Turkish historian Ümit Kurt gave a lecture at Fresno State’s Alice Peters Auditorium that probed why Turkey still denies the Armenian Genocide, the Fresno Bee reports.
The free lecture was organized by the Armenian Studies Program. This was the third lecture hosted by the program during the spring 2016 semester.
Kurt recalls how he first heard in his early 20s of the Armenian historical presence in his country – a presence the Turkish government has spent decades trying to erase.
Some societies are capable of openly discussing their history, Kurt said. Others struggle “because their past and present is intertwined in a way that causes them to lose their sense of reality,” Kurt said. “In Turkish society, this (lost) sense of reality is most obvious in the case of denying, or not acknowledging, the Armenian Genocide.
“Confronting the past is a societal problem, rather than an individual one,” Kurt said.
During 1915, the Ottoman Turkish army committed massacres of Armenians, Kurt said, and deported many under harsh circumstances that constituted an intentional effort to rid the country of Armenians.
After the events of World War I, the modern Turkish republic wanted to create a new national identity, Kurt said. In the creation of that new identity, government leaders sought to forget the past and construct a new past, in which “we Turks did not murder Armenians – Armenians murdered us,” Kurt said.
“Because Turkey founded its existence on the absence of “the other,” every conversation on its existence inspires fear and anxiety,” Kurt said. “The chief difficulty in speaking on the Armenian issue in Turkey lies in this existence-absence dilemma.”
Kurt added that the government of Turkey is also afraid of the reparations and restitution they would have to pay if they accepted that the Turkey’s actions in 1915 constituted genocide.
In response to an audience question, Kurt said it was unlikely the government of Turkey would ever admit to the genocide. “Of course, I hope I’m wrong,” he said.
Kurt is a doctoral candidate at Clark University in Massachusetts and was a Kazan Research Scholar at Fresno State during the fall 2015 semester.
The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths reaching 1.5 million.
The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the Genocide survivors.
Present-day Turkey denies the fact of the Armenian Genocide, justifying the atrocities as “deportation to secure Armenians”. Only a few Turkish intellectuals, including Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk and scholar Taner Akcam, speak openly about the necessity to recognize this crime against humanity.
The Armenian Genocide was recognized by Uruguay, Russia, France, Lithuania, the Italian Chamber of Deputies, majority of U.S. states, parliaments of Greece, Cyprus, Argentina, Belgium and Wales, National Council of Switzerland, Chamber of Commons of Canada, Polish Sejm, Vatican, European Parliament and the World Council of Churches.