Turkey’s Century of Denial About an Armenian Genocide – NYTimes.com

Good piece on the ongoing denial by Turkey of the Armenian genocide which recently had its 100th anniversary this year, marked in particular by the Pope’s labelling itself as such and more Turkish denial:

“The Armenian diaspora is trying to instill hatred against Turkey through a worldwide campaign on genocide claims ahead of the centennial anniversary of 1915,” Mr. Erdogan said recently. “If we examine what our nation had to go through over the past 100 to 150 years, we would find far more suffering than what the Armenians went through.”

In a country defined by its divisions, between the secular and the religious, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, the legacy of the Armenian genocide is a unifying issue for Turks. A recent poll conducted by the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, an Istanbul research organization, found that only 9 percent of Turks thought the government should label the atrocities a genocide and apologize for them.

Turkey’s ossified position, so at odds with the historical scholarship, is a legacy of how the Turkish republic was established after World War I. Under its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, society here underwent a process of Turkification: a feat of social engineering based on an erasure of the past and the denial of a multi-ethnic history. The Armenian massacres were wiped from the country’s history, only to emerge for ordinary Turks in the 1970s after an Armenian terrorist campaign against Turkish diplomats.

Even now, Turkish textbooks describe the Armenians as traitors, call the Armenian genocide a lie and say that the Ottoman Turks took “necessary measures” to counter Armenian separatism. A room at the Istanbul Military Museum is devoted to the suffering of Muslims at the hands of Armenian militants.

Turkey’s Century of Denial About an Armenian Genocide – NYTimes.com.