The taboo breaker: Turkish scholar speaks of cracks in the wall of genocide denial

Gayane Abrahamyan is reporting from Turkey with the support of the Global Political Trends Center (GPoT) and Internews Armenia

Turkish scholar Cengiz Aktar and a few dozen “taboo breakers” like him are changing many stereotypes about Turks, raising hopes that one day Turkey’s denialist policy regarding its past may end.

Aktar, 56, is one of the progressive intellectuals who recognize the Ottoman-era genocide of Armenians and take action to help the Turkish society face its past.
When in 2008 Aktar initiated the “I Apologize” campaign whereby for the first time Turks offered apologies to the genocide victims, Armenians, little did he think that the action would become a “tsunami” and would cause cracks on “the concrete wall of denial”. He says for him it was just a move emanating from his heart, a move that eventually elicited responses from about 40,000 Turks.
“We did that because we were unable to keep silent anymore,” Aktar tells ArmeniaNow.
Aktar, a professor at Bahcesehir University and the Chairman of the Department of EU Relations in Istanbul and columnist for the Turkish Daily and Vatan newspapers, first heard about the massacres of Armenians in France where he studied economic and political sciences and his course included history that he found different from what he had heard back in his native country.
“During that time I necessarily ended up dealing with the Genocide issue. Like every Turk the first reaction I had was denial, saying no, no, we didn’t do that. It was just the contrary. Then I understood that before denial I had to learn more, because during those days there was nothing, absolutely no information about it. So when I read and got more information, I understood there was no way to deny it,” remembers Aktar.
The scholar worked in France for many years, but returning to Turkey in 1999 to take up a position as a European Union affairs expert, he began not only to help smooth Turkey’s path to the European family, but also try to reverse the Turkish policy of genocide denial.
Aktar says his acquaintance with Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist and minority rights champion assassinated in Istanbul in 2007, was a new experience, through which his academic knowledge about Armenians turned into being more practical recognition.
“It is quite different when you meet an Armenian of Turkey who lives amongst Turks every day. Here in Turkey everything is different, the feeling, the responsibility, and that became even more acute after Dink’s murder,” says Aktar.
Still two years before Dink’s murder, in 2005, one of the leading universities in Turkey, Bilgi, which has about 12,000 students, hosted an international conference on the subject of “Armenians during the Decline of the Ottoman Empire”. Turkey’s then justice minister Cemil Cicek called the scholars who organized that conference “back stabbers”. But despite such accusations and threats the event did take place.
That conference as well as the subsequent assassination of Dink and the apology campaign proved a large tsunami that passed through the consciousness of the Turkish society, sending waves that would have an impact on the giant wall formed on 96 years of denial.
“The taboo has not been broken yet, but it definitely now has cracks,” says Aktar.
The cover of his book that he presented in its Armenian translation in Yerevan earlier this year has this meaning – a huge concrete wall of denial gets cracks and the information and memories coming through these cracks, according to the scholar, will one day give results.
“Young people are now mainly inclined to stick to denialist positions. But unlike the time when I was young, when there was a complete information vacuum, this information exists today and youths become inquisitive. The more they learn, the easier denial will one day give way to acknowledgement,” the scholar says.
Aktar is sure that a new era in relations between Turkey and Armenia will be ushered in by individuals and societies rather than statesmen and politicians.
“Authorities have their own interests, people have consciousness and feelings. Officials are not guided by emotions. Emotions mean nothing to them. It is interests that matter to them. And a society is a different organism, and if a change in public consciousness begins, if they acknowledge and accept the reality of genocide, then the demand from the bottom is certain to reach the government one day,” says the Turkish scholar.
Meanwhile, before that realization comes, being a taboo breaker in Turkey remains hard and dangerous. After the assassination of Dink in broad daylight, just in front of his Agos newspaper’s editorial office, the Turkish state has provided bodyguards to people championing the right to know the past. But Aktar refused to have bodyguards.
“It is impossible to live this way. Even though danger now is much less than it was years ago, there is still no guarantee. After the apology campaign we were receiving hundreds of threatening letters every day, but, happily, none of us has been killed. I think those times are gone,” says Aktar.
According to him, Turkish intellectuals are reaching out to Armenians because they, too, suffer the burden of blame.
“It is not easy for us, either. But the return of memory is reassuring. Turks have an old saying, ‘When Armenians were gone, luck was gone, too’. If they remember and try to understand the meaning of these words, many things will change,” concludes Aktar.
Gayane Abrahamyan is reporting from Turkey with the support of the Global Political Trends Center (GPoT) and Internews Armenia