The assassination of the author Hrant Dink in Istanbul in 2007, a high-profile advocate of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, reignited the debate in Turkey on the annihilation of the Ottoman Armenians. Many Turks soon re-awakened to their Armenian heritage, reflecting on how their grandparents were forcibly Islamised and Turkified, and the suffering their families endured to keep their stories secret. There was public debate around Armenian property confiscated by the Turkish state and the extermination of the minorities. At last the silence had been broken.
Open Wounds explains how, after the First World War, the new Turkish Republic forcibly erased the memory of the atrocities, and traces of Armenians, from their historic lands — a process to which the international community turned a blind eye. The price for this amnesia was, Vicken Cheterian argues, "a century of genocide." Turkish intellectuals acknowledge the price society must pay collectively to forget such traumatic events, and that Turkey cannot solve its recurrent conflicts with its minorities — like the Kurds today — nor have an open and democratic society without addressing the original sin on which the state was founded: the Armenian Genocide.
ISBN-13: 9780190263508
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 10-16-2015
Pages: 412
Product Dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.40(d)
Vicken Cheterian lectures at Webster University in Geneva, Switzerland. As a journalist and historian, he has worked on contemporary conflicts in the Middle East and post-Soviet space, publishing widely in Le Monde Diplomatique, Al-Hayat, and Open Democracy. He is the author of War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia's Troubled Frontier.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 'We are all Hrant Dink, We are all Armenian'
Chapter 2: Crime without Punishment
Chapter 3: Oblivion
Chapter 4: Writing as Resistance
Chapter 5 Decade of Terrorism
Chapter 6: A Revolutionary Act
Chapter 7: Re-Awakening: The Struggle for Memory and Democracy
Chapter 8: One Hundred Years of Whispers
Chapter 9: Memories of the Land
Chapter 10: The Owner of the Turkish Presidential Palace
Chapter 11: Kurds: From Perpetrator to Victim
Chapter 12: Continuous War
Chapter 13: Consequences
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