By Anna Ghazaryan
Armenian News-NEWS.am presents an interview with a senior associate in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment, journalist and writer Thomas de Waal.
Tom de Waal
You have recently presented your new book “Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide”. In one of your interviews you said you always try fill “gap in the literature” on the matter you are interested in. You have interviewed many people and studied many archives. What new things did you discover in Armenia-Turkey relations?
I learned a lot of new things researching and writing this book and I believe most readers will as well. Of course, I should say first of all I am not the first researcher to cover these topics. Tatul Hakobyan did a brilliant job in his recent book “Armenians and Turks.” And I can mention some writers in the United States as well.
But let me mention two things. One is the secret meeting in Zurich in 1977 between the Turkish foreign minister Sabri Caglayangil and the leaders of the three Armenian political parties. This had been written about in some Armenian memoirs but for the first time I got a Turkish source on the meeting in the form of the aide to the minister, Oktay Aksoy, who is still alive and living in Ankara and who told me how the meeting was set up in New York. I see the 1977 meeting as a story of “missed opportunities.” Senior Armenians and Turks managed to meet and talk but failed to establish a proper mechanism or continue the dialogue.
Another issue that I think is very important and deserves greater attention is that of the so-called “Islamized Armenians” of Turkey. There are many thousands of people alive in Turkey who carry Muslim names and who grew up as Turks or Kurds but are conscious of having an Armenian identity through parents or grandparents who were left behind in 1915 and absorbed into Muslim families. I met several of these people in Diyarbakir while working on the book.
They know that they are Armenian and are now able to talk about it, but they barely know the language and culture. There are many many of these people in Turkey with a sort of hybrid identity. How can they be described? What can be done for them? This is a big challenge which has yet to be confronted.
Do you think there is anything that can really make Turkey change attitude towards the Armenian Genocide? Will it be possible under the pressure from western countries?
I believe Turkey has already changed a lot and many Armenians have not noticed this. The change has had very little to do with outside pressure, apart from the effects of European Union approximation in the early 2000s. It has more to do with what you might call a “maturation” of Turkish society in which the Ottoman-era multi-cultural identity is being remembered. The Kurds have played the leading role in pushing this process forward. Turkey is now beginning to remember its history and the illusion that history began in 1923 has been shattered. The condolences statement to Armenians by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was prime minister at the time, last April, is a symptom of this approach, as is the re-opening of Armenian churches and the fact that books are now published in Turkey using the term “Armenian genocide.” Of course this is too slow for most Armenians. And I very much doubt the Turkish government will use the word “genocide.” But it is now possible to have a dialogue within Turkey and to engage Turkish society with debate.
Every year Armenians attentively follow U.S. President’s speech hoping to hear a “g-word”. What do you think will happen if Obama says “genocide”? Will it in fact lead to some changes in U.S. policy or it will be just a word?
I understand that Armenian Americans want their president to use the word “genocide” — and of course a United States president, Ronald Reagan, has done so before. But an American president is under pressure from competing political demands. If you read Barack Obama’s April 24 statements carefully, they are a full and thoughtful engagement with the issue of what happened to the Armenians, which does not happen to use the “g-word.” I question whether this is such a big issue really and I humbly suggest that it is not an entirely healthy situation when Armenians are waiting for a verdict of the president of the United States in order to tell them something they already know. Armenians know better than anyone else what happened in 1915 and 1916 — what happened to their grandparents and great-grandparents. They also know from bitter experience that the “Great Powers” have used the Armenian question in ways that have not always helped Armenians. Isn’t it more important to have the statements of intellectuals and historians than that of politicians?
I do not believe that the use or non-use of the word will have any legal effect, as the 1948 United Nations convention was a forward-looking convention on the prevention of future genocides, not a mechanism for dealing with past ones. But of course the use of the word would have political effects in Turkey.
Turkey will mark 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gallipoli on April 24, the day when Armenians mark Armenian Genocide Centenary. How do you assess the move? What are they expecting to get by setting this day: they wanted to diver attention from Yerevan events or to demonstrate that they are not afraid of western pressure ? Will this move bring advantages to Turkey?
I think it is very unfortunate that the Gallipoli ceremony will be held on April 24. Inevitably, foreign dignitaries will be forced to choose between going to Turkey or to Armenia. It would have been possible to hold the ceremony on another day and not to have a “historical competition” on that day. It was a sign of insensitivity by the Turkish authorities. There were reports by the Today Zaman newspaper recently that the Gallipoli ceremony was being called off. This was denied but I think it confirms that the Turkish authorities are having difficulties getting enough guests to come and shows that holding the ceremony on that date was a political mistake.