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Turkish academics in apology to Armenians

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    Turkish academics in apology to Armenians

    Intellectuals break taboo to acknowledge genocide by Ottoman Turks

    By Nicholas Birch in Istanbul

    Monday, 15 December 2008
    Independent.co.uk Web

    Around 200 Turkish intellectuals and academics are to apologise on the
    internet today for the ethnic cleansing of Armenians during the First
    World War, in the most public sign yet that Turkey's most sensitive
    taboo is slowly melting away.


    "My conscience does not accept the denial of the great catastrophe that
    the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915," the text prepared by
    the group reads. "I reject this injustice and ... empathise with the
    feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers. I apologise to them."

    Turkey accepts that many Armenians were killed during the collapse of
    the Ottoman empire, but insists they were victims of civil strife and
    that Muslim Turks also died. Most Western historians agree that the
    ethnic cleansing that killed roughly 700,000 Armenians amounted to
    genocide.

    The academics are inviting Turks to sign a petition and add their
    voices to the apology. "Our concern is being able to look at ourselves
    in the mirror in the morning ... freeing ourselves by finally facing up
    to the past," said the political scientist Baskin Oran, one of the four
    organisers of the initiative.

    However, nationalists have reacted angrily to the internet apology
    before it has even gone live, saying it is a national betrayal. Counter
    campaigns refusing to apologise have sprung up. The head of a
    nationalist party with 70 seats in parliament described the initiative
    as an example of the "frightening extent to which degeneracy and
    corrosion have spread".

    The public apology coincides with a diplomatic rapprochement between
    Turkey and Armenia, whose shared border has been closed since the
    Nagorny-Karabakh war in 1993 and who have been locked in almost 100
    years of hostility. President Abdullah Gul made history in September
    when he became the first Turkish leader to visit Armenia, and the two
    countries have been talking about restoring full diplomatic relations.

    Publicly talking about what happened in 1915 remains a sensitive issue
    in Turkey. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted
    in 2005 for saying a million Armenians had died. In January 2007, the
    Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was gunned down by a nationalist
    teenager for advocating a more humane debate on the issue.

    Yet, while almost every Turkish town has a street named after the chief
    organisers of the massacres, the taboo surrounding the Armenian issue
    is nowhere near as total as it was a decade ago. Bookshops sell books
    by Western and Armenian historians alongside texts written by defenders
    of the official Turkish thesis. Universities organise conferences on
    the issue. Istanbul galleries run exhibitions of postcards showing the
    central place Armenians had in the life of the late Ottoman Empire. And
    a 2005 memoir, My Grandmother, in which an Istanbul lawyer recounts her
    discovery that the woman who brought her up was born an Armenian,
    sparked widespread and sympathetic debate.

    One of the first Turks to break the taboo was the historian Halil
    Berktay, who received death threats for months after telling a Turkish
    newspaper in October 2000 that he believed the Ottoman Empire committed
    genocide. Today, he is convinced the space for intelligent debate is
    growing. "Beneath the bluster," he says, "the Turkish establishment
    position is crumbling."
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