Otherwise it would be hard to account for a quarter-of-a-century-long internal conflict with one part of the country’s population (Kurds) and the issue of Ottoman Armenians that left a legacy that haunts the republic even today. Both issues were swept under the rug and remain a current issue rather than a distant past.The Kurdish issue occupies the whole society and depletes its resources at all levels. The Armenian issue occupies a fundamental part of the efforts of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in dealing with deported Armenians’ legal and now financial (property rights) claims. It seems there will be a long and uphill road for Turkey in dealing with these issues for two reasons: 1. The Turkish state adopted a policy of erasing the memory of the nation at the onset of the republic (1923). Turks do not know what happened before nor are they aware of any developments that crop up concerning the past. News to this effect is either filtered or thwarted as “subversive” or an outright lie. 2. The Turkish bureaucracy and state institutions are not structured or equipped with the capacity of negotiation, compromise, conflict management/resolution and reconciliation with the past (or its past deeds and their outcomes).
Hence there is a lot of concern and confusion on how to address the Armenians’ claims. If there ought to be a starting point, it should be the concept of “historical conflict.” Many conflicts have a historical context. They are “historical” in the sense that it is the legacy of a conflict that continues to haunt the present day. The memory of an event, a catastrophe or mass violence shapes the identity of a group more than other contemporary events. The historical context of a conflict is more important than the event itself. A historical conflict is about our/people’s view of the past. The legacy of the conflict leads to polarized memories that drive a contemporary conflict.
Understanding the historical context of a contemporary conflict helps politicians and statesmen resolve disagreements with more precision. In cases of historical conflicts, however, the historical narrative is the very core of the conflict. And there is usually more than one narrative. This makes the issue more a political matter than the craft of historians. However, the intricacy of the subject discourages the politicians and they refer it to the historians: “This is a matter for the historians.” By this they often mean that that historical or legal scientific research will determine the truth. That is why they often refer difficult issues such as past gross human rights violations to determine whether they were war crimes, genocide or merely ethnic cleansing. Leaving such issues to scholars implies that scholarship is not political. However, the issue is.
Because it is political, each narrative has one-sided justifications, exaggerations and misinformation, and sometimes lies. Scholarship ought to reduce the level of such statements or “evidence” to a possible minimum. Able scholarship would not only limit the range of lies, it would also provide a framework for a shared narrative. This frame will include alternative perspectives, but nonetheless shares a framework.
The desire to investigate the historical truth stems from conflicting interests, expectations and evaluations of the past as “victim” and “perpetrator.” This emotional baggage exaggerates the power of the scientific investigation of history as an instrument of conflict resolution. Recognizing the dissonance between a “public” acceptance of history as truth, and professional expectations and standards of history as “construction,” is important to obtain productive results in historical conflict resolution.
Historians who work in this area should be conscious of the political nature of their work and that, in order to succeed, the work has to be planned to take into account the following constraints:
Defining the “truth” must be based on empirical evidence rather than ideological statements. Events rather than their stories must be taken into account. To do this, experts have to agree on what constitutes good empirical evidence.
Historical empirical methodology must be enriched using archives, various data sets and reconstructing the historical narratives based on available historically verifiable research. It is critical for all sides to be able to present evidence, and test controversial evidence.
Politics presents both the demand and the obstacles. All stakeholders should be included in the process and subject to the same criteria. Goals should be specific. Formal and civil society representatives should be included, as should the diaspora, if need be.
