As I mentioned in my previous columns, last Sunday, on April 24, for the first time in history the Armenian victims of 1915 were commemorated in Ankara. Actually, last year there was one commemoration in İstanbul and this year it was followed by commemorations in Ankara, Diyarbakır, İzmir and Bodrum. My friends from the Human Rights Agenda Association and I joined the commemoration of 1915 in Ankara, where our association’s headquarters are located.
We went to Sakarya Square, where the commemoration was held, on Sunday at 5 o’clock. It was a rainy day, unfortunately, and I am not quite sure how well this event was promoted amongst civil society groups. I guess there were around 100 people altogether. And I knew almost every one of them. They were human rights defenders, intellectuals, writers, academicians, most of whom are also well known by the public in Turkey.
We were all aware of the significance of this small gathering. We were excited. I had not thought about it before, but as soon as the event started I thought tweeting might be a very good way to let others elsewhere know about the atmosphere in Ankara.
I started sending tweets: “We are in Sakarya Square in Ankara. Around a hundred people have gathered, there are counter-demonstrations.”
As soon as I sent this tweet I received a response tweet from İstanbul saying, “The situation is no different here, we are almost a hundred, too.” I do not know, maybe the reporter was reflecting her disappointment with the crowd, but later on I learned that in İstanbul at least 1,000 people attended the event. I shared the information coming in from İstanbul with my friends. Then I sent my second tweet: “We are reading out the names of Armenian intellectuals who were sent away from İstanbul and perished on April 24, 1915.”
While we were reading the names of the massacred Armenian intellectuals, many people stopped and tried to understand what we were doing. It must have been quite interesting for the bystanders witnessing the event.
When the names of the slain intellectuals were read out, the speaker also added their professions. I noticed there were so many lawyers amongst them, and right as I was saying this to myself I heard the murmuring of a Turkish priest standing next to me, “So many priests amongst them.”
While we were listening to the names, counter-demonstrators started chanting slogans. I tweeted: “Counter-demonstrators shouting louder and louder, there is a police line between us.” I learnt from İstanbul that there were two groups of counter-demonstrators there, one socialist nationalists and the other one nationalist nationalists.
I continued tweeting: “Baskın Oran made a short speech: I had not heard anything about the Armenian question until I was 45 years old.” “Baskın Oran is talking: Shame on murderers!”
Our commemoration lasted half an hour. It was such an emotionally charged event. After the commemoration, I spoke over the phone with Yavuz Baydar, a fellow columnist from Today’s Zaman who attended the İstanbul commemoration, and we exchanged our observations about our respective cities.
Well I really liked reporting on Sunday, and later that day I learnt that my tweets had been re-tweeted by many different people and my messages had been scattered around the world. Next year, I hope we will be more numerous in all the cities where we commemorate the victims of 1915. And I will send more tweets then, I promise.
