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*AUTHOR’S PRE-PRINT
This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in Democratization ©
2013 Taylor & Francis; Democratization is available online at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13510347.2012.668437
Cite as:
Gellman, Mneesha (2013). “Remembering violence: the role of apology and dialogue in Turkey’s
democratization process.” Democratization 20:4: 771-794.
Remembering violence: the role of apology and dialogue in
Turkey’s democratization process
Mneesha Gellman∗
Political Science, Northwestern University, Illinois, USA
mneesha@u.northwestern.edu
In this article I ask the question: how do citizens use memories of violence
in dialogue with a democratizing Turkish state? To address this, I unpack
how memories of violence influence solidarity communities in addition to
those who are direct descendents of survivors. I also examine how these
solidarity communities are widening political space for contemporary
dialogue about the Armenian Catastrophe. To demonstrate the connection
between memory and political participation, I identify three discursive
moments where Turkish and Armenian citizens invoke memory in
dialogue with one other and with the state. I use the 2009 online campaign
for a Turkish apology to address the Armenian Catastrophe, the aftermath
of the murder of Hrant Dink in 2007, and a controversial 2005 academic
conference on the events of 1915 as focal points to discuss how memory
impacts the way people behave as citizens. My argument is twofold: first,
elite-led solidarity networks play an integral role in shaping the discursive
space between citizens, the state, and the international community; and
second, dialogue about memory can grow space for citizen participation
in Turkey.
Keywords: Armenian; Turkey; memory; dialogue; apology
They have flour, butter, and sugar. Why then cannot they make a cake? –
popular Turkish sage Nasrettin Hoca1
Introduction
At a conference on minority rights in Turkey in 2002, Hrant Dink, an ethnically
Armenian2 journalist who founded the bilingual Armenian newspaper Agos, and who
had lived in Istanbul since he was seven years old, made a statement for which he
was later prosecuted by the Turkish state. Asked what he thought about the Turkish
primary school requirement of reciting the phrase, ‘I am a Turk, I am honest, I am
hardworking’, he said that ‘although he was honest and hardworking, he was not
a Turk’.3 For this statement, as well as for a
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2005 Agos column in which he critically discussed Armenian-Turkish relations
and used the word ‘genocide’, Dink was prosecuted under Turkey’s Penal Code 301,
which defines ‘denigrating Turkishness’ as a crime; Dink responded that ‘racism was
the denigration’.4 This incident showcases the interrelationship between citizenship
and identity politics for ethnic minorities and also draws attention to problems that
internally hegemonic states face in democratization.
The Turkish Constitution allows freedom of thought and expression of those
thoughts,5 though there are many articles in the Constitution, such as Articles 14 and
15, which allow the state to curtail these and other freedoms. The Turkish state wields
not only constitutional or legal, court-based authority over its population, but also
cultural dominance and the ability to use fear as a silencing tool. Dink’s case was
still in court at the time he was assassinated on 19 January 2007 in front of the Agos
office in Istanbul. The murder, carried out by Ogu¨n Samast, an unemployed teenager
from Trabzon who has been linked to ultra- nationalists and gendarme conspirators,6
is in fact connected to a much wider web of ‘deep state’ or paramilitary repression
against minorities and leftists in Turkey that is currently being investigated in the
Ergenekon trials.7
Today, Turkey needs to allow free speech to increase its credibility as a
democracy, but the Turkish government also appears to be profoundly threatened by
freedom of expression. This is because individual actors, and the solidarity
movement of academic elites that advocate on behalf of Turkey’s ethnic minorities,
use free speech to name the quotidian inequalities that minorities experience. By
bringing to the public’s attention the fact that Armenians living in Turkey do not
identify as Turkish, Dink challenged both the constitutional and cultural
assumptions of Turkish nationalism – that all who are born in Turkey identify as
Turkish.8 His circle of colleagues invoked the out- pouring of support at his funeral
as the critical historical juncture at which the momentum for real dialogue coalesced
into a solidarity movement.
In this article I explore the process by which an elite-led social movement chal-
lenges state hegemony. Specifically, I ask the question: how do citizens use mem-
ories of violence to make rights claims on the democratizing Turkish state? To
address this, I examine the coalitions of intellectuals and activists who attempt to
widen political space for contemporary dialogue about the actions of the Ottoman
state towards Ottoman Armenians in 1915. My underlying argument is twofold: first,
that elite-led solidarity networks play an integral role in shaping the discourse in
democratization processes; and second, that memory-based rights claims expand the
space for citizen participation in Turkey. Although more recently studies of emotion
and sequencing have been considered in the contentious politics literature,9 the
scholarship on dialogue about memory and its connection to citizenship participation
remains limited, and my work attempts to address this gap.
The outline of the article is as follows: first, I present the research puzzle and
outline the key concepts used to address the research question. Conceptually, this
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includes memory, identity, violence, and citizenship, and theorizing the interaction
between these components makes up the heart of the article. To illustrate the theory, in
the second half of the article I present three elite-led moments of dialogue that have
drawn on memories of violence and might affect how Armenians participate as
citizens. Working in reverse chronological order, the first project addressed is the
apology petition of 2009, an initiative of Turkish people apologizing to Armenians for
the events of 1915. The second dialogue moment is the funeral march after Hrant
Dink’s assassination, and the third dialogue moment is a conference about 1915 that
took place at Bilgi University in 2005. In all three of these moments, Turks and
Armenians gathered together to discuss the interpretation of historical narratives
about state violence. These three attempts at widening the space for dialogue explicitly
use remembered violence as a catalyst for action and have, I argue, left lasting legacies
regarding the quality of debate about pluralism in Turkey. In addition to drawing
from the contentious politics and democratization literatures, data is included from
interviews with scholars and journalists during my fieldwork in Turkey. Finally, I
conclude with a plea to incorporate the role of memory, particularly memories of
violence, in future research about dialogue during democratization.
The research puzzle
In this section I present the scope of the research and define key terms that are used
throughout the article. The specific moments of dialogue probed in this article are
conceptualized as mechanisms through which memory is able to exert an effect on the
participation of people in the democratization process writ large. In the contentious
politics literature, ‘mechanisms’ are occurrences or events that change relations
between individuals or grouped units of analysis similarly across different contexts.10
In this article, dialogue is defined as a process that promotes verbal or textual
interaction between parties who would otherwise avoid communicating with each
other. Although the kind of interaction that takes place in dialogue may vary greatly,
dialogue moments consistently promote interaction and foster an exchange of
perspectives. Such moments, I posit, may be useful in reanimating relationships that
have heretofore been marked exclusively by hostility. Dialogue opens the possibility
for a reframing of past events through mutual discussion and negotiation of memory.
As those with access to power and resources, Turkish elites are well positioned to
renegotiate how violence is memorialized in consultation with Armenians whose
collective memories are more directly affected by the results. Without delving into
the arguments about top-down versus bottom-up generated change,11 it is assumed
in this article that elite-led solidarity networks play a formative role in opening up
the dialogue arena to new mechanisms that will reframe memories of violence in
Turkey.12 Though elites are more fully defined further on, it is important to keep in
mind that the actors I am concerned with have real access to power, in that they are
well educated agenda-setters who can
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shape the discourse of the country through use of media and academic institutional
forums.
The connections between memory, identity, dialogue, and citizenship are all vital
to the story told in this article; therefore, I want to make the links explicit here. The
capacity to remember collectively is integral to identity formation and maintenance
because collective memories contain the ontologies and epistemologies that people
use to reinforce their senses of self, situated in community. To deny the validity of a
collectively held memory that constitutes a portion of identity diminishes that
identity through a manipulation of power. Though power as coercion often exists
even in the most democratic of states, in the context of a democratizing Turkey, using
state power to deny memories of violence that have been central to identity
undermines Armenian claims to belonging. By casting Armenians as both ‘outside’
the acceptable state narrative of memory, but simultaneously as needing to be ‘inside’
Turkishness to be acceptable as citizens, both the Constitution and daily rhetoric
diminish the Armenian sense of self-belonging that would encourage political
participation.
The Minority Rights Group report on Turkey documents that minorities ‘are seen
as “foreigners” and any advocacy for their protection, particularly by Euro- pean
states, is seen as interference in internal affairs’.13 However, not all minorities wear the
foreigner label equally. Sunni Kurds, for example, in exchange for silencing their
Kurdish ethnic claims, have been more able to assimilate in Turkey as full citizens based
on their Sunni Muslim religion that they share with the vast majority of Turks.14
Armenian Orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, essentially renders Armenians
incapable of full assimilation, thus perpetuating their foreigner status even though
generations of Armenian families have resided in Turkey.
But religion is not the sole issue that complicates full citizen participation by
Armenians in Turkey. By denying the memory of the Armenian Catastrophe, the state
perpetuates a narrative that disempowers Armenians by casting doubt on a
foundational component of their identity. This paralyzes the Armenian community to
a substantial degree, stymieing their political participation by weakening an
epistemological attribute central to a common identity that could otherwise be used
to mobilize. Denial of the 1915 events by Turkey has had larger diplomatic
consequences as well, stalling the controversial reopening of the Turkey- Armenia
border in 2009. In the end the deal was undone by the issue of control over Nagorno
Karabakh, a disputed territory in Azerbaijan long claimed by Armenia, with Turkey
supporting Azerbaijan’s claim. However, the lack of apology from the Turkish state
for the events of 1915 fed pessimism about the border negotiations among Armenians
in both countries.
Less as a remedy and more as a starting point, I propose that dialogue moments can
open communication channels to begin reversing this problematic pattern of
disempowerment and deadlock. This logic draws from the work of Melissa Nobles
in her book about how official apologies can influence the way national membership
is experienced.15 Nobles defines ‘membership in a political community’ as taking
shape legally, politically, and affectively16:
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The legal status of one’s membership as a citizen (whether one is or is not a
citizen) profoundly affects one’s feeling of belonging, the political rights one
may exercise, and one’s perception and treatment by others. Conversely,
feelings of detachment or satisfaction with membership may lead to lesser
or greater participation, which may lead to the further loss or enhancement of
political rights.17
My argument rests on Nobles’ assertion that whether or not people perceive them-
selves as belonging can affect their behaviours of political detachment or engage-
ment. First, defining citizenship as ethnically based in Turkishness, as seen in the
Turkish Constitution, alienates those such as Hrant Dink who do not identify in this way
yet participate actively in civic life. Second, denial of the events of 1915 has served
to diminish Armenians’ sense of belonging in Turkey, and has led to political non-
participation that does not further a minority rights agenda. To some extent denial has
created non-identification by Armenians with the state, a phenomenon that has been
experienced in other post-violence countries. In Chile, for example, ‘[p]eople do not
find in the political realm the symbolic representations that could serve them as a
mirror through which to name the past and thus apprehend it. Given this lack of words
and symbols, they opt for silence’.18
The moments of dialogue presented in this article address this silenced perception
of self by affirming identity. By publicly recognizing what happened to Armenians in
1915 as a potent site of identity memorialization, elite Turkish solidarity coalitions
impact the sense of Armenian belonging that in turn can foster increased political
participation for this specific population, but also the citizenry at large as democratic
practices become more mainstream. Dialogue moments, then, affirm memory-driven
identity, and the resulting sense of belonging expands the potential for greater
participation in the political arena. The dependent variable or outcome, namely
participation, may take the form of institutionally channelled behaviour such as
voting and petitioning, or extra-institutional behaviour such as public protest. These
connections are not only potent for Turkey’s internal democratiza- tion process, but
also for its role in the international community.
The politics of remembering
In this section I provide the theoretical heart of the article by exploring concepts of
memory and citizenship and how they function in relation to political behaviour.
Memory as a cerebral function can be defined as the ‘mental faculty of retaining and
recalling past experience’,19 but this is inadequate for operationalizing memory as the
basis for political action. The anthropological and psychological literature describes
memories as ‘never simply records of the past, but.. .interpretive reconstructions that
bear the imprint of local narrative conventions, cultural assumptions, discursive
formations and practices, and the social contexts of recall and commemoration’.20
Memory has a long history as a defining characteristic of selfhood. Aristotle
philosophized about its role in human formation and believed that humans were
formed through learning, which shaped our brains and made us more mature as
we remembered.21 Thus, rather than mere
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neurological processing, memories both reinforce and are produced through narra-
tives, informing the ontologies and epistemologies we use to navigate our lives as
individual and social beings.
Definitions of memory often convey the sense that one is retaining an experience
that one has lived through, whereas the literature on collective memory has
established that memory may pass experiences on, both horizontally across social
and geographic groups, and vertically down through the generations. The memories
of violence that I explore enact both spatial and temporal movement, signifying that
contemporary memory keepers may be thousands of miles, or multiple generations,
away from the exploitation of power that first created the violent memory.
In this article, actors are rememberers, defined as direct descendents and soli-
darity community members, and forgetters, who constitute the majority of the
Turkish public and successive government administrations, who routinely deliver
both informal and official statements denying the events of 1915 as problematic for
the national psyche or the nation’s democratization process. A primary process
explored here is the coalition-building between Armenian descendents of violence
survivors and those non-Armenians who stand in solidarity. Solidarity communities –
groups of actors who take up advocacy on behalf of people with less access to
resources or power, in this case Armenians – actively participate in Turkey to
challenge the suppression of collective memories that are integral to Armenian
identity.
These solidarity communities are composed of what Tarrow labels ‘rooted
cosmopolitanists’, who he describes as people ‘rooted in specific national contexts, but
who engage in contentious political activities that involve them in transnational
networks of contacts and conflicts’.22 The rooted cosmopolitanists who join with
Armenians to form solidarity coalitions can be defined as intellectual elites: aca-
demics, journalists, and non-governmental organization (NGO) workers who have
access to media, financial resources, and a capacity to frame the issues in ways that
resonate with the larger international community. Generally, this segment of the elite
population: (1) resides on the political left, (2) has more exposure to their Western
counterparts than only Turkish-speaking and Turkish- educated elites, (3) is multi-
lingual, often speaking English, French, or German, due in part to being educated
outside of Turkey, and (4) is also politically involved in Turkey’s other divisive
issues, for example, Kurdish autonomy and religious freedom characterized by the
headscarf debate. Not only do these elites know how to capitalize on political
opportunities like Turkey’s European Union (EU) membership application, and
mobilize resources necessary to stage conferences or publish books, they can also
translate their message to the English, French, and German-speaking world. Indeed,
the apology message online is posted in 13 languages.
Though Turkey is home to many different kinds of intellectual elites, based on
these four characteristics above, I limit my focus in this project to elites coming
distinctly from the left. Elite counterparts among Islamists and ultra-nationalists
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hold different agendas and are not currently prominent actors in facilitating real
dialogue about the events of 1915, and therefore are not my focus here (though their
powerful roles in other aspects of Turkish politics should not be dismissed). While
there are certainly exceptions, the elite solidarity members in this article behave and
perceive themselves more as global citizens than their Kemalist or Isla- mist
counterparts who often support, at least tacitly, the state’s policy of denial and confine
their social networks to within Turkey. Of course, many leftist elites may have
originally been inspired by Kemalist traditions of secularism and modernism, but
ultimately they seek more international values than those espoused, for example, by
the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP). The most tangible way this
differentiation plays out is in the relationship of different elite groups to nationalism.
While leftist Turkish intellectuals are by no means a homogenous group, they do
generally criticize Turkish nationalism in a way that sets them apart from other
intellectual elites.
In addition to the formation of solidarity coalitions, a secondary process in this
democratization dialogue is the solidarity coalition’s relationship with the state. The
actors engage in several moments of dialogue that contest official policy in the arena
of memory. The elite-led coalitions facilitating this contestation are integral to
enabling active citizen participation by less powerful social groups. Tilly sees
democratization processes entailing the formation of coalitions between social
classes to bring marginalized people closer to centres of power.23 Although a portion
of the Armenian community has formed this kind of coalition with the Turkish leftist
intellectual elite, there has been little exploration of this coalition as a participation
promoting tool.
This article does not focus on the Turkish state, but it is worth mentioning because
the state plays a monumental role in both the perpetuation of interethnic hostilities
and the potential for reconciliation between ethnic groups. However, the notion of
the state issuing an official apology remains ephemeral. This is because the Turkish
state is bound to its historic policy of Turkification as modernization and therefore
chooses not to recognize an event like the Armenian Catastrophe because such
recognition would cast a negative pall over the state- building project and the legacy
of Kemalism. Moreover, the state is bound to the public opinion its policies have
manufactured, and deviance from the official discourse at this point could be labelled
anti-nationalist. Rather than try to change this reality, the leftist Turkish elite has
stepped up to offer the affirmation of identity memorialization that the state is unable
to do by apologizing to Armenians. Although there is great concern in the political
apology literature about who has the right to forgive on behalf of whom,24 it is less
contested that citizens may apologize to each other if their state is unwilling to
participate in the ritual. Often elite pressure is needed to foment behaviour change
among states and civil society alike, and such seems to be the case in Turkey.
While the role of the state in apology as mentioned above is important, the central
focus of this article is the way the Armenian community has used memories of violence
in identity construction and political behaviour. Around the world
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people create and maintain identity through narratives, which are the stories that
people tell about themselves and that are reinforced by the social webs in which
individual actors are embedded. Armenian citizen participation in Turkey is influ-
enced by the memories of violence that shape the collective identities of this group.
Related to this, ethnic minority communities such as Armenians that have experi-
enced state-initiated violence use collective memory as cultural legacies to com-
memorate grievances, which in turn are used as identity rallying points. Furthermore,
the subjectivity of memory – the recalling of an experience across space and time –
will vary depending on the socially constructed narratives of the rememberers.25 The
events of 1915 within the Armenian community ‘produced an exceptionally strong
feeling of ethnic cultural cohesiveness that provided Armenian intellectuals with
reference points, causes, and an avid audience’.26 Such reference points serve a
collectively held historical memory that is denied by the Turkish state.27
To create collective memory, however, there must first be collective identity,
where people perceive that they are more similar to each other than to people of
another group.28 From the conflict resolution literature, we know that when
confronted with an identity-threatening conflict, people will rely on their in-
group identity all the more fiercely.29 Thus, collective identity strengthens in the
aftermath of identity-targeted violence, and even more so when collective memories of
the violence, perceived as memorials to the victims, are challenged. In the case of
Turkey, the Armenian community has clung to its collective identity and its collective
memories, which put it in direct opposition to the state. This stance has hindered full
citizen participation by Armenians in the democratizing Turkish state. The official
negation of memory perceived as fundamental to group identity results in a silencing
and sense of detachment for that group. Detachment, re-invoking Nobles’ point
about the impact of apologies, may lead to less civic participation.30
The role of memory in citizen behaviour becomes particularly pertinent with
the added layer of historic state-driven violence. Although I refer more generally to
‘violence’ throughout this article, the specific definition of violence utilized comes
from Charles Tilly’s work on coordinated destruction as a sub-category of collective
violence. Tilly defines coordinated destruction as occurring when ‘persons or
organizations specialized in the deployment of coercive means under- take programs
of actions that damage persons and/or objects’.31 Furthermore, he allows that
coordinated destruction can lead to genocide, in which attackers ident- ify victims
based on heritage categorization.32 Targeted bodily harm of Armenian- Ottomans by
the Ottoman state – the killing of upwards of one million people – fits into Tilly’s
definition of coordinated attacks and demonstrates the coercive relationships that
then became stored in the memories of survivors, their descen- dents, and their
solidarity communities.33
Because of the sensitive nature of the topic it is important to clarify the terms
employed to delimit the ‘incident’ itself. Depending on the audience, many vagaries
are used to hint at past ethnic violence, such as the ‘Armenian question’, the
‘Armenian problem’, or the ‘catastrophe of 1915’.34 While many scholars
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have debated terminology around 1915, sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek concisely
presents the spectrum of Turkish words used to talk about what happened to the
Ottoman-Armenian population in Turkey, with translations ranging from ‘forced
migration’ to ‘mass killing’ or ‘massacre’.35 US-based Turkish historian Taner
Akçam consistently deploys the word genocide to describe what Ottoman Turks did
to the Armenian population in 1915.36 Defined by Article II of the 1948 United
Nations Convention on Genocide, acts of murder or violence ‘committed with intent
to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ reflect
the reality that Akçam says Ottoman Armenians faced from Ottoman Turks. A
member of the forced diaspora,37 Akçam presents detailed documentation to justify his
use of the term.38 Moreover, it has been established by the larger international
community as an appropriate description of what happened to Ottoman Armenians in
1915.39 Nonetheless, the term ‘genocide’ remains highly controversial in Turkey
today, and using it can shut down dialogue prematurely with those who would
otherwise be open to discussing ethnic minority relations and political participation.
Though ‘massacre’ can connote the seriousness of the violence against Ottoman
Armenians in a somewhat less polarizing way, ‘catastrophe’ is the expression
employed in the 2009 apology petition itself. Since ‘catastrophe’ is the term I often
used during my fieldwork in Turkey to open dialogue with a range of people, it is also
the term employed in this article to describe the events of 1915.
As with labels for violence, the body count of Armenians killed by Ottomans
varies based on the source and is highly contested. Common estimates are that
roughly 600,000– 1,500,000 Armenians were killed in the deportations and massacres
from 1915–1922,40 though the Turkish government contends there were from
300,000– 600,000 casualties.41 While exact dates and figures are still up for interpret-
ation by scholars, the events of 1915 have left an indelible mark on the Turkish psyche. The
myriad ways that one event can be framed through basic word choice or quantified
numerically highlight the importance of elite intellectuals in the con- testation of
memory. Academics are often the producers of words, theories, and statistics that
frame reality for the rest of the population through media and education forums. As
the correct label and body count for the events of 1915 is continually renegotiated,
elites, as part of broader solidarity coalitions, are trying to facilitate dialogue in the
arena of memory that will prevent the Turkish state from hegemonically
characterizing the Armenian Catastrophe as self defence.
Defining citizenship
Citizenship is taken to signify the status of a person with the duties, rights, and pri-
vileges of being bound to a specific territory governed by a state. This draws on
Tilly’s contractual definition:
Citizenship designates a set of mutually enforceable claims relating to categories
of persons to agents of governments ... citizenship has the character of a
contract:
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variable in range, never completely specified, always depending on unstated
assumptions about context, modified by practice, constrained by collective
memory, yet ineluctably involving rights and obligations sufficiently defined
that either party is likely to express indignation and corrective action when the
other fails to meet expectations built into the relationship.42
Yet it has been the inability of Armenians to obtain this ‘corrective action’ that
highlights the fragility of their citizenship. Though in theory each individual is bound
to the same set of duties and rights as the Turkish Sunni majority, minorities as
communities often lack the power to back up their rights claims. In part, this may be the
case in Turkey because of minority groups’ small numbers, but it may also have to do
with the policy of Turkification that has characterized the development of the modern
Turkish state.
Minorities, ethnically and religiously defined, do exist in Turkey.43 Out of
approximately 77 million citizens of Turkey, roughly 70 – 75% are ethnically
Turkish, 18% are Kurdish, and 7 – 12% are ‘others’ such as Greeks, Armenians,
Caucasians, Caferis, Rum, and Laz.44 While the US government’s ‘CIA World
Factbook’ does not distinguish the Alevis from what it classifies as a 99.8% Sunni
Muslim population, more discerning sources say that of the Turkish population, 10 –
33% of the total population are Alevi, with a breakdown of the remaining non-
Muslims at 60,000 Armenians, 23,000 Jews, 16,000 Rum Orthodox Christians, and
some 15,000 Syrian Orthodox Christians.45 The temptation to over- look the potent
diversity that exists both within Sunnis and among Turkish citizens should be resisted,
as such homogenization obscures the real challenges that exist for the Turkish state to
meet not just the needs of the majority population but those of the state’s most
neglected and oppressed citizens.
To be clear, Article 10 of the Turkish Constitution does protect the rights of all
citizens from discrimination regardless of race or language.46 However, Article 66 of
the Constitution manipulates the definition of citizenship in such a way that all those
‘bound to the Turkish state’ are considered Turkish.47 While straightforward at face
value, this territorially derived definition of citizenship does not make space for
identifying citizens such as Hrant Dink, who participated as a citizen in the Turkish
state, but was, as he insisted, ‘not a Turk’.48 This definition points to the generalized
ethnic and cultural assumptions wrapped into the package of the individual citizen,
and can help dispel the notion that by including minorities as Turks under the
Constitution, they will therefore be treated as equals. In fact, the territorial definition
of citizenship is leveraged as an assimilation tool that makes all Turkish citizens the
same, while disregarding the unique needs of various minority ethnic communities.
The constitutional definition of citizenship in Turkey was the subject of much debate
as the country prepared for the 2011 elections, but as of this writing, constitutional
reform has not yet taken place. An article in Hurriyet described constitutional reform
proposals put forth by the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) that would include
adding a clause to Article 66 saying that citizens will not be discriminated against
based on ethnicity but it has not been approved.49
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The Turkish Constitution discriminates against its minority citizens in ways that
fundamentally contradict the protections given to them under the Lausanne Treaty,
signed between Turkey and the Allied powers in 1923. Under the treaty, Armenians,
Jews, and Greeks were to be allowed to have their own schools con- ducted in
minority languages, and the treaty obligated the Turkish government to create
public, minority language schools in any location that had a concentrated population
of one of these ethnic groups.50 Yet Article 3 of the Turkish Constitution declares
Turkish to be the national language, and Article 42 then makes it illegal to conduct
education in any other language, in direct conflict with the Lausanne Treaty’s
provisions.51 Though exceptions have been made for the Lausanne minorities, as well
as to allow English, French, Italian, and German-language schools in Turkey, no
ethnic minority language education is technically allowed under the Constitution.
While the Lausanne minorities continue to supersede various challenges to enforce
the right to operate their own private schools in their own languages, the only way
to continue minority language acquisition for Turkey’s other minorities is through
inheritance or private classes.52 The fact that even the Lausanne minorities have
consistently struggled to obtain the access to their languages that the treaty
commanded highlights the dire situations of Turkey’s non-Lausanne groups who also
want the right to education in their own languages, as well as the right to practice their
own religious and cultural rituals.
If we take education to be a fundamental human right, as the United Nations (UN)
has declared it to be in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UNUDHR),53 then Turkey’s policy of Turkish-only education violates not only
the Lausanne Treaty, but also UNUDHR’s Article 26. This Article states that
‘education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to
the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental free- doms’.54 Though
the Turkish government may counter that it does provide education to each citizen
as per UNUDHR, by doing so only in Turkish the state is negating the ethnic heritage
and associated cultural epistemologies that accompany language. This is but one of the
ways that Armenians lack affirmation through official institutions.
Though Armenians are, as citizens, granted the right to vote, they are too small a
population to elect an Armenian representative. Since the 1980s, even the choice of
their electoral college through which the Armenian Patriarch is chosen has been
dictated by Turkish government regulations, which insist that the fathers of electoral
delegates must be Turkish citizens.55 Generally, minorities in Turkey are required to
‘be Turkish’, to assimilate, in order to access their rights. Challenging the policy of
assimilation, as Dink did, can lead to curtailed freedom through legal channels, such
as Penal Code 301, but the diminishing of identity shows how this can happen more
ephemerally. If Armenians refuse to accept the official Turkish state memory about
the events of 1915, their inability to be Turkish in this way works against their ability
to make rights claims as citizens.
Though individually citizens with guaranteed rights, Armenians’ collective
identity as an ethnic minority challenging state-sanctioned memory jeopardizes
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their ability to access their full range of rights. Yet constitutionally, in Articles 12 and
17, Armenians, as Turkish citizens, have the protected rights to express their
identities through the right of liberty.56 The denial of a fundamental historical
event which shaped the legacy of Armenians for their descendents diminishes their
identity by negating it. Armenian Turks today must downplay their ethnic identities
in order to be welcomed into the arena of formal political participation.
To touch on a temporal dimension of Turkish citizenship, it should be noted that a
constitutionally derived notion of citizenship, and specifically Turkishness, is a
relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, ‘claims premised on a direct relation between
state and individual – date only to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when
sultanic regimes attempted to transform both the coercive and con- sensual means of
rule’.57 Citizenship was not the main objective of major reforms during the Ottoman
Empire, but provides an interesting historical backdrop for understanding the way
that contemporary Turkish citizenship has evolved. During the Tanzimat reforms of
1836 – 1879, ‘the meaning of citizenship was continually reshaped by discussion and
contention between majority and minority; between individuals, semiautonomous
bodies, and an emerging legal and public sphere’.58 Now, as under the Tanzimat,
citizenship continues to be a malleable, powerful tool that is created, performed, and
experienced in divergent ways by Turkey’s residents. In addressing memories of
violence in the Armenian community of contemporary Turkey it is critical to unpack
the meaning of citizenship for minorities there, to better situate the challenges to
identity-based political participation, and to foreshadow the significance of the
moments of dialogue dis- cussed below.
Dialogue moments
As ethnic minorities in Turkey today try to exercise their rights and acquire recog-
nition in the public sphere, they face denial and blocked channels for dialogue.
However, a select solidarity community of elite scholars is trying to open the dia-
logue channels. This section presents recent moments of dialogue that illustrate
coalition-building between solidarity communities and descendents of violence
survivors in order to promote citizen participation in Turkey.
Official apologies
Apologies by governments to minority populations have caught on in recent years,
particularly among former British colonies: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the
United States have apologized in some way to their indigenous peoples and Great
Britain apologized to Ireland for its role in the potato famine.59 Less consolidated
democracies have also used apologies to address past grievances. The Salvadoran
government, led by Mauricio Funes, apologized in January 2010 for the
government’s role in El Salvador’s civil war. The lesson from these apologies relevant
to the discussion of Turkey is that they demonstrate the kind of language
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and political space necessary to generate a discourse. Though democratizing
countries may still feel threatened by the people to whom the government has a moral
obligation to apologize, the act of powerful states apologizing has in a sense paved
the way for weaker states to do the same. In each case, the government did not decide
on its own to offer an apology, but rather prior civil society petitioning facilitated its
manifestation. Turkey’s solidarity community may serve this petitioning purpose as
they offer a people-led apology that could bring enough international attention to
eventually shame the state into some degree of grievance recognition.
As a verbal or textual arena in which states can address past offenses committed
towards specific populations, apologies can have the goal of promoting peace,
national cohesion, or simply increased credibility of the regime. Apologies fit into the
theoretical framework of this article in that they are statements crafted by elite actors
in discursive arenas directed towards marginalized communities. As presented earlier,
Melissa Nobles argues that apologies can change the conditions of national
membership, in part because they ‘validate reinterpretations of history by formally
acknowledging past actions and judging them as unjust’.60 In line with her work, I take
apologies to be a type of dialogue fostering tool that can affirm memories integral to
identity. In turn, this affirmation can induce a greater sense of belonging to, and
interest in, participating in the polity.
The relatively new apology movement in Turkey, though not state-led, has still had
a powerful effect on the discourse about memory in Turkey. Barkan terms the apology
trend in Turkey the rediscovery of guilt, which gains prominence the more denial
appears as a losing political strategy.61 Though these apologies do not carry with them
monetary compensation, they do affect the tenor of public dis- course. Kevin Rudd,
when he was Prime Minister of Australia, made the first ever apology to Aboriginal
Australians in 2008, shortly after he assumed office.62 The impact of this apology was
such that white Australians became more aware of the colonial legacy of the country
and the abuse that Aboriginal people suffered, and continue to suffer, as a result of
racist policies. Moreover, it had the effect of legitimizing Aboriginal people as valid
citizens of the Australian state whose rights had been violated. Though some people,
including Aboriginals, say that apologies should include reparations to address the
inequalities that state-induced suffering produces, it is undeniable that the verbal
apology alone raised the level of debate within Australia about the treatment of
Aboriginal Australians.63 Even as the Australian apology was transmitted through the
media, discourses of the state’s obligations and citizens’ rights came to life both in
Parliament and at kitchen tables. Why then could such a verbal arena not be the seat
of discursive change in the Turkish case?
An unofficial apology
The online apology petition, o¨zu¨r diliyorum,64 was started in Turkey in January
2009 by a small group of scholars and journalists. The text of the apology
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campaign, spearheaded by Cengiz Aktar, head of EU Studies at Bahçesehir University,
and Ali Bayramoglu, a prominent writer and public intellectual, is as follows:
My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the
Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject
this injustice and for my share, empathize with the feelings and pain of my
Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them.65
Launched on 21 January 2009, more than 30,000 individuals signed the statement, and
the majority did so within the first month of its circulation.66 This apology is
significant on many levels, but I focus on the way that a coalition of elite actors
merged together to address an individual and community-held memory and rejected
the Turkish state’s official policy of denial. Such an approach returns us to the initial
question this article explores: how do citizens participate in democratization processes
when state narratives challenge their own memories of violence? While for many years
of Turkey’s democratization Armenians were unable to manifest sustained,
contentious collective action, it seems that the support of solidarity communities in
arenas of dialogue promotion has been integral to overcoming participation
stagnation.
Though acknowledging that the petition began as an elite discourse from within
the academic community, Aktar says it quickly stimulated public debate and dialogue
through dispersion on blogs and in newspapers.67 In fact, the main- stream public
reaction to the petition was harsh (but also evidence of its widespread impact), with 11
counter-petitions formed online, saying things like ‘we are ashamed of you for
apologizing’.68 One of the counter-petitions garnered upwards of 85,000 signatures,
though doubts about the authenticity of the signatures abounded. Regardless, the
counter-petitions, particularly one crafted by Turkish ex-diplomats, were widely
publicized in the media, reinforcing the state narrative of denial and illuminating the
scale of the challenge to initiate dialogue about the Catastrophe. Abundant hate mail
and threats also came to initiators and prominent signatories. On the one hand hate
mail can also be considered freedom of expression, like the apology petition itself,
but threats to well-being cross the line of expression, violating the recipient’s right
to security. Sending hate mail that carries threats is a fear tactic designed to limit
contestation of citizen- ship identity in Turkey and perpetuate unequal access to rights
claims for Armenian Turks and their solidarity communities. The menacing way that
opponents rejected the apology campaign can also be seen as indicative of incomplete
democratization regarding civil liberties in Turkey.
While the text of the apology addresses the incidents of 1915, it metaphorically also
addresses the problem of denial that has undermined Armenian identity for the last
century. The ability to ‘name the problem’, as Ferda Keskin of Bilgi University puts it,
is a compelling example of citizen participation in a rights-demanding form that is a
useful indicator of democratic quality in Turkey.69 Elite allies have clearly played a
pivotal role in fostering moments of dialogue, but this is often the case
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when minority groups lack access to resources. By forming coalitions, individual and
collective actions support the expansion of minority group power while furthering
the elite agenda of increased democratization that entails greater freedom of
expression.
While the intricacies of how the apology campaign was perceived by Armenians are
not documented here, in general it seems that the campaign increased the willingness
of the Armenian community to open up to solidarity coalitions interested in working
with them. The apology campaign in this sense reinforced the sense of solidarity that
began with the identity commonality seen at Hrant Dink’s funeral, where Turks came
out in the streets to support and speak out for the Armenian community. However, the
politics of these solidarity coalitions remain tense – as Aris Nalcı, Redactor-in-Chief
at Agos, put it – ‘there are people in the Turkish left who use the word genocide in
private but the word catastrophe in public’.70 Though he understands politically why
solidarity activists make this kind of choice, Nalcı noted that such language-swapping
feels insincere and may prove to be a stumbling block in building solidarity coalition
strength.
Returning to Tilly’s coalition-building as a part of collective action, the apology
petition does denote a collective action, but also the importance of each individual
that makes up the collective. Academic and public intellectual Ahmet Insel stated
that ‘everyone signed this statement on their own conscientious assessment... [T]here
are as many motives for signing on as the number of signa- tories’.71 Yet there is also
a common platform on which the coalition can base its action, namely ‘the need to
face our history without having to bow to any taboo, ban or pressure’.72 Keskin
describes how, regardless of any personal connection to the events of 1915, ‘by being
a citizen of this nation-state, I feel bad about it, and I apologize’.73 This shared
response allowed individual actors to mobilize together in the discursive arena. By
joining forces with those who have less access to power, elite-led solidarity
communities use the apology as a discursive tool to promote interaction in the arena
of memory.
In some ways, textual dialogue can feel safer than face-to-face discussion because
of the ability to revise one’s words prior to them being publicized, and mass
movements provide a safety in numbers that can be comforting for people unwilling
to make controversial statements alone. The internet in this scenario grants greater
political expression and distribution, but was (and is) also used as a mouthpiece for
hate.74 By placing their names on the apology petition, Turkish citizens are calling
for increased discussion and revision of the national memory as it pertains to the
Armenian community. The act puts one’s reputation on the line and essentially says,
‘I am ready to talk about things that are difficult.’
The 2007 funeral of Hrant Dink. While Dink, as seen in the opening vignette of this
article, could be rather blunt in his personal identity politics, his life’s work, as shown
through the creation of Agos newspaper, was dedicated to the idea of robust
democratic dialogue and identity pluralism. Though Turkish nationalists feared
Dink’s call for dialogue on both the history of Armenians in Turkey as well as con-
temporary ethnic minority rights, Dink was also instrumental in opening up greater
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discourse about engaged citizenship within the Armenian community living in
Turkey. As a colleague wrote in a memorial edition of openDemocracy Quarterly
dedicated to Dink:
The bitter tragedy of his death is that Agos was an expression of his dedication
to a debate not with Turkish nationalists but with his fellow Armenians. He felt
that they were too much in the grip of the Armenian diaspora’s obsession with
the genocide between 1915 – 1917. He wanted to talk, write and publish about
it freely and honestly, of course. But with the hope of this allowing Armenians
to become normal, healthy citizens of a modern democratic Turkey.75
Hrant Dink’s death provoked a tremendous reaction from a heterogeneous portion
of Turkish society. People took to the Istanbul streets at his funeral – some estimate
more than 100,000 – holding signs and chanting ‘we are all Armenians’ and ‘we are
all Hrant Dink’. At this particular historic moment, solidarity transcended ethnicity
in Turkey and allowed what Sidney Tarrow calls ‘contentious collective action’ to
take place; when people who normally do not have access to political power via
institutions gather together to voice a claim that challenges authority through
sustained interface.76 For many Turkish people, the funeral march was the first time
they raised their voices in support of the Armenian community in Turkey. For
Armenians, the event marked the first time many saw large scale identity solidarity
from Turkish people who were generally thought of as persecutors. Transcending
ethnic boundaries and discursive divides in the streets of Istanbul, people honoured
the life of Dink while challenging the impunity and violence of the deep state. Nearly
everyone interviewed cited the funeral march as a turning point in the relationship
between Armenian activists and the elite Turkish left. The momentum generated at
Dink’s funeral continues today through the Hrant Dink Foundation and various
solidarity communities, such as families of murdered Turkish journalists who protest
in his name, and at court- side demonstrations whenever Dink’s case is in front of a
judge, organized by mostly Turkish activists and intellectuals.
The 2005 conference on academic responsibility. Academic dialogue was
attempted most visibly through the conference entitled ‘Ottoman Armenians during
the Era of Imperial Decline: Academic Responsibility and Issues of Democracy’,
intended to take place at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul 25 – 27 May 2005. Organized
by scholars from Bogaziçi, Bilgi, and Sabançi universities, the conference came under
heavy scrutiny from both ruling and opposition parties of the Turkish government that
led to its delay. Der Matossian commented that the conference was ‘an important step
for Turkish liberal historiography, because for the first time since the founding of the
Turkish republic in 1923, a meeting within a Turkish university questioned the state
narrative’.77
Nationalists were enraged at their narrative being questioned in this way, and they
let participants know it by throwing refuse at them as they entered the confer- ence.78
Additionally, denialists complained to the public university where the conference was
first supposed to be held. Bogaziçi’s president received hate mail and
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calls about the fact that tax dollars would be used for the event, which contributed to
the conference being moved to the privately funded Bilgi University.79 Moreover, a
civil organization called the Jurists Union filed a petition to the courts asking that the
conference be shut down based on its potential to damage the nation’s reputation, and
two of three judges upheld the petition, citing rather transparent denialist rhetoric to
justify their decisions.80 Eventually, Bilgi University held the conference on 24 – 25
September 2005, but not before the Turkish government had tried to ban it, with then
Minister of Justice Cemil C
¸
içek (as of this writing Speaker of the Parliament and
affiliated with the Islamist party),81 describing it as ‘treason against Turkey’.82
This incident points to the perilous role of academia as an arena of free thought and
expression in a restricted though democratizing state. Individual elite actors have
stepped into this arena to access their rights claims through expression that challenges
the state narrative, but they do so at risk of their jobs and reputations. From the state
perspective, however, limiting free speech is seen as imperative to preserving
historic truths within the collective memory. On the other side of the argument,
European legislation has made it illegal to deny the Holocaust, thus using restrictions
of freedom of expression to preserve integrity of the collective memory of state-
sponsored violence.
In the case of Turkish and Armenian advocacy, if free speech is taken out of
academia and this link in the elite solidarity community network is dissolved, it is
uncertain if other arenas would host the voices of survivors’ descendents. Scholars
play key roles in relation to citizen expression and participation because they
pedagogically disseminate norms and discourses in classrooms, conferences, and
writings. However, US-based Turkish sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek observes that
when scholars engage with trauma and its historical actors:
[t]he conventional distance that scholars place between themselves and their
texts is no longer there; the strategic negotiation enables scholars to do a couple
of things simultaneously: they capture the complexity of the trauma,
contextualize it without normalizing it, and, by reflecting on their own subject
position during the process, are able to clarify their ethical stand in relation to
the trauma.83
Academics and other public intellectuals in Turkey hold a grave responsibility to
keep the dialogue process rolling despite extreme resistance from the Turkish state.
To draw on the language of the contentious politics literature,84 academics facilitate
dialogue within the arena of memory. Their role as elites in contesting the state
narrative appears indispensable to the momentum of the movement.
For democratizing countries like Turkey, owning up to the unjust origins of the
modern state is not yet going to happen at the regime level, but it is starting to happen
within civil society. EU scholar Ahmet Evin said he does not think memory should
inhibit the development of a modern nation state.85 Yet he concedes that in the
context of Turkey and the events of 1915, traumatic memory, for both the regime and
the Armenian community, does seem to be complicating the democratization
process.86 Oral historian Leyla Neyzi is more forthright in linking memory and
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Turkey’s political development. ‘The modernization project in Turkey’, she asserts, ‘is
about forgetting’.87 Elite solidarity coalitions challenge this reality by trying to
facilitate both democratization via EU channels, and memorialization of identity via
dialogue moments in Turkey.
Conclusion
In this article I have argued that what transpires in the memory arena informs pol-
itical participation, and that citizenship in Turkey is inextricably bound up with
identity in ways that can influence the quality of democracy. Dialogue about memory
is one tool that can expand participation space for all Turkish citizens. For
Armenians, such dialogue may play a role in the reassertion of their right to non-
Turkish identity as a fundamental right of citizenship in Turkey.
I have described the role that solidarity communities play in creating coalitions with
Armenians, and have discussed memory and dialogue arenas as integral spaces for
emerging frameworks of collective action. Through fieldwork findings, a snapshot of
Turkey’s elite-led dialogue about the Armenian Catastrophe has been created. The
online apology petition of 2009, the funereal outpouring after the death of Hrant Dink
in 2007, and the 2005 academic conference were presented as dialogue moments
operating in arenas of memory that have opened up space for ethnic minority and
solidarity citizen expression. To be realistic, it is noted that dialogue within select
communities will itself not change political behaviour. A wide swath of Turkish
society exists outside the dialogue and in fact stands in opposition to it. The claim
here has been more subtle; that dialogue serves as a window through which
Armenians and members of solidarity communities can glimpse other ways of being
in relationship with each other. Dialogue is the first step to engaging alternative
ontologies.
Acknowledgements
I thank Mert Arslanalp, Edward Gibson, William Reno, and Joshua Dankoff for their
insightful comments on previous drafts of this article. Financial support for fieldwork
came from the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies and the
Keyman Family Program in Modern Turkish Studies, for which I am grateful. An
earlier version of this article was presented at the International Praxis Conference on
Cultural Memory and Coexistence in Istanbul, 2011, whose participants provided
helpful feedback, as did two anonymous reviewers for this journal. I alone am
responsible for any errors.
Notes
1. Cited in Mango, Turkey: A Delicately Poised Ally, 11.
2. Please note that throughout this article, the label ‘Armenian’ refers only to
Armenians living within the territory of Turkey.
3. Dink, ‘A Pidgeon-Like Unease of Spirit’, 27; Hilton, ‘Hrant Dink: An
Opendemocracy Tribute’.
4. Literary figure Orhan Pamuk has also been tried for denigrating Turkishness
after saying in an interview with the Swiss press that a million Armenians
and 30,000
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Kurds in Turkey have been killed – such an allegation constitutes a crime under
Penal Code 301 and is punishable by six months to three years in prison, see
Belge, ‘The Trials of Turkish Writers’.
5. Republic of Turkey, The Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, Articles 25, 26.
6. Young Civilians and Human Rights Agenda Association, Ergenekon Is Our Reality, 47–9.
7. For a brief primer on Ergenekon see ibid.
8. The notion of territorially derived, unshakable identity stretches back to the
Ottoman Empire. Article 8 of the 1876 Constitution reads: ‘All subjects of the
Empire are called Ottomans, without distinction, whatever faith they profess;
the status of an Ottoman is acquired and lost, according to conditions specified
by law’, emphasis in original, Salzmann, ‘Citizens in Search of a State’, 66.
9. Aminzade et al., Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics.
10. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, 24.
11. Higley and Gunther, Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and
Southern Europe; Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy;
Rueschemeyer, Huber Stephens, and Stephens, Capitalist Development and
Democracy.
12. This role for elites indicates a level of civil society robustness that is important
for increasing citizenship participation in democratizing states. For opinions on
this debate, see Collier, Paths toward Democracy; Schumpeter, Capitalism,
Socialism, and Democracy; Viterna, ‘Pulled, Pushed, and Persuaded’.
13. Kaya, Forgotten or Assimiliated?, 8.
14. While Sunni Kurds are able to use religious commonality as a basis for
assimilation, this is not the case for Alevi Kurds, who are rendered outsiders by
both their religious and ethnic identities, as in the town of Dersim/Tunceli.
15. Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies.
16. Ibid., 36.
17. Ibid.
18. Lechner and Gu¨el 1999, 194 – 5, cited in Jelin, State Repression and the
Labors of Memory, 101.
19. The American Heritage College Dictionary, 850.
20. Antze and Lambek, Tense Past, vii.
21. Bloch, ‘Internal and External Memory’, 218.
22. Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism, 29.
23. Tilly, Democracy, 76 – 7.
24. Digeser, Political Forgiveness, 112 – 15.
25. See Antze and Lambek, Tense Past, xviii– xix for a discussion of this.
26. Derluguian, Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus, 189.
27. The way that the policy of denial affects the Armenian diaspora is quite different,
as diasporans are able to have the benefits of citizenship elsewhere while holding
on to a collective memory as a basis for ethnic identity. Armenians in Turkey,
however, are faced with this problem through daily disadvantages as citizens,
such as having no real representative government that speaks to their needs.
28. Coy and Woehrle, Social Conflicts and Collective Identities, 3.
29. Ibid., 7.
30. Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies, 36.
31. Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence, 103.
32. Ibid., 104.
33. See Mango, ‘Remembering the Minorities’, 276 – 7, for a problematic
juxtaposition of Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis’ work on Armenian
casualties to that of Justin McCarthy; and Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy,
140, for a breakdown of several sources.
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34. Damat Ferid Pasha decries the use of the term ‘deportation’, as the Armenians
were not resettled but driven out, thus he says ‘expelled’ would be a better
description. See Akc¸am, A Shameful Act, 267.
35. Mu¨ge Go¨c¸ek, ‘Turkish Historiography and the Unbearable Weight of 1915’, 338.
36. Akc¸am, A Shameful Act.
37. Akc¸am received asylum in Germany in 1978 after breaking out of Ankara’s
Central Prison one year into a nine-year sentence that he received for being the
editor of a radical leftist journal.
38. Akc¸am, A Shameful Act.
39. International Association of Genocide Scholars, ‘Open Letter to Prime Minister
of Turkey’.
40. In everyday discussion it seems that this time period becomes compressed to
just 1915, the year of the largest single massacre, though the whole time period
was in fact part of the catastrophe.
41. Suny, Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History, 217. Also Akc¸am,
A Shameful Act, 4.
42. Tilly, ‘Conclusion: Why Worry About Citizenship?’, 253.
43. Some scholars, such as Michele Penner Angrist have called Kurds Turkey’s
‘sole significant ethnic minority’ (Penner Angrist, ‘Turkey: Roots of the
Turkish-Kurdish Conflict and Prospects for Constructive Reform’, 388), but
members of the ethnic and religious minority groups listed here might disagree
with her.
44. CIA, ‘CIA World Factbook – Turkey’.
45. Kaya, Forgotten or Assimiliated?, 10.
46. Republic of Turkey, The Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, 3.
47. Ibid., 21.
48. Hilton, ‘Hrant Dink: An Opendemocracy Tribute’.
49. Daily News Parliament Bureau, ‘Pro-Kurdish Party Introduces Own Draft
on Constitution’.
50. Kaya, Forgotten or Assimiliated?, 8.
51. Republic of Turkey, The Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, 2, 14.
52. Kaya, Forgotten or Assimiliated?, 8–9.
53. United Nations General Assembly, ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’.
54. Ibid.
55. Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and
Indigenous Peoples – Turkey – Armenians.
56. Republic of Turkey, The Constitution of the Republic of Turkey.
57. Salzmann, ‘Citizens in Search of a State’, 38.
58. Ibid.
59. Barkan, ‘Can Memory of Genocide Lead to Reconciliation?’, 391.
60. Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies, 112, 174.
61. Barkan, ‘Can Memory of Genocide Lead to Reconciliation?’, 396.
62. BBC, ‘Full Text: Apology to Aborigines’.
63. Since in the Turkish case the notion of reparations is unimaginable at this point in
time, I try to evaluate the significance of the discursive arena alone, without
taking on the challenge of monetary calculations for state-induced violence.
64. The petition is available at http://www.ozurdiliyoruz.com.
65. Insel, ‘“This Conduct Was a Crime against Humanity”: An Evaluation of the
Initiative to Apologize to the Armenians’, 1.
66. Ibid.
67. Cengiz Aktar, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 26 June 2009, Istanbul,
Turkey. Aktar has also published a book on this topic that provides background.
See Aktar, L’appel Au Pardon: Des Turcs S’adressent Aux Arme´niens.
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68. Aktar, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 26 June 2009.
69. Ferda Keskin, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 16 June 2009, Istanbul, Turkey.
70. Aris Nalcı, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 22 July 2010, Istanbul, Turkey.
71. Insel, ‘“This Conduct Was a Crime against Humanity”: An Evaluation of the
Initiative to Apologize to the Armenians’, 2.
72. Ibid.
73. Keskin, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 16 June 2009.
74. As an example of interactive popular media that can influence dialogue, the entry
for ‘Armenian genocide’ in Wikipedia was vandalized, editing privileges
restricted, and the content declared disputed, showing how the politics of
apology are far from resolved, and the public discussion remains highly charged.
Similarly, non-interactive websites that deny the Armenian massacres, such as
‘tallarmeniantale.com’ have taken to embedding photos from their sites in less
political websites about Turkey in order to get users to click the photo link, which
then takes them to a distressingly denialist website.
75. Barnett, ‘Hrant Dink: Do Not Fear’.
76. Tarrow, Power in Movement, 2.
77. Der Matossian, ‘Venturing into the Minefield’, 382.
78. Fatma Go¨k, Meeting with Mneesha Gellman on 30 June 2009, Istanbul, Turkey.
79. Ibid.
80. Belge, ‘The Trials of Free Speech in Turkey’.
81. From 2003 – 2007, C¸ ic¸ek served as Minister of Justice under the Justice and
Develop- ment Party (AKP), but he started his career as a Member of Parliament
with the Motherland Party (ANAP) in the 1980s.
82. In Der Matossian, ‘Venturing into the Minefield’, 382.
83. Go¨c¸ek, ‘Turkish Historiography and the Unbearable Weight of 1915’, 355.
84. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention.
85. Ahmet Evin, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 23 June 2009, Istanbul, Turkey.
86. Ibid. Although Japan has long been democratic, it is interesting to note that
contro- versy over memory about sexual slavery during World War II
contributed to former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s resignation. From: Freedom
House, Freedom in the World – Japan. Also, for more on Japan’s unwillingness
to apologize to China for war crimes, perpetuating its isolation see Nobles, The
Politics of Official Apologies, 1.
87. Leyla Neyzi, Interview with Mneesha Gellman on 25 June 2009, Istanbul, Turkey.
Notes on contributor
Mneesha Gellman is a PhD candidate in political science at Northwestern University,
USA. Her current research focuses on ethnic minority rights mobilizations in Turkey
and Latin America, particularly after incidents of state and paramilitary violence.
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