Al Jazeera TV channel spoke with Agos Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Yetvart Danzikyan about Ankara’s take on Armenian Genocide.
Responding to the question what would Turkey lose or gain if it acknowledged 1915 as 'genocide,' he said that it would not lose anything.
“It would become a country that faced its dark history. The Justice and Development [AK] Party's perspective on the issue is this: This might have happened in other country's histories, but this would never happen in ours.
In the government's view, Turkey's ancestors would never conduct a genocide - other countries do. What happened to Armenians fits with the definition of genocide. The fact that there was no defined concept of genocide in 1915 doesn't mean it wasn't one. No one actually blames Turks or Turkey as a country; the state itself internalises it. Nobody is saying Turks or Turkey's ancestors did it. However, the Committee of Union and Progress government of the time planned the genocide and carried it out. This is what we are saying. It wasn't an aspect of the war going on back then as the government claims, it was planned,” he said.
Danzikyan added that facing these events would put Turkey in another higher league of countries in the world. “Turkey should stop seeing the issue as an insult to the state, religion, and nation,” the editor-in-chief said, adding that depp-rooted denial policy has never changed, even during the AK part government.
Responding to the question on how dominant the concept of the 'Armenian genocide' in the daily lives of Turkish Armenians is, he said that there is a generation of Armenians who are not interested in the genocide issue. According to Danzikyan, they think that dealing with it causes problems and don't want to be insistent on the matter. When the government makes a positive move - such as an official being present at the Armenian Patriarchate's April 24 ceremony and Erdogan's message being read there - some of the Armenians say that there are positive developments and there is no reason to be in a dispute with the state. Another group believes that, as long as the denial persists, they are not going to live comfortably in the country.
As to the messages of condolences and dialogue that government officials have sent to Armenians in the last two years, Yetvart Danzikyan considers this a positive development. “However, if you look at the content of the messages, you will see that the Turkish government wants 1915 to be memorialised the way it defines it,” he said.
