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Turkey 'Lost Battle With Truth' Over Genocide - Academic

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  • Turkey 'Lost Battle With Truth' Over Genocide - Academic

    TURKEY 'LOST BATTLE WITH TRUTH' OVER GENOCIDE - ACADEMIC

    10:45 * 21.04.15

    Turkey has lost the battle with truth over its refusal to acknowledge
    the mass killings of Armenians during World War I as genocide, a
    Turkish academic who helped break a long-standing taboo on the issue
    said, according to AFP.

    Cengiz Aktar was one of four Turkish intellectuals who in 2008 launched
    a campaign known as "Ozur Diliyoruz" ("I Apologise") calling for a
    collective apology for the "great catastrophe" inflicted on Armenians
    from 1915.

    Armenians in Armenia and the diaspora will on April 24 mark the 100th
    anniversary of what they see as the start of a campaign of genocide
    by Ottoman forces in World War I to wipe them out of Anatolia.

    But Turkey to this day has vehemently denied any genocide took place
    and the Turkish state can in theory under the penal code prosecute
    anyone who dares to do so.

    "I think that Turkey has lost its battle with truth," Aktar, a
    political scientist at the private Sabanci university in Istanbul
    told AFP in an interview.

    "No-one believes any more in this primitive negationism. The skeleton
    is so big that it just won't go back in the cupboard."

    President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last year presented Armenians with
    unprecedented condolences for a shared tragedy but Aktar said it does
    not seem that the government is prepared to go any further.

    "This was better than nothing but it is still very far from what the
    crimes committed in 1915 requires."

    Aktar credits Erdogan, who has dominated Turkey for over a decade,
    with ending many of the taboos in Turkey but said that on the Armenian
    issue "he stopped on the way".

    "What is lacking in Turkey is a visionary person who is prepared to
    tackle this question head on.

    "The sole aim of the government in the year 2015 is to limit its
    losses," he said.

    Aktar said that one of the main problems was with education, saying
    many Turks do not know what happened and some use the word "Armenian"
    as an insult.

    "And when there is some education it is so misguided and falsified
    that it is an insult," he added.

    http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/turkey-lost-battle-with-truth-over-armenia-genocide-academic/article/431275#ixzz3Xt38hgaq

    http://www.tert.am/en/news/2015/04/21/turkish-academic-on-genocide/1652621

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