Word: turkishly
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...both sides. The action, Berktay believes, has strangled a growing dialogue between historians in Turkey and abroad. He himself speaks from painful experience after having been the target of what he describes as a McCarthyite witch-hunt after an interview in which he expressed the "open secret" that Turkish irregular units attacked Armenian civilians as they were forcibly evacuated from their homes...
Such attitudes fill Dink and other Turkish Armenians with despair. He denies the view of the diaspora that Armenians living in Turkey are being held hostage. They believe that it is years of silence on the part of Turks themselves that has resulted in the current impasse. "I want to be proud of my country with its past and present," said Nazar Buyum, the head of a large Istanbul advertising firm. The first step, in this way of thinking is to stop labeling legitimate attempts to examine history as some sort of conspiracy...
...question of genocide should be left to historians," said the Turkish President Ahmet Nejdet Sezer in an attempt late last year to diffuse nationalist passions - a remark that earned him criticism at home for being too soft. To people like Berktay, the issue of whether it was genocide is a legal not a historical question: "Our job is to explain what happened and why it happened...
...Turkish attitudes may only change slowly. Some Turkish bureaucrats privately fear that admission of any sort of guilt would open the country up to the three Rs - recognition, reparations, and perhaps even the restitution of territory. Emotions, too, play a part. Senior foreign ministry officials remember all too vividly the terrorist attacks mounted by radical Armenian groups during the 1970s and 1980s. Among the 71 killed were 34 diplomats...
...Some Turkish politicians accuse critics of double standards. Why, they ask, is the West concerned with one people's historical suffering when others are suffering now. "Some 20% of Azerbaijan is currently under Armenian occupation," said Ismail Cem, the Turkish foreign minister in a recent briefing to foreign journalists, voicing the concern that Europe is eager to look at events in 1915 but has turned a blind eye to the recent conflict that has produced one million Azerbaijani refugees...