How is it possible for anyone to look at the photographs of corpses heaped, emaciated, naked, and argue that a genocide or massacre is an artifact, somehow staged, its cause some force of nature, disease or war or famine, and not a planned effort to exterminate a population?  The facts are well documented.   We have surely all seen some of the awful photographs taken by different witnesses at different places, and heard or read accounts by witnesses and survivors.

Turkey’s government has been denying it implemented a policy of eliminating its Armenian citizens in 1915.  Its denial, similarly, extends back to the hamidieh massacres orchestrated against that Christian minority from 1895 into 1896 and beyond.  Yes, there were “violent incidents” in 1895-1896, it maintains, but they were essentially random and not systematic.  Not (the argument goes on) a result of deliberate government policy.  Moreover (say Turkish officials), in a time of drought, banditry and disease, death rates soar.  Muslims die along with infidels.

One question this position cannot address is how, then, the 1895-96 incidents followed the army from one city to the next all over eastern Turkey, where the Armenian population was most numerous.  Erzerum’s “Incident” was preceded by several other “incidents” of violence against Armenians in nearby cities.  It was followed by similar “incidents” in close range.  Readers of my historic novel, “Prelude to Genocide: Incident in Erzerum” will be swept into the events of that fraught time.

Because my father passed family stories along to me and my brother, we can never take the Turkish government position seriously.  Many second and third generation Armenian Americans whose elders survived the 1915 genocide of Armenians agree.  They demand the Turks acknowledge the government’s role in the tragedy, as Germany has done with the Holocaust.

“Admit it,” they say, “And then we can heal that open wound.  Only then can we move on.”

Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel Laureate in Literature, was forced to flee his country in 2005 after stating, “Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do.”   He returned later in 2005 to face the charges against him.

Pamuk said in an interview the same year with BBC News that he wanted to defend freedom of speech, which was Turkey’s only hope for coming to terms with its history: “What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo. But we have to be able to talk about the past.”

Pamuk has been joined by a number of other private Turkish citizens, particularly academics, who have spoken out about the need to recognize the Armenian Genocide.  Their remarks have not been prosecuted, so far as I know. The Turkish government, however, continues to deny that there was government involvement in the deaths of Armenians, either in 1915 or in 1895-1896.

Pamuk is the author of numerous novels, including My Name is Red, Snow, The White Castle, The Museum of Innocence and The Red Haired Woman, along with a memoir, Istanbul—Memories And The City and the screenplay for “Secret Face,” a movie.  He is among several Turkish writers who have published essays critical of the government’s treatment of its Kurdish minorities.

Timely evidence of the continuing disagreement about the genocide/massacres of Armenians in Turkey appeared recently in The New York Times.   Interested readers are invited to visit my next blog, “Kim Kardashian and the Armenian Genocide”.