By: Hambersom Aghbashian

Fethiye Çetin (born in Maden, Elazığ Province– Turkey) is a Turkish attorney, human rights activist and writer. She is  the author of “My Grandmother”, a book  about her discovery of her dying grandmother’s Armenian roots. Also she is the co-author of “The Grandchildren”, a book of first-person retellings of other grandchildren’s coming to terms with their grandparents’ Armenian ancestry. In her capacity as a lawyer, among others, Çetin has represented the family of murdered Turkish-Armenian,  Agos newspaper’s editor-in-chief , Hrant Dink, a prominent member of the Armenian minority in Turkey. Dink was assassinated in Istanbul in January 2007. Çetin also  defended his case prior to his assassination, when he was prosecuted three times for denigrating Turkishness .

Growing up in the small town of Maden in Turkey, Fethiye Çetin knew her grandmother as a happy and respected Muslim housewife called Seher. Only decades later did she discover the truth. Her grandmother’s name was not Seher but Heranush. She was born a Christian Armenian. Most of the men in her village had been slaughtered in 1915. A Turkish gendarme had stolen her from her mother and adopted her. Çetin’s family history tied her directly to the terrible origins of modern Turkey and the organized denial of its Ottoman past as the shared home of many faiths and ways of life.
Writing about genocide is always a highly political issue in Turkey. In Fethiye Çetin’s case, it is even a dangerous one. For nearly a whole century Turkey has not only been denying the Armenian Genocide, but actively prosecutes civilians who use the term to refer to the ethnic cleansing of 1915. In 2004, Çetin dared to publish her memoir in which she recounts the life of her grandmother. Her grandmother is just one example of so-called “leftovers of the sword” (according to Bilefsky ,a Canadian Jornalist,2010). Mostly female survivors who were saved were forced to assimilate into Turkish society. Heranush, Çetin’s grandmother, who was torn from her mother’s arms by a Turkish military officer during the death marches, became a servant girl, married a Turkish man and vanished from the surface of the Armenian post-genocidal narrative.

After

the “murder of the Armenian leadership and men of military age”, women and children were sent on death marches in the Syrian deserts where they experienced “kidnapping and sex slavery” and in the case of women forced re-marriage. Turkey’s policy of denial affects precisely and most severely exactly those survivors, Cetin discusses in her memoir. Women, who were assimilated into Turkish culture, have been non-existent in diasporas narrative for decades and even suffered from discrimination among the Turkish as well as the Armenian communities. Now there are many Armenian women among the Turks. They were taken in and remained with them, married and ga

ve birth to their children. They were forced to convert to Islam in one way or another and considered Turks.The children don’t know their identity, only their mothers do.

Fethiye Çetin didn’t manage to get her grandmother in touch with her family, whom she found through a classified ad in an Armenian newspaper. Her grandmother’s father   turned out to be still alive, but then had a heart attack and died. She told her grandmother that he called his daughter Heranush. That made her feel good, Heranush was sure that she was never forgotten, but she was too weak to travel to the United States and she died without ever seeing her Armenian family again. Çetin did meet them when they celebrate the eightieth birthday of her grandmother’s sister. She apologized for all the pain they suffered because of the way the Turkish society handled the things that happened. The pain caused by the silence, and by the history books in schools that depict Armenians as enemies. Maureen Freely ( an American journalist, novelist, professor, and translator) who translated  her book” My Grandmother” into English, said “In life, as in this book, her first aim is to give voice to those whom history has silenced.”

”I hope my apologies are accepted ” said Çetin in one of her interviews.

Nor Or No 4, Jan. 23, 2014