The New York Times
May 10, 2000, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final
Section A; Page 3; Column 1; Foreign Desk

1230 words

Turkish Region Recalls Massacre of Armenians

By STEPHEN KINZER

ELAZIG, Turkey, May 7


Groves of mulberry trees at lakeside resorts are about all that remains from the days when this region was a center of Armenian life.

One of the gnarled trees used to stand beside a long-gone Armenian Orthodox church. Now it shades Tahire Cakirbay, 66, as she looks out over her fields and shimmering Lake Hazar below.

"They took the Armenians up there and killed them," Ms. Cakirbay said, pointing to a hill above her. "They dug a hole for the bodies. My parents told me."

More than one million Armenians lived in what is now eastern Turkey until their community was shattered in an orgy of ethnic violence that exploded 85 years ago this spring. Many aspects of what happened then are still hotly debated, but here where the killings took place, few people doubt that they occurred.

"They don't teach it in school, but if you're interested there are plenty of ways you can find out," said Yasemin Orhan, a native of Elazig who
graduated from the local university last year. "Many Armenians were killed. It's for sure."

Ms. Orhan said she had learned about the killings from her grandmother. Here in eastern Turkey, the passage of several generations has not been
enough to wipe the killings from memory.

In the rest of the country, however, most people know little about the killings of 1915. Turkish textbooks refer to them only indirectly. They
stress that Armenian militants were rebelling against the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and discount or ignore the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians after the abortive revolt.

Conflicts over how to deal with the episode have provoked a worldwide propaganda war between Armenia and Turkey.

Armenian lobbyists want foreign governments to declare that what happened in 1915 was genocide. Some Armenian nationalists say that if Turkey can be forced to concede that, their next step might be to claim reparations or demand the return of land once owned by Armenians.

Turkish diplomats resolutely resist those efforts. They assert that Muslims as well as Christians were killed here in 1915, and that it is unfair to blame only one side.

To most Turks the events of 1915 seem distant, but in the Armenian consciousness they are a vivid and constant presence. Awareness of what is
simply called "the genocide" is acute in Armenian communities around the world.

Often it is accompanied by fierce anger at Turkey's recalcitrance.

That anger boiled over into violence during the 1970's and 80's, when a group calling itself Commandos of the Armenian Genocide mounted a campaign against representatives of the Turkish government. It killed Turkish diplomats in the United States and elsewhere, and bombed targets including the Turkish Airlines counter at Orly Airport in Paris.

Since then the battle has shifted back to the diplomatic arena. Each spring, foreign leaders issue carefully worded commemorations of the
killings. Last month, President Clinton issued a proclamation recalling "a great tragedy of the twentieth century: the deportations and massacres of roughly one and a half million Armenians in the final years of the Ottoman Empire." He did not use the word "genocide."

In the last year, Turkey has greatly improved its relations with Greece, but there has been little progress with Armenia. The two countries feud
over a variety of political issues, but the wound that 1915 has cut into the Armenian psyche also plays an emotional role in keeping them apart.

In recent months, some of the first efforts toward reconciliation between Turks and Armenians have begun. One was a conference of Turkish, Armenian and American scholars who met at the University of Chicago to begin a joint inquiry into the events of 1915.

"This was the most difficult paper I have ever written in my life," said Selim Deringil, a historian at Bosporus University in Istanbul, as he presented his analysis of Turkish-Armenian relations. "Venturing into the Armenian crisis is like wandering into a minefield."

The scholars who gathered in Chicago plan to meet again. Another group plans to open a series of conferences later this spring in Austria.

In a different kind of gesture, seven Turkish and Armenian women, all in their 20's, have joined in a campaign aimed at improving relations between
their peoples. The group's first project will be raising money to restore an Armenian church near Van, a city in eastern Turkey that was once an
Armenian capital. "This kind of thing has never been tried before," said one of the organizers, Safak Pavey, a Turkish journalist. "We want to give an example of unity between two peoples who lived together for a long time but became alienated from each other. It's about restoring a church as a way of restoring souls."

Elazig is just one place where Armenians were killed by Ottoman soldiers and Kurdish tribesmen in the spring and summer of 1915. But because several foreigners were living in the area and recorded what they saw, the killings here were unusually well documented.

One of the foreigners was an American consul, Leslie Davis, who took a trip around Lake Hazar, then known as Lake Golcuk, after the massacres.
"Thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly helpless women and children, were butchered on its shores and barbarously mutilated," he later wrote.

Armenian houses, churches and schools in this area have long since been destroyed or allowed to collapse. New villages have sprung up along the
lake. Residents picnic under the mulberry trees that Armenians planted around their summer homes a century ago.

It is still possible to find artifacts of Armenian life here. At one antique shop near Elazig, $250 will buy a heavy copper serving tray
inscribed with the name of its former owner in distinctive Armenian script.

Just last month, a couple of men were discovered digging at what they believed to be a former Armenian cemetery. They were apparently looking for gold that, according to local lore, was often interred with wealthy Armenians.

Nevzat Gonultas, manager of a telephone substation on the lakeshore, is considered a local historian because his father spent many hours telling him stories from the past. Like most people around here -- although unlike
their brethren in other parts of Turkey -- he knows what happened in 1915.

"Other people don't know because they don't live here," Mr. Gonultas said as he sipped tea on a recent evening. "My father told me that Turkey was
weak at that time and the Armenians decided to stage an uprising. Then the order came to kill them. Almost all were killed. It wasn't a war; it was a massacre."

The Turkish authorities do not accept that version, and many Turks never hear it. A historical atlas issued by a leading Turkish newspaper does not show that much of this region was under Armenian rule for centuries.

At historical sites in this region, signs and brochures often discount or omit facts about the earlier Armenian presence. According to one new travel book, "guards are under instruction to eavesdrop on tourist guides who might be tempted to tell another story."

Anyone who seeks to learn about the events in 1915, however, need only come here.

"This used to be an Armenian area, but now they're gone," said a factory worker named Selhattin Cinar. "Dead, killed, chased away. Our government doesn't want to admit it. Why would you want to say, 'My yogurt is sour'?"


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