Talking history: How some Turks and Armenians are seeking to overcome years of conflict

Turkey’s involvement in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict brought century-long tensions between Armenians and Turks to an all-time high. But just weeks after a ceasefire, some activists were working to bring both communities together.

“Turks and Armenians have a lot in common. We should meet to discuss and analyse our history without pre-judgement or patriotic visions,” Apo Torosyan, 78, a Turkish-born artist living in Lynn, a suburb of Boston, told The Independent.

In December last year, Torosyan took part in a discussion group which gathers Turks and Armenians in the diaspora in the US to share family stories about the Armenian genocide of 1915. It was the group’s first meeting after the fall out in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Torosyan’s family survived the genocide, in which up to 1.5 million Armenians living in what is modern-day eastern Turkey were killed by Ottoman troops and Kurdish mercenaries. Decades later, Torosyan experienced attacks on Armenians and other minorities in Istanbul in 1955, and eventually left Turkey.

When he moved to Boston, however, he befriended a group of Turks. “They accepted me and I accepted them, we had no discrimination,” he recalled.

Then, in the 1990s, Torosyan translated and published his uncle’s eyewitness account of the genocide. His Turkish friends stopped talking to him.

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“I spoke the truth about what happened to my family. I was not describing propagandist history but facts in my family,” he said.

Turkey has never recognised the genocide and this history is a divisive issue for both countries and their diaspora communities. More than 30 countries have recognised the genocide.

“Denying the genocide is an existential issue for Turkey,” said Ohannes Kiliçgadi, aTurkish-Armenian academic historian and columnist.

“Those who had organised the Armenian deportations and massacres later became ministers, military commanders and even prime ministers. Speaking about the genocide would mean questioning the foundational narrative of the republic.”

Gonca Sönmez-Poole, a Boston-based activist and filmmaker who organised the discussion, was surprised by the turnout. “After the Nagorno-Karabakh war, I couldn’t see any signs of reconciliation. But a lot more Turks came than usual,” she said.

Sönmez-Poole is one of few Turkish activists working to initiate a dialogue between both communities, and has been organising these discussion groups for over 10 years. Her online community platform, Neighbours in Memory, collects personal stories of the genocide and its legacy. 

Yet she was 47 years old when she first became of aware of the history of the genocide.

“My knowledge about Armenians was limited to what I had studied in history classes: the Armenians had sided with the enemy,” said Sönmez-Poole, referring to the protection that Armenians had sought from Imperial Russia.

“Historically, Turkey sees itself as the victim of western powers, not as an oppressor,” said Lerna Ekmekçioglu, a Turkish-Armenian historian who was part of a women’s group previously organised by Sönmez-Poole.

Dozens of attacks by Armenian extremists in the 1970s and 1980s further alienated Turks from the issue. In 1982, Sönmez-Poole’s friend and Turkey’s honorary consul in Boston, Orhan Gündüz, was assassinated by an Armenian gunman. Sönmez-Poole stopped going to Watertown, a suburb of the city with a large Armenian population.

Then, in 2007, the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was shot by a Turkish nationalist in Istanbul. “It had a profound effect on me. I realised something had to change,” said Sönmez-Poole.

Despite this divisive political climate, activists involved in reconciliation highlight the shared culture between two communities, who coexisted for centuries until 1915.

“There’s a lot of shared vocabulary in the border towns of Turkey and Armenia, which intensifies when it comes to food and cooking,” said US-based Turkish activist Ihsan Karayazi.

Together with his partner Armine Avetisyan, an Armenian journalist, they invited Armenian and Turkish women from these border regions to cook together and share recipes.

“Armenians were initially reluctant to participate,” said Avetisyan, “But women were more open to it than the male business owners we approached. Women were the drivers of peace.”

Some of these women maintained contact after the project, and despite their differences during the conflict, they agreed to a virtual meeting. “It is a very sensitive time. I did not imagine that my Armenian friend could be so nationalistic,” said a Turkish woman from the project. “But we women need to work together to overcome this.”

Both women asked to remain anonymous. “I was disappointed by her comments to me on Facebook about the war,” said her Armenian friend.

Relations were not always this strained, activists say. Public discussions about the genocide became acceptable for the first time in Turkey after the early 2000s. Turkey allowed an independent investigation into the events of 1915.

“It was part of a general policy of liberalisation. When people speak and write more freely about the Armenian Genocide, it means democratisation is moving forward in Turkey,” said Kiliçdagi, “But when this becomes risky, it shows Turkey is growing more authoritarian.”

But while the government permitted public centennial commemorations in Istanbul in 2015,they stopped short at genocide recognition.

Then, after an attempted coup against Turkey’s government in 2016, many of the organisations funding reconciliation projects were shut down for their perceived connections to the opposition.

“Turkey became more insular. Nationalist sentiment today is stronger and more aggressive,” said Ahmet Insel, a Paris-based political scientist and cofounderof a Turkish campaign recognising the genocide in 2008.

This nationalism was particularly felt in France.

During the recent conflict, videos of Turkish nationalists taunting and threatening Armenians in French cities prompted France to ban the Grey Wolves, a Turkish ultra-nationalist movement. Organising projects with the wider Turkish and Armenian communities in France today, said Insel, would be impossible. 

Torosyan,the artist, blamed politicians, not people, for these divisions. “It is sad that so many lives were lost on both sides,” he said, “and that our leaders have guided us into this bloody history.”

Others stressed that peace was key to prosperity back home.

“The first two coronavirus vaccines were developed by companies led by a German-Turk and a Lebanese-Armenian,”said Karayazi, referring to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. “If only we could overcome our differences, our talent would be homegrown.”