InternationalA nation begins to come to grips with its conscience
by Vincent Lima
Published: Thursday December 18, 2008 in Editorial Notebook
Yerevan - Gadarine Boudakian fondly remembered her childhood in the Ottoman Empire before the state shattered that childhood and made her an orphan in 1915. Many decades later, she volunteered at a hospital in Queens, New York, and was often called upon to interpret for Turkish patients who spoke no English.
Those patients, most born decades after she was orphaned, obviously bore no personal responsibility for Gadarine's fate. And Gadarine - in whose honor her granddaughter and I named our firstborn child - helped them without hesitation.
Almost two years ago, when I was in Istanbul for Hrant Dink's funeral, I asked the young woman at the hotel reception desk for directions to the Agos office. She told me how to get there and then she apologized.
For what?
For the murder of Hrant Dink.
But you did not kill him, I protested.
Yes, but he was killed in Turkey, so I'm sorry, she said.
I was taken aback. Of course, I appreciated her graciousness and her sentiment. She was appalled by what the murderer and his accomplices had done, and she wanted me to know it. She identified with the state, but in fact she had no role in the murder, no culpability. Why apologize?
(And why apologize to me? Wasn't she, as a Turkish citizen, also a target of the murderers' effort to silence and suppress free speech and an honest encounter with Turkey's past?)
My reaction to the Turkish "We Apologize" initiative is similar.
First, I admire the initiators and each signatory for their willingness to breach the code of silence imposed for decades by Turkish nationalist historiography and the Turkish state. Each act of signing the statement of apology is an act of courage that can have adverse consequences for the signatory.
Second, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of an apology from individuals. Like Grandma Gadarine, I'm comfortable with individual Turks and don't require anything from them as a condition for normal relations. It is the state, as the undisputed successor to the Ottoman Empire as it stood in 1915-17, that is culpable for the genocide, for continuing the anti-Armenian policies of the Young Turks, and for denying those crimes. It's the state that has to face the consequences of that crime against humanity.
Third, the initiative provides a new opportunity for Turkish society at large to reexamine the suppressed and falsified pages of Turkey's history. This reexamination will help set the stage for popular acquiescence to the inevitable acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish state.
That said, the apology avoids characterizing the Great Catastrophe (which is a translation of the Armenian name for it) as genocide. Unlike, say, the 1988 earthquake, which was also a catastrophe, the Great Catastrophe was a crime, meaning it had perpetrators who acted with criminal intent. To acknowledge the Great Catastrophe without acknowledging that it is a genocide, a crime against humanity, is to tell only part of the story.
The apology initiative is an opportunity for us to acknowledge that Turkish society includes people of conscience and courage. We will need to continue to work with them to tell the whole story of our peoples.
