By Caleb Lauer

ISTANBUL – Though genocide scholars around the world agree that more than one million Ottoman-Armenian civilians were deliberately killed during World War I when Turkish Ottoman authorities forced them to walk out of Anatolia into the Syrian desert, Turkey has always officially denied this was genocide. Ankara has insisted that a commission to study this tragic history be a pillar of its now fizzling peace deal with neighboring Armenia.
The idea of the commission has caused much controversy. Armenia, bowing to Turkish pressure and eyeing the prospect of an open border with its much richer European Union-candidate neighbor, has committed itself to something that suggests the facts of the genocide are insufficiently known. But for Armenians, the genocide carried out against them is a fundamental aspect of their modern identity. And likewise for the Turks; denial of the genocide is intimately intertwined with the story of modern Turkey’s founding in 1923.
Suat Kiniklioglu, the governing AKP’s (Justice and Development Party) deputy chairman of external affairs and spokesman for the Turkish parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said in an e-mail that the Turkish government insisted on a historical commission to “have a fresh look at the evidence [and] documentation surrounding the unfortunate events of World War I. The events of 1915 cannot be understood without situating them in an appropriate historical context.”

This context, said Kiniklioglu, includes ” … the ethnic cleansing of millions of Turks and Muslims from the Balkans, the Caucasus, and other parts of the crumbling [Ottoman] empire”.

Many Armenians, genocide scholars and others say this just rationalizes denial of the genocide and is an extension of Turkey’s policy of lobbying abroad to prevent its recognition. Some also say it is an affront to historical research and the lessons drawn from it.

Roger W Smith, a former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and current chairman of the academic board of directors at the Zoryan Institute in Toronto, wrote in a September 30, 2009 open letter to Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian that the proposed commission “in effect dismisses all of the extensive research that has already been conducted for decades and implies that none of it was impartial or scientific”. He also wrote that genocide scholars have no confidence “that a politically organized commission would not compromise historical truth, especially considering the imbalanced power relations between Armenia and Turkey”. He also argued such a commission would show “how easily genocide can be relativized, especially by the powerful”.

But some doubt the commission will be effective enough to warrant fear. Cengiz Aktar, a retired United Nations official and now chair of the European Union Relations department at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, dismissed the idea that a commission was a threat, saying such a commission would have so little credibility, and would be so dysfunctional, it would be simply impracticable. “It is ridiculous to think for even a second that [such a] commission could even meet, let alone decide about anything [historical].”

Any equally weighted, government-run commission, Aktarimagines, would consist of one side of “denialists” and one side of genocide scholars. “These guys are not capable of even shaking hands,” he said.

Aktar is also the creator of an online “I apologize” proclamation addressed to Armenians, so far joined by more than 30,000 Turks. He suggested that unsealing relevant archives in Ankara, Jerusalem and Boston would be a more constructive goal of the commission.

But the prospect of a commission has a significant inverse; it may be a sign of, and end up promoting, Turkey’s increasing openness to a less categorical and dogmatic view of its own official history. Turkish schools teach that the genocide never happened; Turks who publicly say otherwise have risked prosecution by the state and vilification in the media.

But the current AKP government, in power since 2002, has been steadily pushing the old guard – especially the military – out of the center of the Turkish state. With major electoral support, there is no doubt that the government’s democratic reforms have helped itconsolidate power; still, thanks in part to this new environment, many long-sacred taboos of Turkish public life are being challenged and more and more Turks, in newspaper articles, books, and academic conferences, have been questioning the conventional denialist view of the genocide.

Professor Taner Akcam of Clark University in Massachusetts, a leading genocide scholar and one of the few Turkish historians to unequivocally affirm the Armenian genocide, rejects the Turkish government’s argument that more context is needed to understand what happened in 1915 and says Turkey must understand that thehistorical debate “is over”. Still, Akcam argues that the significance of the moment should not be overlooked.

“Nobody understands enough the importance of Turkey’s readiness for negotiations. For 100 years Turkey denies everything. And now after 100 years, Turkey officially says – ‘OK, let’s negotiate about our own history’ … There is something seriously changing in Turkey,” he said.

“The Turkish republic was established by the same military and bureaucratic elite which organized the Armenian genocide,” said Akcam. “We know [from historical study] that a change in the ruling elite is the precondition for facing history.”

“There is a huge process of transition in Turkish society from an authoritarian system [of rule] to one more democratic and more European. And within this system, Turkey will, and has to, face its own history.”

The Turkish government may use the commission as a “face-saving operation”, that is, to minimize blame as much as possible while communicating unknown, and unwelcome, facts to the Turkish public, said Akcam. “After 100 years of denial, you cannot suddenly say: ‘Yes, it was a genocide.’ Or, ‘Yes, it was a crime.’ You need a transition.”

Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 during Armenia’s war with Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan. Once the Armenian and Turkish parliaments ratify the protocols signed by their foreign ministers last autumn in Switzerland, the two countries will open their common border and establish normal relations. (Though lately it seems Turkey is willing to let a dispute over the Armenian-controlled province of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan put the whole deal at risk.)

It is expected bureaucrats from Armenia, Turkey and Switzerland, which mediated the peace deal, will comprise the commission, and, according to the protocols, will carry out ” … an impartial scientific examination of the historical records and archives to define existing problems”. Despite protests against the commission and other aspects of the peace deal, poor, land-locked Armenia has a clear interest in an open border with Turkey, which could join the European Union in the next decade.

In the end, however, Akcam believes real reconciliation between the two countries cannot come through commissions or legislation. He recalls the words of Hrant Dink, an Armenian-Turkish newspaper editor whose prosecution for comments made about Turkish-Armenian reconciliation made him a target of ultranationalists. He was assassinated outside his newspaper office in Istanbul on January 19, 2007.

“My dear friend Hrant was always saying: when the Armenian and Turkish people come together, see each other, talk to each other, the genocide problem will be solved automatically.”

Caleb Lauer is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Istanbul.