A silence lasting 60 years

The writer of Armenian origin, Antonia Arslan, former professor of Italian literature at the University of Padua, says she is “perplexed” by the recent decision approved, with 106 votes in favour and 19 against, by the National Assembly in France to prosecute anyone who denies the Armenian genocide. The new law declares that it is a penal offence, punishable with one year in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros, for anyone to deny that the Ottoman Turkish government persecuted the Armenian minority between 1915 and 1923 and exterminated one and a half million people. The approval of the law came in spite of the pressure and protests of the Turkish government. Ankara in fact rejects the accusation of genocide, since it maintains that the Armenians were the victims of the civil war unleashed after the break up of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. In a communiqué the Turkish Foreign Ministry declared that the new French law causes “grave damage” to relations between the two countries. We discussed the Armenian tragedy with ANTONIA ARSLAN , author of the book “The Farm of the Skylarks”. The news from France has once again brought to the attention of public opinion the tragedy of the Armenian people, an historical episode about which little is spoken. What do you think of the French Parliament’s decision? “I am perplexed. For the Armenians there has been a long and culpable silence in which any mention of the genocide was taboo, as it is still is in Turkey today. However, I can understand why in a country like France, where a strong Armenian minority lives [some 500,000, the largest in Europe] and where there is already a law that punishes Holocaust deniers, attempts should be made to extend it also to the Armenian genocide, the first of the 20th century”. What is needed to begin a process of historical revision of the tragedy that struck the Armenian people? “First, the Turkish government needs to accept that people be free to speak of this black page in its history. There is still a long way to go. Today any talk of the Armenians in Turkish schools is out of the question. Many Turkish intellectuals, not famous like the new winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Orhan Pamuk [incriminated in 2005 for some statements made in a Swiss magazine on the Armenian genocide], are still being tried by the courts, ‘guilty’ only of having touched on this controversial issue”. What are the reasons for this silence? “We need to recall that in 1915 when these events took place everyone spoke of them. There are collections of newspapers of the period full of articles about them. Benedict XV did a lot through his apostolic nuncio Angelo Dolci, who tried in every possible way to help the Armenians, also by speaking with the Sultan. After the war, the victorious powers, France, Great Britain and Italy, wished to seize the rest of the Ottoman Empire. They failed to do so thanks to the talent of the Turkish general Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk, who regained possession of the whole of Anatolia. And when the powers realized they could no longer dismember the Ottoman Empire, they competed with each other in wooing the benevolence of the new Turkish leaders. In the meantime Kemal also expelled the Greeks, the third largest minority in the country, it too Christian like the Armenians and the Assyrians. To achieve this goal the Turkish regime did not hesitate to throw a veil of silence over the Armenian tragedy. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 is a monument of hypocrisy, in which the word ‘Armenians’ does not even appear”. But now something is changing… “Only now are people beginning to speak of it, thanks to the action of Armenians of the third generation who are rediscovering traces and testimonies of the period. In the face of denial, the survivors of the genocide did not even have the courage to speak of it. They were dispersed. But their children and grandchildren, born and bred in the diaspora, began to ask questions. Over the last thirty years their efforts have led to the publication of direct historical sources and eyewitness accounts. Today we are faced by a new consciousness: the two genocides, that of the Armenians and that of the Jews, are linked and many of our Jewish friends share this conviction”. How far will the Armenian question affect Turkey’s entry into the European Union? “Europe’s request, reiterated no less than six times, for a form of recognition of the genocide by Turkey, if this nation aspires to become part of the European Union, seems to me right”.