A news item from the Guardian today that bears on a recent dis­cus­sion I had with Justin in the com­ments of an old post of mine:

Aca­d­e­mics and writ­ers in Turkey have risked a fierce offi­cial back­lash by issu­ing a public apol­ogy for the alleged geno­cide suf­fered by Arme­ni­ans at the hands of Ottoman forces during the first world war.

Break­ing one of Turk­ish society’s biggest taboos, the apol­ogy comes in an open letter that invites Turks to sign an online peti­tion sup­port­ing its sentiments.

It reads: “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, I empathise with the feel­ings and pain of my Armen­ian broth­ers. I apol­o­gise to them.”

The con­tents expose its authors – three schol­ars, Ahmet Insel, Baskin Oran and Cengiz Aktar, and a jour­nal­ist, Ali Bayramoglu==to the wrath of the Turk­ish state, which has pros­e­cuted writ­ers, includ­ing the Nobel prize-​winning nov­el­ist Orhan Pamuk, for sup­port­ing Armen­ian geno­cide claims.

Turkey rejects the asser­tion of many his­to­ri­ans and Armenia’s gov­ern­ment that up to 1.5 mil­lion Arme­ni­ans died in a wave of expul­sions that amounted to state-​sanctioned geno­cide. Offi­cials claim the death toll was much lower and that most of the vic­tims died from dis­ease. They also say many Turks were killed by Arme­ni­ans, who have long been accused of ally­ing them­selves with enemy Russ­ian forces against the Ottoman empire.

The letter has trig­gered a furi­ous response from ultra­na­tion­al­ists, who have labelled it a “betrayal” and an “insult to the Turk­ish nation”.

How­ever, Aktar, a pro­fes­sor of EU stud­ies at Istanbul’s Uni­ver­sity of Bahce­se­hir, said Turks needed to apol­o­gise for being unable to dis­cuss the issue because of offi­cial policy, which has long repressed open debate on the Armenians’ fate.

“Today many people in Turkey, with all good inten­tions, think that noth­ing hap­pened to the Armenians,” he told the news­pa­per Vatan. “The offi­cial his­tory says that this inci­dent hap­pened through sec­ondary, not very impor­tant, and even mutual mas­sacres. They push the idea that it was an ordi­nary inci­dent explain­able by the con­di­tions of the first world war. Unfor­tu­nately, the facts are very different.”