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They say 'incident'. To me it's genocide
When its finest novelist attacked Turkey's bloody past, he became a hero for Armenians and Turks alike, says Nouritza Matossian Sunday February 27, 2005 The Observer There is a Turkish saying: 'A sword won't cut without inspiration from the pen.' Orhan Pamuk, wielder of Turkey's finest pen, has spoken and cut a swath through his country's conscience. His most recent novel Snow was set in Kars and peppered with references to the Armenian culture of that formerly Armenian city. Brilliant novelist, translated in 20 languages, winner of international prizes, he has become a hate figure. His crime was one sentence in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger this month. 'Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in Turkey. Almost no one dares speak but me, and the nationalists hate me for that.' All hell broke loose. The press attacked him for dishonouring the Turkish state and incitement to racial violence. He has been called a liar, 'a miserable creature' and a 'black writer' in the daily Hurriyet. Professor Hikmet Ozdemir, head of the Armenian studies department at the Turkish Union of Historians, rejected his statement as a 'great lie'. A lone voice, Halil Berktay, professor at Sabanci University, supported Pamuk: 'In 1915-16 about 800,000 or one million Armenians were killed for sure.' Mehmet Üçok, an attorney, filed charges at the Kayseri public prosecutor's office. Another charge was filed by Kayseri Bar Association attorney Orhan Pekmezci: 'Pamuk has made groundless claims against the Turkish identity, the Turkish military and Turkey as a whole. He should be punished for violating Articles 159 and 312 of the Turkish penal code. He made a statement provoking the people to hatred and animosity through the media, which is defined as a crime in Article 312.' I find this ironic. My mother's family was deported from the historic Armenian city of Kayseri, leaving their murdered menfolk behind. I was recently in Istanbul lecturing on my biography of Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky, the basis for the controversial genocide movie Ararat. Official permission for my talk required me not to utter the word 'genocide' to refer to the Ottoman empire's systematic deportations, tortures and killings of two million Armenians which Gorky witnessed. I might refer to those 'incidents'. The crime has never been acknowledged by successive Turkish governments, Britain or the United States. Recent discussions of Turkey's possible entry into the EU were dominated by France and other countries demanding that Turkey first admit the Armenian genocide. What if Britain had a law forbidding criticism of its history, identity, or the armed forces? Turkey has far to go to reach the legal standards of EU members, with their humane and non-discriminatory laws aiming at standards of truth and reason. So much hatred. So much anger. What does Turkey have to hide? 'Pamuk has always defended freedom of speech and thought, the rights of minorities,' writes Hrant Dink, owner of the Armenian Turkish-language weekly Agos . 'For 90 years we Armenians have been abused, insulted and discriminated against. We cannot enter certain professions, we Turkified our names. We have learnt to survive and endure without protest. Maybe it is time that the Turkish people also learnt tolerance and endurance from us.' In London, a thinly veiled propaganda exercise at the Royal Academy trumpets Turkish empires, making far-reaching claims about the origins of the 'Turkic peoples'. Echoes of master-race ideology. Pamuk himself writes in the Academy journal: 'Turks gripped by romantic myths of nationalism are keen to establish that we come from Mongolia or central Asia... scholars have come no closer to offering definitive or convincing evidence to link us with a particular time and place.' In the show the contributions of other nationals in the Ottoman empire - Armenians, Greeks and Jews - are not credited. Yet their handiwork is everywhere, in architecture, pottery, carpets, manuscripts. Britain colludes in this travesty for the sake of oil interests in Azerbaijan, Turkey's closest ally. Akin Birdal, vice-president of the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, emphasises: 'No matter we have come to the 90th year of "incidents" Orhan Pamuk talked about, these will of course be discussed on domestic and international platforms. The aggressions carried out against Pamuk are those which have been carried out against thought. Pamuk is not alone.' Pamuk has cut the Gordian knot. He has become the hero of every right-thinking person in Turkey and every Armenian worldwide. ·Nouritza Matossian is author of 'Black Angel, A Life of Arshile Gorky' . Observer Postbag:
Most countries have a murky past and now, with an ever-growing European Union and an easier acceptance of different ethnicities and religions, the way forward has been not the suppression of history but an acknowledgement of past genocides. There can only be a yawning gap if the Armenian legacy is left out of Turkish history. Would anyone in the civilised world be so insensitive or stupid today as to celebrate, for example, American slavery and the subjugation of African Americans? Yet this is precisely what the Royal Academy trumpets in its Turkish exhibition. How would the world react if, instead of positive discrimination for African Americans, the US denied there had ever been slavery and persecuted anyone who challenged the official line? There would be outrage. The Turkish domination of peoples for centuries was a dark nightmare for the people at the receiving end. It was hardly different from total subjugation, slavery and oppression. For the Armenians it was also interspersed with regular pogroms and eventual genocide. Turkish official society is permeated with xenophobia in general and denial, extreme racism and blind hatred towards the Armenians in particular, as Ms Matossian's article amply demonstrates. The few brave individuals who think freely and independently are considered traitors and threats to that society, and they are persecuted. So why is a blind eye turned to all this, and why is there orchestrated propaganda campaign to portray Turkey as a cradle of civilisation and culture when it manifestly is not? Nouritza Matossian claims the Ottoman government 'systematically deported, tortured and killed two million Armenians', which she labels as genocide, without a shred of scholarly and legally admissible evidence. The claim has not been impartially and judicially established, and does not meet the provisions of the United Nations Prevention and Repression of Genocide Resolution of December 1948. The Turkish government is being accused of denying the Armenian genocide; but one can only deny what has been impartially and expertly examined and fully established through research and judicial process. Could Ms Matossian tell us as to when and how were the Turco-Armenian incidents of 1915-16 subjected to such a process and which international court of justice decided that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to anything that amounts to 'genocide' under the UN convention?
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