The Armenian genocide

Abstract

From very early on the Turkish Republic's attitude toward minorities has been paradoxical. On the one hand, the legal system wants to assimilate them. For example, in 1926 the state forced minority leaders to stop using their canonical and traditional laws in matters of family law. In 1934, the state required that every Turkish citizen receive a Turkish-language last name. Had the state conceived Turkishness as a supraethnic, suprareligious identity somewhat like American identity, this might not have been a problem. In other words, these assimilationist measures are not oppressive per se; but because the same state that forced minorities to identify as Turks has at the same time been treating them as non-Turks in many aspects of their life, these assimilationist policies are discriminatory. For Armenians in Turkey, this is doubly complex: they are genocide survivors who have remained in the unapologetic perpetrators' state, living among a people who clearly did not want continued Armenian presence in their purportedly new country, but in any case forced down the generations to identify as Turks. This is a dizzying process, one so fascinating that I have devoted a decade of exploration to it, focusing in particular on its initial manifestations in the 1920s.