Turkey must loosen the grip of its founding myths
February 3rd, 2007 by
The banners read “We are all Armenians” at the funeral in Istanbul last week for Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist shot in January by a young nationalist assassin. “We are Turkish. We are all Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,” nationalist football fans chanted in reply from terraces across the country, referring to modern Turkey’s founder.
As Dink’s tragic death and the polarised reactions to it demonstrate in the most graphic way, the ongoing reckoning with events now nearly a century old remains a huge factor in Turkey itself. It is not merely that, fairly or unfairly, its pursuit of European Union membership is generating international pressure on the government to recognise the Armenian genocide. The issue polarises the country internally as well and raises more acutely than any other issue the question of how tightly it remains within the ideological grip of its founding fathers. [Read More]
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