Armenia Stuck In The Past: Turkey could give a hand
It was two in the morning and I couldn’t go to sleep, zapping on the channels of my TV nothing appealed to me. Suddenly out of nowhere I saw Charles Aznavour on the screen. In Ararat, the French singer plays a film director trying to bring alive a historical fact that has been forgotten or merely acknowledged. Although the shooting of an Armenian artist’s life is what leads the story, there is more to it than what meets the eye as it only brings the plot together for a far greater scheme. Although this is only a movie, its message is truly touching and revealing. It becomes political, social, philosophical and psychological.
The Armenian genocide remains the key element to the whole synopsis. Multiple stories keep crossing each other and various questions keep on bursting out. However, they all lead to the memory of past events, its effect on the present and of course how to live with it. It doesn’t give out any answers or even try to blame anyone, it only says: How can we keep on living when everyone has forgotten us and what we have been through?
When there is no justice there is no truth and therefore there can be no trust. This is why the Armenian memory is an everyday battle for its people. The 24th of April is the commemoration day of this tragedy that we can call today genocide. In 2009, French intellectual and philosopher Bernard Henry Levy said a few words that explaining why one should not forget. ‘To negate the events that occurred during 1915-1917 in the Ottoman Empire is to kill the dead once again, to humiliate the survivors and their descendants.’
Although the European parliament recognized it in 1987, in 2001 France was the first country to declare that genocide was operated by the Turks in Armenia in the early 20th century. France didn’t write History as it was already written but not acknowledged. The facts are there, lawsuits were trialed and sentences were pronounced at the end of the 1st world war. Although many documents had been destroyed, the facts remained inerasable. Would there have been a unionist trial in 1919, or then again would there have also been the Tehlirian lawsuit in 1921 if this tragedy hadn’t happened?
The last time I heard about the Armenian genocide was when Turkey resented the French government’s vote in 2006 on the Gayssot law. This law would have severely punished any negations upon the subject, which occurrence is still being debated in Turkey. Blaming France for being an intruder in matters that don’t relate directly to its nation, the Turks held this matter as a great offense and would have reprimanded greatly by cutting short any shared economic development. The law has still not passed but remains an open file.
What about the rest of the world? With France giving out the example other countries followed as to restore the truth and knowledge of historical facts. From Europe, Latin America and the USA to the UN, EU and [The South American] Mercosur, Armenia’s past has been restored. Why can’t Turks admit these events?
Relating to Germany and the Holocaust, we all know that this horror is indelible. However although the memory of this loss will never tire it is not blamed on the young German generation as they have nothing to do with it. The German Republic cannot be blamed forever for what once happened. It was the act and motivation of a group of people that affected a population and a time and was lead by a name and its disciples. In a nutshell, if we keep on blaming each other after all these years we’ll never find peace and reconciliation. What am I trying to say? Simply that if Turkey could acknowledge the wrongs of the Union and Progress committee in these days and their involvement in the killing and deportation of more than a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds, then these people could move on. Putting their mutual hate aside, a dialogue could be restored between the two countries. If Turkish historian Orhan Pamuk could do that, why can’t its government do the same? It is only about admitting the past in order to embrace the future.
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