1915: Genocide or not? | Hurriyet Daily News

After the Pope’s remarks, the calls from the European Parliament stating that “1915 is a genocide, Ankara should open its archives and make peace with Yerevan” received harsh reactions from Turkey (...)

It was known that remarks like these would come during the 100th anniversary of 1915, but obviously nobody in Turkey had done their homework. More precisely, the government chose a simplistic approach of thinking “we will publish a condolences message with a language that suits us, and then it is all over.”

However, the government’s first reactions reflect a guilty psychology. It takes a defensive approach, while claiming responsibility for the actions of the Committee of Union and Progress (Ittihat and Terakki, or Young Turks). Some of the reactions are gory. For example, President Tayyip Erdogan spoke of deporting Armenians with Turkish citizenship, just like deporting Armenians living illegally in this country. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, on the other hand, actually accepted the genocide when he talked about “opening” the archives of Europe’s history too. Isn’t reacting to the West’s “genocide pressure” by referring to colonialism and asking “what happened to the Aborigines, Indian Americans, and African tribes?” just another way of saying that genocide took place in 1915”?

This article published in daily Milliyet on April 22, 2015 received the Global Political Trends (GPoT) Center’s ‘Turkey–Armenia Journalism’ award. It was translated from Turkish by Muhammed Ammash.