'Ghost' of 100-year-old tragedy haunts Armenians and Turks

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[April 23, 2015]  By Ayla Jean Yackley

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - The mass killings of Armenians in Turkish lands during World War One left scars still visible a century on, says a book published ahead of this week's anniversary of the start of the violence.

"Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide", by Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier and published in English in March, investigates the aftermath of one of the 20th century's greatest tragedies.

Armenians say 1.5 million of their ethnic kin were slaughtered by Ottoman Turks in what amounted to genocide.

Turkey denies the massacres were an orchestrated campaign to annihilate Armenians and says many Muslims also died in the turmoil of a global war and the subsequent collapse of the Ottoman Empire. A much more ethnically homogeneous Turkish Republic was founded in 1923 on the empire's ashes.

Marchand and Perrier, who worked as Istanbul correspondents for a decade for France's Le Figaro and Le Monde newspapers, respectively, accept the premise that genocide was committed, as do most Western scholars. They focus their work on examining the impact its denial has left on both sides.

"In Turkey, 1915 does not belong to the past but to the present because history has not been confronted. The Armenian issue is alive, like a ghost walking the country," Perrier said.

Q: Why does a 100-year-old historical event still haunt both Turks and Armenians?

Marchand: Turkey's inability to face its past still has consequences, whether it's in diplomacy or its treatment of minorities today, like the Kurdish issue. Turkish people are forced to share this big secret upon which their country was founded. Confronting the past ... is a key point in the democratization of Turkey.

For Armenians around the world, their identity is based on genocide, constructed by a diaspora that had nothing when it left ... Their grandchildren carry the same ideas about Turkey, even though they did not live it.

Q: Turkey argues that the genocide is not a legal or historical reality but Erdogan has offered his condolences over the loss of life. Why does Turkey refuse to call it a genocide?

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Perrier: Turkey is now a rich, confident country, it can face these charges. In the end, it is symbolic. As a new country, Turkey was built on the genocide, the economy was built on confiscated property. It was the founding event.

Marchand: We met the family of the owner of the land and vineyard house at the (former presidential) palace of Cankaya (in the capital Ankara). This helps us understand how deeply rooted this is in the Turkish state. Cankaya, the symbol of the republic, was property that used to belong to an Armenian.

Q: Are you seeing movement in Turkish civil society toward reconciliation?

Marchand: It is easier to talk about this issue today than 10 years ago. We couldn't have found a publisher in Turkey before. The book is meant to accompany an ongoing debate.

Perrier: The Kurdish (political party) HDP is targeting voters who have been excluded by the state for their identity. They recognize the suffering of Armenians because of their own suffering. People in (the mainly Kurdish city of) Diyarbakir speak quite freely now about their Armenian origin.

Q: What are the ghosts you refer to in your title?

Perrier: The ghosts are Islamicized Armenians, descendants of those who converted (from Christianity) to survive the genocide. The Kurdish issue is a ghost. The killing of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007 and his murderers' links with the state. All of the churches. When you travel into Turkey, it is surprising how easily you can find the ruins of churches. Along the border with Syria, where you find refugee camps today, are the same sites where camps for the deportation of Armenians stood, in exactly the same places. These are the ghosts.

(Editing by Daren Butler, Michael Roddy and Gareth Jones)

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