"My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers. I apologize to them."
This public statement, signed by about 100 liberal intellectuals and posted on the Internet for wider involvement has, as one expects, ushered in heated debates. This was obviously the inevitable result. Issuing a counter-statement, more than 50 retired diplomats argued that the intellectuals' apology was a misguided initiative, which is "disrespectful to our history and also to our people who lost their lives in violent terrorist attacks during the history of the republic and also during the last years of the Ottoman Empire." The retired ambassadors claimed that the "forced immigration of Armenians in 1915 gave bitter results under the conditions of war, but the pain of the Turks is no less than the Armenians, due to the Armenian insurgence and terrorism."
The statement noted that in terrorist acts, which resumed in 1973, many diplomats and their relatives were killed, and asked: "Have the people who launched the flawed campaign of apology ever thought that the people who were killed or victimized by Armenian terrorism throughout history also deserve an apology?" The retired diplomats suggest that if the aim of the intellectuals' statement is to improve relations between Turkey and Armenia, the proper way to do this is not to make concessions like unilateral apologies, but to mutually recognize borders and territorial integrity. "If it is inevitable, the pain that both sides suffered during the history should be shared," the retired ambassador claimed, and called on the Armenian side to apologize. Which of the statements is more just or more correct? Before discussing this question, let me tell you two short stories about my late grandparents.
It was 1915 or 1916. My grandmother was seven years old. She lived in the village of Orduzu in the province of Malatya. She was the only girl in a family of seven brothers, at a time when the number of males in a family connoted the "power" of that family. Moreover, her mother had died before she was able to have memories about her. All the uncles of this little girl, except the oldest one, and her father had been recruited by the army and mobilized to defend the eastern provinces, which had been occupied by the Russians cooperating with the Armenians. None of them came back from the war. Her oldest uncle, who lost all of his brothers in the war and become poorer as a result of the war, took care of her, my grandmother, but he had nothing to give but misery to her. She was married before she was 14 years old. But bad luck followed her. Her husband died in a work accident when she had just given birth to their first child at a young age. Whenever my late grandmother remembered the dramatic day when her father left or whenever she told that sorrow that lingered in her memory and heart like a darkest stain, she would turn into a seven-year-old orphaned girl -- even at the age of 80.
The time of the second story, too, should be about the same. This time, the place is a village in Bingol province. This village suffered a tragedy in which Armenians indiscriminately killed many people. The people who survived the massacre fled to western parts of Anatolia on foot and in convoys. A five- or six-year-old boy whose relatives had all been killed by Armenians managed to find a place in one of these convoys. Without any relatives or guardians, this little boy was transferred from one convoy to another until he came to one of the mountainous villages of Malatya. He managed to survive with help from other people. As he grew stronger, he started to work for villagers to earn his living. He finally arrived in my grandmother's village, where a relatively rich villager for whom he was working helped him marry my grandmother, who was a widow with a child at that time. My late grandfather, who died before my grandmother, was always searching for any trace of his family past. When he eventually learned that one of his cousins was living in the Karakocan district of Elazig, I saw that he was so happy, as if he felt he had been reborn at the age of 70. I cannot find the words to describe how that little girl, who had grown considerably older when she met my grandfather and her children, reconnected my grandfather with all his past and the relatives he had lost.
Such great sorrows that I, personally, would never want to experience are the things people tend to forget. But, whatever advancements it makes, humanity always lives side by side with history. The important thing is to accept that history with its good and bad memories. Today, some people have apologized for all the pains of the years of mutual wars as if they had been suffered only by one side. To say that one is sorry shows, of course, wisdom. Can an irrelevant apology not be construed as nothing but done out of inferiority complex. If they feel the urge to apologize for something, then they should say that they apologize for their apparent lack of knowledge of history.
Everyone suffered their share of the sorrows of World War I. Neither Armenians, Turks or Kurds can claim to have suffered more or less. If an apology should be made for these sorrows, then it should be made mutually and simultaneously by everyone involved. Moreover, if the Turks had intended to commit systematic genocide on the Armenian people, they would have done it easily at the time when their power was at its peak. If, as claimed, there was a systematic genocide, why the Ottomans chose to do it at the time they were at their weakest needs some explanation.
People who have even a bit of respect for history would accept that neither mutual tragedies suffered in conflict nor forced immigration would be accepted as genocide or ethnic cleansing. What happened is nothing but mutual fighting with its ensuing pain. The forced immigration was nothing but the unsuccessful transfer of Armenian citizens who cooperated with Russians to another area of the Ottoman Empire. Some understand this forced immigration as an expulsion of Armenians out of the country. But, at that time, Syria was no different than Anatolia in terms of being part of Ottoman territory. Moreover, Armenians in western provinces were not forced to emigrate.
Now that a rush of apologies has started, I think that I, too, deserve to receive an apology for the Armenian massacres which orphaned my grandmother and grandfather at an early age.
Bulent Kenes - Today's Zaman
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