Armenian News-NEWS.am presents the article of Burcin Gercek published in Ouest – France paper with some reductions.
“From April, 1915, the Turkish army and police killed more than one million Armenians who were considered as the inner enemies of the country. Hasan Cemal’s name constantly reminds him that he is the grandson of Cemal Pasha a member of the triumvirate which was ruling the Ottoman Empire during the genocide.
‘I learned to distinguish the history and my grandfather,’ the elegant man says.
The famous reporter of Milliyet, 68-year-old Hasan Cemal is known as ‘the grandson of Cemal Pasha who kneeled in the Genocide memorial in Yerevan, Armenia’. After that symbolic act in 2008 he participates in world conferences and says that he shares the Armenians’ pain.
The realization did not come in one day. In his first articles in the beginning of the 1980’s he was repeating the official disposition of Turkey that ‘There was no genocide but mutual massacre’. Later with the help of the books of Turkish Historian Taner Akcam he discovered that the truth is different.
His meeting with Armenian reporter from Istanbul Hrant Dink had an important meaning.
‘I started looking at history not with the eyes of the state but tried to find out what had happened,’ he says.
When in 2005 the organization of the first conference on the Armenian Genocide in Turkey faced threats from the government Cemal stood against the ban. Part of the media called him traitor.
The murder of Hrant Dink in 2007 turned everything finally.
‘The death of Hrant deeply changed me. It was like all stones found their places again. I saw all the other murderers in our history,” he says.
After that without hesitation he uses the word Genocide which is still problematic in Turkey. In the following year he went to the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan. In 2009 he was one of the first to sign for the apologizing action started by the Turkish elite.
Will he have the will to undo the damage done by his grandfather?
‘I did not act because of my family history. It is intellectual responsibility and willingness to go to political fight,” the article quotes Hasan Cemal.
