This paper analyses the ways in which Turkish-Armenian intellectuals publicly wrote about their community’s presence in the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it examines how Armenian discourse about Turks and Turkishness evolved from the immediate aftermath of World War to the early decades of the Turkish Republic, which was officially promulgated in 1923. I trace this change through a close study of the Armenian periodicals published in Istanbul. The paper has two sections which correspond to the chronology of important events in Turkish and Armenian history. The first section focuses on the period from 1918 to 1923 and delineates various tropes with which Turkish- Armenian writers, journalists, social workers, professionals, and religious leaders approached the Turkish state and society. In this period, the Turks are generally seen as adversaries, they are accused of causing Armenian suffering (with regard to the mass massacres of 1915-16) and revenge is promoted. The signing of Lausanne Treaty (in 1923) which was immediately accompanied by the establishment of Turkish Republic, changed the political balances between the Turkish and Armenian populations. The Armenian population was considered “minority” under the protection of Turkish rule. During the early decades of the Turkish Republic various Turkification measures were employed to assimilate non-Turkish populations into Turkishness. The second section of the paper examines how the political changes corresponded to a change in the common public portrayal of the “majority:” the Turkish Armenian media, after 1923, increasingly acquires a friendly tone towards Turks, the recent mass killings are not mentioned at all, and the discourse of revenge disappears. The paper argues that it is in the first decades of the Turkish Republic that Armenian minority population in Turkey learned how to forget (at least publicly) their past and be silent about the contemporary discrimination against them. This was all done in order to ensure a rather peaceful co-habitance with the majority in the present.

Studies of the Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide have so far focused on ‘denial’ as a function of either international states system and great power politics or institutional and ideological continuities between the Kemalist elites and the ‘Unionists’ (members of the Committee of the Union and Progress, known as the architects of population policies that resulted in the ejection, expulsion, and annihilation of the Empire’s non-Muslim subjects between 1913-1918). Both in domestic and international discourses on the Armenian Genocide, modern Turkey’s relation to its past is reduced to ‘Turkish denial’ and ‘Turkish denialism.’ And yet we know very little about how generations of ordinary Turkish citizens ‘learned’ to forget their past and have been disciplined to ‘deny’ not only what happened in 1915 but also the presence of Armenians in the Anatolian peninsula. In this paper, I argue that a comprehensive analysis of Turkish schoolbooks constitutes a solid empirical territory where we can observe ‘around-the-clock’ blueprints of the engineering of ‘social’ denial and its diffusion. . In Turkey, school textbooks are controlled by the Turkish government; all textbooks are written under the supervision of the Curriculum Board of the Ministry of Education. All chapters and topics, even the sub-sections, must be in accordance with the annual curriculum accepted by the Curriculum Board and changes are officially announced in the monthly official bulletin of the Curriculum Board. As part of larger research, this paper aims to provide a historical overview of the representations of Armenians, the narratives on Armenians in the history of Anatolia up until the Great War, and how these representations have evolved in the Turkish secondary school textbooks from 1930s to the 21st century.

The ‘Turkish Denial’ of the Armenian genocide is a topic that is frequently talked about, but hardly ever studied systematically. In this paper I address the following questions: What accounts for the mainly denialist discourse in Turkey when it comes to the forced deportation of the Ottoman Armenians by the Young Turk Regime? What role do cultural and political factors play? Is the dominant denial discourse a) a matter of national identity imperatives, b) the geostrategic bargaining assets of Turkey against international genocide acknowledgement or the lack of effective international pressure on Turkey respectively to come to terms with the past or c) a combination of cultural needs and political power? I explore the denial phenomenon by analysing the societal and political reactions and defense patterns with regard to the Armenian genocide during “critical discourse moments” (Chilton 1987) between 1973 and 2005. The contribution of this approach to scholarly work on denial and Armenian-Turkish relations is twofold: with an in-depth analysis of decisive discourse moments during a period of over 30 years and looking on both – the public discursive coping patterns with the past and the Turkish state’s past politics – and systematically embedding these into the context of Turkey’s foreign relations I trace the development of the denial in Turkey and empirically located changes and continuties. So far scholars have either looked at Turkish state politics and practices (Hovanissian 1999; Dadrian 1999; Kaiser 2003) or at the civil-society’s increasing interest and openness for alternative readings of the history of 1915 (Göcek 2003, Altinay 2006, Kieser 2005). This separation of state and society, I argue, reduces the denial phenomenon to the Turkish state’s past politics. It also implies that the coming to terms with the past of the Turkish society takes place outside the framework of the denial discourse which is by and large equated with the Turkish state’s political practices and defense mechanisms against international genocide charges. However, prioritising the Turkish state as the key actor of the denial discourse overlooks the power that rests in the discourse itself and neglects its pervasiveness in different social and political settings. In order to reveal this pervasiveness, I follow a discourse-oriented approach that links texts (denial frames as identifiable in public debate), context and political practices (the politics of the Turkish state with regard to the history of 1915, international debates about the genocidal character of 1915 and official acknowledgements etc.).

In this paper I argue that the subject position of “Armenian from Turkey” is marked by an impossibility within the context where the very possibility of such an existence has been erased by violence. I show that the state’s policy of silencing the Armenian presence and the annihilation of that presence in Anatolia, along with the violent acts committed to secure this position throughout decades, hinder a full and coherent imagination of the “Armenian identity” in Turkey. I argue that displacement and loss are two interrelated experiences shaping the Armenian belonging in Turkey. Not only being displaced from one’s homeland, but also being detached from the means to reproduce the essential elements of a social life to live within without being cut of from one’s history and culture marks the displacement at home. This displacement is immediately coupled with a sense of loss which results from the very impossibility of talking about the loss, i.e. the Armenian Genocide. In my paper, I trace the accounts of young generation Armenians living in Istanbul narrating their relation to their family’s survival stories. The impossibility of reproducing those stories in the public in their totality and without being questioned for their truth value, creates a gap in their narrative of the self and their presence in Turkey as an Armenian.

The historical process of secularization and democratization of the Armenian millet (with special reference to the adherents of the Apostolic Armenian Church) of the Ottoman times and the Armenians of Republican Turkey has been impacted by state induced reforms/policies/practices and intra-communal relations both of which were not devoid of various European/Western influences. Establishment of Republic of Turkey introduced a new context of secularization for the religious minorities recognized and protected by the Lausanne Treaty. The overall secularization and modernization project created rew points of tension between state and society/religious communities and among different groups of Armenian population. While the Civil Code of 1926, which all citizens of Turkey were to observe, introduced further secularization for the Armenian community, the de facto annulment of the Armenian Constitution (1863) on the other hand led to establishment of ad hoc committees within the Patriarchate to administer civilian matters of communal life, especially pertaining to community foundations. In conjunction the authority of the Patriarch came to be a controversial issue, both for the state authorities and the Armenian community, a public debate over which has been raised by Agos, Armenian weekly published in Armenian and Turkish since 1996. Its editor, Hrant Dink, raised a debate on the incomplete secularization process of the Armenian population, given the ambiguous position of the Patriarch (ethnarch in temporal affairs and/or spiritual leader) with respect to both the state authority and the Armenian community. Recently, the Armenian community (including the Catholic group) is engaged in a search for strengthening civil initiatives in the administration of community foundations, encouraged by a set of reforms with certain furtherance of positive minority rights, in line with Turkey's bid to accession to the EU, while the debate over the temporal authority of the Patriarch continues in a new context initiated by Mesrob II's illness.