Turkey still unsettled by Armenian massacres of 100 years ago

Standing in a desecrated Armenian graveyard in the central Anatolian city of Sivas, Hayko, a middle-aged labourer with sad eyes, reflects on the simple concrete tombs of his parents and a 100-year-old massacre that is still unsettling modern Turkey.

"If there was no crime, why are the Turks reacting so strongly?" he asks.

All around him are vandalised graves and the spaces where crosses once stood. The neighbouring Armenian church is inaccessible, fenced off on the territory of a military base. "If they are not guilty, why are they so touchy?"

Hayko is speaking of the mass killing and deportation of Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman Empire. The cataclysm changed Sivas and Anatolia forever - and profoundly shaped what a few years later would become the new nation state of Turkey.

The 100th anniversary this week has also become a focal point for increased tension between Ankara and the west amid criticism that, as in other areas, Ankara is backsliding on earlier steps towards openness and pluralism.

A millennium ago, Sivas was an Armenian fiefdom. In 1914, it was home to around 150,000 Armenians. Three years later, after the city became a hub for deportation, some 90 per cent were gone. Today, perhaps a dozen families remain.

Overall hundreds of thousands of Armenians died across Turkey - many Armenians say up to 1.5m - but Turkey has always denied the massacres amounted to genocide.

Still, something has changed this year, ahead of the official centenary on Friday April 24.

Turkey's current, Islamist-rooted government, which had gone far further than its predecessors in recognising Armenian rights and expressing condolences for the deaths, has rounded on its critics with unwonted fury.

After the Pope referred to the killings as genocide, Ahmet Davutoglu, prime minister, accused the Pontiff of entering into an axis of evil conspiring against Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded to a similar resolution by the European Parliament by describing it as "nothing but an expression of enmity against Turkey".

Mr Erdogan has also claimed that Turks suffered more than the Armenians in the chaos of the first world war and that the Armenians effectively brought the cataclysm on themselves by responding to enemy "provocations" and rising up against the Ottomans.

Such declarations contrast with much of the ruling AK party's record. Long shut out of Turkey's traditional elites, the country's Islamists have tended to be more open to criticism of the early years of Turkey's self-styled secular republic in 1923 and of the years preceding it.

Since the party came to power in 2002, restoration work has begun on Armenian churches and members of the country's remaining Armenian community of roughly 60,000 have moved closer to the centre of political life - including as both government and opposition candidates in June general elections.

"We care about our Armenian citizens' demands and needs," says Sami Aydin, Sivas's AK party mayor.

Prosecutions for "insulting Turkishness" - a key mechanism for criminalising references to an Armenian genocide - are much rarer than before.

Hasan Cemal, the grandson of Djemal Pasha, one of the triumvirate of rulers who oversaw the killings and deportations in 1915, has published a book called The Armenian Genocide - an act that would have been near unthinkable in Turkey a decade or so ago.

Mr Cemal argues that Ankara should at least apologise to the Armenians and declare the massacres a crime against humanity. "By being a captive of history, you cannot be free and democratic today," he says.

But he contends Mr Erdogan appears instead to be courting the nationalist vote ahead of June's elections. Other critics note how the president's rhetoric is becoming increasingly anti-western as he lambasts traditional allies for alleged duplicity and greed.

Amid such diplomatic strains, Mr Erdogan's tough language on the massacres is a further point of contention, with allies increasingly concerned about what they view as growing authoritarianism under his rule.

Still, many Turks have unmistakably broken from the old nationalist orthodoxy about the events of 1915. It is a development some say is far more important than Turkey's official position - or indeed that of other countries with shameful historical incidents of their own.

"You can't keep telling a lie for a hundred years," says Altug Yilmaz, who works at Agos, a Turkish Armenian weekly whose former editor, Hrant Dink, was murdered by a Turkish nationalist in 2007.

Mr Yilmaz, an ethnic Turk, says that while he was told at school that the Armenians and Greeks betrayed the Ottomans during the first world war, Dink's fate, together with Turkey's opening up to the rest of the world, led many to question such a narrative.

He now knows more about the Armenian community that fled his home town on the Gallipoli peninsula, where his grandmother lived in an old Armenian house. But he has yet to convince an ethnic Armenian friend who lives in Athens to return there with him.

Back in Sivas, Hayko emphasises the lot of Turkey's remaining Armenians, who he says are often marginalised and denied public sector jobs. He has not set foot in the nearby church on the army base since he did his national service decades ago.

He remembers it was used to store weapons and was marked with holes where people had dug for supposed Armenian buried treasure. Gesturing to the battered cemetery, he adds: "We still don't have much space here, either living or dead."

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