A former mayor of the Turkish town of Diyarbekir, who is now on a visit to Armenia, says conducting a trip to the country has been his long-time dream.
At a news conference in Yerevan, Osman Baydemir said he very much regrets that the mentality characteristic of the 1915 Genocide period continues today, leading to such violent crimes as the recent militant insurgencies in Kobane (Syria).
“The 1915 mentality and ideology continue nowadays,” he noted
Agreeing with the former mayor, Ismail Beshikci, a prominent Turkish scholar also attending the news conference, said his visit to the Genocide Museum-Institute brought him face to face with the idea that institutions of the kind should focus more attention on stateless nations being subjected to Genocide.
“The first Genocide is the one committed 1915,” he said, noting that its impunity later led to the Jewish Holocaust.
“And the Kurdish issue too, can be said to be the logical continuation of the Armenian Genocide. Had the Armenian Genocide been punished, the Kurdish issue would not have struck its roots so deep,” he said, stressing the importance of national education and confrontation with history as important factors for preventing future crimes of genocide.
The idea was also shared by the Kurdish activist Nurjan Kaya who said the nation pursued the genocidal mentality later too in order to become dominant.
Turkai Abdulgafur, an ethnic Armenian whose family was converted to Islam after taking flight from the Genocide, said it is very difficult to be an Armenian in Diyarbekir. He said the family had never had an occasion to reveal its identity ever since. “We have been more Muslim than the Muslims to be able to survive,” he added.
Abdulgafur further spoke of Armenians in Turkey, noting that those converted to Islam (4-5 million) considerably outnumber the Christian Armenians. He said the community is isolated from the Armenians in both Armenia and the Diaspora.