MovieChat Forums > Ararat (2002) Discussion > Documents surface re: genocide

Documents surface re: genocide


But no on seems keen to report it in Turkey.

A devastating document is met with silence in Turkey

For Turkey, the number should have been a bombshell.

According to a long-hidden document that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916.

In Turkey, any discussion of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians can bring a storm of public outrage. But since its publication in a book in January, the number - and its Ottoman source - has gone virtually unmentioned. Newspapers hardly wrote about it. Television shows have not discussed it.

"Nothing," said Murat Bardakci, the Turkish author and columnist who compiled the book.

The silence can mean only one thing, he said: "My numbers are too high for ordinary people. Maybe people aren't ready to talk about it yet."

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/09/europe/turkey.php

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There re more and more people in Turkey who understand that we committed a ,massive genocide. You have to remember that this was a hugely sensitive issue in Turkey for years and we jailed people for even talking about it. Even today scholars are fired from university positions and threatened with worse etc.

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I thought they cleaned up their archives and destroyed every document about the genocide…

Haha, now there it is.

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That link is dead but here is another
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/world/europe/09turkey.html?_r=0

Section of text

The documents, given to Mr. Bardakci by Mr. Talat’s widow, Hayriye, before she died in 1983, include lists of population figures. Before 1915, 1,256,000 Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, according to the documents. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later, Mr. Bardakci said.

To the untrained ear, it is simply a sad statistic. But anyone familiar with the issue knows the numbers are in fierce dispute. Turkey has never acknowledged a specific number of deportees or deaths. On Sunday, Turkey’s foreign minister warned that President Obama might set back relations if he recognized the massacre of Armenians as genocide before his visit to Turkey next month.

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Also, they forget to mention what they did with the greeks and assyrians.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/world/europe/09turkey.html?_r=1

Though he clearly wanted the numbers to be known, he stubbornly refuses to interpret them. He offers no analysis in the book, and aside from an interview with Mr. Talat’s widow, there is virtually no text beside the original documents.

“I didn’t want to interpret,” he said. “I want the reader to decide.”

The best way to do that, he argues, is by using cold, hard facts, which can cut through the layers of emotional rhetoric that have clouded the issue for years.

“I believe we need documents in Turkey,” he said. “This is the most important.”

But some of the keenest observers of Turkish society said the silence was a sign of just how taboo the topic still was. “The importance of the book is obvious from the fact that no paper except Milliyet has written a single line about it,” wrote Murat Belge, a Turkish academic, in a January column in the liberal daily newspaper Taraf.

Still, it is a measure of Turkey’s democratic maturity that the book was published here at all. Mr. Bardakci said he had held the documents for so long — 27 years — because he was waiting for Turkey to reach the point when their publication would not cause a frenzy.

Even the state now feels the need to defend itself. Last summer, a propaganda film about the Armenians made by Turkey’s military was distributed to primary schools. After a public outcry, it was stopped.

“I could never have published this book 10 years ago,” Mr. Bardakci said. “I would have been called a traitor.”

He added, “The mentality has changed.”

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