Below is an article entitled “The Armenian issue in the election year” by Etyen Mahçupyan, Editor of the Agos newspaper, published by Today’s Zaman.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s hinting at deporting 100,000 Armenians working illegally in Turkey has, interestingly, captured the country’s attention immediately. The fact that his remarks amount to a gaffe that leaves Turkey in a politically difficult position as we get closer to April 24 has added to the media’s interest.

Erdoğan gave an overblown figure for the number of Armenians working illegally in Turkey, and this urged many people to wonder whether these Armenians were being held hostage against the possibility of foreign parliaments adopting bills recognizing the Armenian genocide. Moreover, it was not rational for him to propose, as the prime minister of a country that rejects genocide accusations, a measure that recalls genocide. Not a single person believed that these illegal Armenian workers might be sent back to their homeland. This belief rests on the fact that humanitarian values now precede political motivations in this issue.

The prime minister’s unfortunate remarks served as a litmus test that brought to surface the change in Turkey. All media organizations reported his remarks along with interviews with Armenians. All human rights associations condemned Erdoğan, and perhaps as a more important indication, Muslim readers sent messages protesting or criticizing him. This incident indicates once again the risks before the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). Today, the AK Party does not face serious competition in the political spectrum, but its supporting demographic are freeing themselves more quickly from the party. While the AK Party is still forced to maintain its coalition with nationalism, a dynamic group of its supporters, accounting for about 10 percent of its total vote, consisting mainly of young people in cities and gradually increasing in number, is significantly ahead of the AK Party’s management in terms of human rights and democratic criteria. We will possibly see the outcome of the pressure from this group on the party’s management in the next election. If it can establish a single-party government, we can predict that more “young devout people” will find a place within the AK Party government and we will see a more reformist and more pro-European Union government.

Therefore, we will spend the year to come with the reform moves intended to smooth out the legal framework of the coming term, but we will probably not see major moves in the political sphere. However, the expectations for reforms in the political sphere will continue to mount each day. As the tension between reality and expectations will affect the AK Party’s election performance to a great extent, we will witness draft reforms being reconsidered as we near the election period.

The relations with Armenia seem to be trapped within this general political environment. In other words, it would be realistic to assume that the steps toward the opening of the common border between Turkey and Armenia will be postponed for at least one year. Yet this is a long stretch of time, and if Turkey spends this period without doing anything, this would imply that its claim of having good relations with its neighbors is false, further adding to anti-Turkish sentiments in Western countries. For this reason, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Turkey launched a civil society initiative geared toward Armenia.

However, this effort does not guarantee that parliaments of Western countries will stop adopting genocide bills. Turkey must pursue a more realistic policy. Western parliaments’ adoption of resolutions concerning a historic incident that occurred in another territory may be flawed from a legitimacy perspective, but it is obvious that the main cause of this is Turkey’s policy of intentional indifference and denial for the last 90 years. By adopting genocide resolutions, Western parliaments are acting in an illegitimate manner from a political perspective, but they are quite justified from a psychological standpoint.

The more Turkey insistently refuses to accept the realities that occurred during and after 1915, the higher the likelihood that the world will call these incidents “genocide.” If, in addition to this policy of denial, Turkey shows extraordinary resistance to returning the properties that belonged to the foundations of non-Muslim minorities, this possibility of attaching the “genocide” label to the incidents will increase further. This is because the story of 1915 and its aftermath is not only one of the people who were displaced or killed, but also one of a community whose cultural assets and properties were usurped. Turkey not only refuses to carry the burden of the dead people, but also continues to hold a handful of their properties as spoils. This inevitably adds credence to the genocide-still-continues discourse.

Then the prime minister talks about sending back 100,000 Armenian workers. A diplomatic blunder, his remarks are possibly an indication of a block. There is a general congestion in how Turkey sees the Armenian community, Armenia and the genocide issue. The government’s room for maneuver has contracted considerably. In theory, two options may be tried. But the option to adopt more nationalistic discourse is not very likely as it is getting harder for Muslim groups to accept it. So we are left with the initiative policy as an extension of a more democratic perspective. Unfortunately, we have to wait at least one year for this policy.