TURKEY: Whatever happened to Armenians in 1915, the survivors have carried a burden for 90 years. But the space for intelligent debate is growing rapidly in Turkey, reports Nicholas Birch
April 24th, the date Armenians worldwide have chosen to mark the mass deportation and murder of their kin by the Ottoman Empire, has always been an uncomfortable time for Turkey. Each year, eyes in Ankara turn nervously to Washington. What will the US president say in his annual address to the diaspora? Last year, when George Bush talked of "annihilation", there were sighs of relief here. Another year gone without a mention of genocide.
This year, the 90th anniversary of the massacres, the tension is if anything higher. Though senior Turkish government ministers took the unprecedented step last month of calling for the events of 1915 to be "researched under United Nations arbitration", since then, if anything, they have redoubled their efforts to avoid confronting their country's past.
"They allege one million people were killed," head of the state-funded Turkish History Foundation Yusuf Halacoglu told state officials last week. "But where are the bodies? One million people do not just disappear into thin air." The total number of Armenian casualties, he added, could not exceed 100,000.
But as the story of Fethiye Cetin shows, the official discourse slowly seems to be losing ground among ordinary Turks.
Cetin had always assumed the grandmother who brought her up was Seher, pillar of an apparently typical Anatolian family. It wasn't until she was a student that she learned the truth.
"My father, mother and brother are in America," Seher, who was by then in her 70s, told her. "If anybody can find them, you can. Find them for me." Gradually, the old lady told the rest of her story. Her name was Heranush, and she had been born an Armenian. Nine when the massacres started, she had cowered in the churchyard as the village men were murdered and thrown into the river. Forced with other women and children to begin walking south to Syria, she was abducted and handed over to a police corporal. He brought her up as his own child.
Such tales are common in Turkey's eastern provinces. Locals called people like Heranush "those the sword left behind". What makes her story unusual is that her granddaughter decided to make it into a book.
"She had hidden the things she told me for over 60 years," explains Cetin, sitting in her small Istanbul law office. "I felt they needed to be given a voice." She also wanted to help move the debate away from barren disputes over terminology and statistics: 100,000 killed, no 500,000, no one million; genocide, no ethnic cleansing, no the unfortunate side effect of civil war.
Such arguments, she says, "hide the lives and deaths of individuals and do nothing to encourage people to listen". Turks have certainly been listening to her. Published last November, My Grandmother is already into its fifth edition. Cetin has lost count of the phone calls and letters she has received, of support, or from people with similar stories to tell.
Cetin attributes the success of her book to the growing impatience Turks feel for the various state discourses - on Armenians, Kurds, Turkish identity - that have traditionally held sway in Turkey.
"People appear to accept the official version. In fact they don't," she says. "When books like this come out, even people with very different family histories realise they aren't the only ones to question what they have been taught."
The new spirit of openness is nowhere more evident than on the Armenian issue. Five years ago, the taboo was almost total. Cetin has no doubt her book would not have been accepted in 2000, when her grandmother died. Now there are Armenian cookery books and novels. This January an Istanbul gallery hit the headlines with an exhibition of 500 postcards showing Turkish Armenians between 1900 and 1914.
"The history taught in schools is told as if only Turks had ever lived in Anatolia, no one else," curator Osman Koker told reporters. "That is deeply unhealthy."
He might have added that Turkish schoolchildren, including children of Istanbul's 50,000-strong Armenian community, are now obliged by law to write essays refuting evidence of the "so-called genocide".
One of the first Turks to break the Armenian taboo was historian Halil Berktay, who in October 2000 raised a storm of protest when he told a Turkish newspaper he believed the events of 1915 were indeed genocide. Today, he is convinced the space for intelligent debate on the past is growing rapidly.
"Beneath the bluster," he says, "the Turkish establishment position is crumbling."
What angers him, though, is the politicisation of the Armenian issue in the EU. Poland's parliament recognised the Armenian genocide last week, joining France. Right-wing politicians in France and Germany have over the past few months implied Turkey should too, if it wants to join the EU.