Having started its democratic initiative with the Kurds, the government is now pursuing new overtures toward the Alevis, who have long suffered discrimination and have been at the receiving end of political violence on many occasions. Mr. Erdoğan also mentioned the oft-forgotten Roma community, whose problems are so rarely addressed that they appear almost invisible in Turkish society, as he extolled an understanding of citizenship that is not linked to religious or ethnic origins.The veil of silence that had been maintained over some of the darkest episodes of the country’s past is now being lifted. Newspapers are filled with tragic accounts of the Dersim massacres. The pain, suppressed for so long, is coming out in a silent scream expressed between the lines in the press.
Whatever happens next, the burned villages of the Southeast, the events of Dersim and the carnage caused in Kahramanmaraş, Çorum, Sivas or in İstanbul’s Gazi district, mentioned by Mr. Erdoğan this weekend cannot be swept under the carpet of history again. They are now in the public domain, open to scrutiny and debate, even though legal provisions still limit the scope of the discussion.
By frequently referring to the suffering of mothers, the prime minister perhaps hopes that the common experience of pain -- leftists, Kurds, Islamists, Alevis and non-Muslim minorities have all at one time or the other been oppressed, ostracized or subjected to violence -- will, in the future, prove to be the cement that will strengthen the fabric of society.
For the time being, the prime minister’s praise of diversity remains at odds with a general intolerance revealed by several opinion polls in the past few months, which was based partly on ignorance but also on notions of threats that had been deliberately kept alive.
Eradicating entrenched prejudices will require steady efforts, but the government’s public acknowledgement of past mistakes is an important first step. Most nations have skeletons in their cupboards. It is their ability to revisit history and acknowledge the human cost of erroneous policies that allows societies to move forward, hoping not to repeat the same mistakes.
A few days ago, Britain and Australia issued apologies for the thousands of refugee children from Britain who had been shipped to Australia where many faced abuse and misery after World War II. Only a few days ago, I watched a film that highlighted the plight of Japanese Americans, interned in camps in the United States, during the same conflict. My own country, Switzerland, has in the past decade admitted keeping in its banks assets stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families and paid compensation to their heirs. Last year, Australia expressed regrets for its treatment of aborigines. The list could go on.
Democracy is a work always in progress. The erosion of civil liberties in the US and in Europe in the past few years was a useful reminder that vigilance needs to be constant to prevent setbacks. Since Sept. 11, some of the gains of the past decades appear particularly fragile.
In Turkey, thankfully, the momentum is still moving in the right direction. The developments of the past few weeks mark a milestone, a new level of maturity in Turkey’s democratization. How the country and its judicial system deals with those responsible for some of the most recent outrages will partly determine how fast this country can graduate to the next level of accountability.
To consolidate the gains that are being made at the moment, Turkey needs to institutionalize them with sweeping changes to its Constitution and to its laws. The prime minister recently promised new mechanisms, such as an anti-discrimination commission. In the past, institutions set up to monitor democratic practice have often fallen short of popular expectations. Only tangible changes on the ground can provide proof that the new approach is really taking hold.
