History should be a matter of lesson, not hatred: on 1915

For the Armenian Diaspora, the year 2015 as a whole is regarded as the year of revenge for what happened a hundred years ago. For that reason, all the clocks have been set to this date for quite some time. They appear determined to carry out all the lobbying and propaganda activities they can against Turkey within this year.

There are some factors that make their job easier. There is a whole mass of customers in the world ready to buy instantly, to accept immediately, every kind of news that will be against Turkey. There is also a largely ideological ground that drives this customer mass to consume such news, false and wrong, with appetite. As Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said at last week's group meeting, "they are trying to cast a shadow on this story of Turkey, which is writing a complete success story in every field." They are already prepared to be very easily convinced that there is nothing new and original in this story, provided they hear any small piece of asparagus.

In fact, this situation, which feeds largely on an Orientalist ideological conditioning, constitutes an opportunity from which not only the Armenian Diaspora but all the groups that have lately been conducting propaganda activity against Turkey benefit. Indeed, the ground that the Parallel structure also benefits from, and that lets its claims, which can be refuted instantly to the whole world, gain wide circulation, is precisely this Orientalist-ideological ground itself.

Although there is no one in Turkey who is imprisoned for journalistic activity, people who have been tried or convicted on charges such as terror, murder, theft, forgery of documents and violation of personal rights have been able to be put on international lists as "journalists." When one looks at whom the uproar that has been raised convinces and how, the alliance at play is seen in all its clarity.

In fact, if the 1915 file could be opened in all its dimensions, it would be seen that there are more data that would require Turkey to feel itself, once again, in the position of the claimant rather than defending itself against the world. Those who undertake to go to the conditions of 1915 from today, from parliaments and lobbying centers, and to pass judgments on those conditions, cannot say two words about the massacres taking place right under their noses.

What is currently taking place in Syria has turned into a savagery beyond genocide. In Egypt, three thousand people were killed in a single day, nearly fifty thousand people are currently being held arbitrarily in prisons under the harshest conditions, where they go through torture, and death sentences are being handed down to hundreds of people within a few minutes.

And yet, from those who want to take Turkey to the year 1915, that is, in fact to a complete darkness as far as evidence is concerned, and convict it, we hear not a single word on this. The purpose of going to 1915, that is, to history, and bringing an oppression there to the present is not, as claimed, humanitarian sensitivity. If the aim is to give humanity a course on crimes against humanity, to say "never again," then that "thing you say should not happen" is already happening before our eyes today.

From so much digging into the past, from the zeal of confronting the past, only a feeling of revenge and hatred arises. And in the end this brings no benefit either to the living or to the dead. Whereas, with a right stance that we would take on the events unfolding before our eyes today, we could prevent people from dying, stop their murderers and call them to account at once, and save people from being subjected to torture.

Truthfully, we never want to go, but even if we go to 1915, that is, to history, Turkey is in a position to be in the seat of the claimant, not of the defendant.

Of course, if we are going, we will not stop at going only to the part of 1915 concerning the Armenians; we must also go back somewhat to 1912, and even further back, to 1877. The Armenian deportation must be given meaning within the movement revealed by the wars of those years.

In the 1912 Balkan Wars alone, at best one and a half million Muslims were massacred or deported. During the Battle of Gallipoli, at a time when nearly all the Muslim men able to bear arms were at the fronts, in days when the stories of the wretched refugees, most of whom had been settled in Istanbul and Anatolia, were being told everywhere, there are rumors that what happened in the Balkans would be done to Muslims and Turks in Anatolia by Armenians.

Let us go back a little further, to the late 1890s. In that period, Armenians are a minority in the great majority of the lands that today belong to Armenia. Yet today almost the entire population of Armenia is Armenian.

Moreover, even when the deportation decision was taken in Turkey in that environment, the Armenians who were uprooted were transferred not outside Ottoman territory but again to other Ottoman lands. That is, the aim was not to destroy the Armenians; on the contrary, it was to transfer them to regions that would be safer for both sides.

If we dig into history, we will find things that are inconvenient for us as much as things that suit us. We of course need this in order to take lessons and draw instruction, but the lesson we ask of history must not be the lesson we impose on history, either.

When going to history, the Armenian diaspora tries to draw conclusions that will feed the most archaic, most negative feelings, feelings of revenge, rancor and hatred. This, rightly and as a reaction, pushes the Turks too to go to history with the same motivation. Thus history becomes an agnostic field in which the truth can never be found.

Yet, heeding the call of the Book, we can say this and take part together in building a better future: "They were a generation that has passed away. Neither is there a share for us from their account, nor for them from ours."