.
The Armenian population that was in Turkey before the establishment of Turkish Republic was forced to emigrate in 1915, and, according to some, the conditions of this expulsion are the basis of Armenian claims of genocide. (Zaman, E.BARIŞ ALTINTAŞ, ERCAN YAVUZ, 6 December 2008)