ISTANBUL, Turkey – A controversial conference on the mass killings of ethnic Armenians from 1915 to 1923 opened here amid heavy security on Saturday, in defiance of a court ban.
The forum was hailed by participants and Western observers as a groundbreaking event where Turkish academics for the first time could publicly challenge their country’s official version of the events leading to the Armenian tragedy.
Hundreds of protesters waving Turkish flags pelted the arriving panelists with eggs and rotten tomatoes, expressing the fury felt by many Turks over efforts to open their country’s painful past to debate.
“The aim … is to declare Turkey guilty of genocide,” said Erkan Onsel, head of the local branch of the small, left-wing Turkey’s Workers’ Party.
The conference was canceled twice before, most recently on Thursday, when an Istanbul court ruled in favor of a group of lawyers who opposed the gathering on procedural grounds.
Turkey’s reformist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, harshly condemned the ruling, saying it was timed to undermine the country’s efforts to join the European Union. Turkey is scheduled to open long-awaited membership talks with the EU Oct. 3.
“I want to live in a Turkey where freedoms are enjoyed in their broadest sense,” Erdogan told reporters Saturday.
Emotions ran high among a packed audience of academics, journalists and diplomats as panelists deconstructed Turkey’s official explanation of how the country’s once-thriving Armenian population, estimated at more than 1 million in the early 20th century, was reduced to its current level of about 80,000.
Armenians say more than 1 million of their people were systematically killed in a genocide campaign launched by Ottoman Empire forces. Turkey says several hundred thousand Armenians died of exposure, disease and attacks from brigands as they journeyed south to Syria after being deported for collaborating with invading Russian troops.
Most speakers took a cautious tone, saying the purpose of the conference was not to deliver a verdict on whether the killings constituted genocide or not.
“We cannot allow debate to be trapped between these two conflicting points of view. We need to try and understand what happened in 1915,” said Halil Berktay, a prominent Ottoman historian. He noted nonetheless that Ottoman officials at the start of World War I declared “an open season to hunt Armenians.”
One of the speakers, Turkish historian Fikret Adanir, stated outright that the killings constituted genocide. “That is my view,” he said.
“What about the Muslims who were killed, why won’t you mention them?” demanded Mustafa Budak, deputy director of the state-run Ottoman archive, during a heated question-and-answer session.
A European diplomat observing the panel said its significance went beyond free debate of the Armenian issue, saying: “It proves that Turkey is maturing into a Western-style democracy, where all opinions, no matter how contentious, can be freely expressed.”
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