CORRESPONDENCE 5

Dear Garabet:

I agree with you: Peace and dialogue will form the spirit of our friendship. Indeed most of the Turks are ready to embrace Armenians but you know we have two big problems: The last decades of our common history, and the issue of Mountainous Karabakh...

Armenians have an image in their mind: "Brutal Turk" which is really hard to overcome. Turk means the killer of 1 million Armenians, a man who converts Christians by force, an intolerant barbarian, a psycho.

Turks also have the same image, because during World War I and 1920 some Armenian militias killed thousands of Turkish/Kurdish civilians. That's why in the Eastern part of Anatolia Armenian means a man who incarnates pregnant women, who rapes girls, and who kills babies.

To overcome these images we have to underline common features and beautiful moments shared by the two people. History is not a garden full of pink roses. If we look at the empty part of the glass, we can’t solve our problems. Personally, I think it will be very easy for these nations to love each other, only if we can overcome the bad imagery and transform it to neutral. Because we shared the same lands, our cultures influenced each other. We have almost the same cuisine, our taste is the same and because of intermarriages, conversion and rapes, our physical appearances are similar. We have similar auras. When I look at an Armenian or Greek or a native of the Balkans, I see the eyes of my grandmother, the hair of my lovely wife, the face of the best tailor in my district, the nose of my boss. We share the same aesthetics.

Christianity is not a foreigner for me. It is not as strange as Hinduism or the Shinto religion.

To overcome our troubles we should know that not only our nation, but all nations in Anatolia suffered a lot during the same period.

In the Ottoman Empire 2, 5 million Muslim civilians died during World War I because of illness, famine and assaults of Turkish, Armenian and Greek bandits, militia and regular troops. Many Armenians, Kurds and Turks were killed, tortured, and pillaged by the same bandits and militias used by the militarist government of Talaat, Enver and Cemal Pashas.

Many Armenians (Dink estimates them at 500,000) escaped from this massacre with the help of their Turkish/ Kurdish neighbors. Many Armenian babies and children (estimations of up to 200,000) were given to Muslim neighbors. Their Armenian parents thought they would come back, but most of them could not afford this and these babies and children were adopted by Turkish and Kurdish families, even though most of them were really very poor and had many children of their own. They did not frustrate their Armenian neighbors. Some Armenians became Muslim or were presented as Turk or Muslim with the help of their Muslim neighbors.
We have a 1 000 years of shared history. We should not focus just on the last decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries for our mutual relations. The Ottoman Empire had many Armenian bureaucrats (some of them were Christian) and Armenians became rich using the advantages of being a subject of a state from Morocco to Austria to Iran and Russia to Yemen. Armenians took advantage of Timar System which condemned Turkish and Muslims peasants, civil servants and soldiers. They had a symbiotic relation with Turks in their villages and towns. Mimar Sinan, who is the biggest architect in Turkish history, is an Armenian renegade. We have many Armenian compositors of Turkish classical music (most favorable of them is Tatyos Effendi). We have Armenian blood, Armenians have Turkish blood. (Ironically the mother of Abdulhamit was Armenian).

We suffered a lot because of the Crusades. Crusaders did not kill only Muslims but they killed Armenians and Assyrians too, as they look like Muslims rather than Nordic or Latin Christians. Mongol and Timurid invasions are other tragedies in Anatolia that made us suffer a lot. These are our common sorrows!

Regarding North Karabakh... Turks have sympathy towards Azeris. They only know one side of the story. They watched some million Azeris being deported or escaping from Armenian violence in Nagorno Karabakh and the occupied parts of Azerbaijan, dismembered and burned bodies of Azeri civilians and babies. They even don’t know that in Nagorno Karabakh Armenians are the majority. Russia doesn’t want to solve this problem because Armenia is its ally in the area.

With help from Turkey Armenia can become a Switzerland in the Caucasus. The Armenian people are good traders if they would have a chance to expand to Europe via Turkey. One day the three republics in Caucasia will be members of EU and NATO. In Turkey there are many intellectuals who want to see these countries as members of EU. This is not a dream. This is our future.

Peace be with you,

Mehmet

ANSWER TO LETTER 5

Dear Mehmet:

This is exactly the kind of dialogue and discourse I was speaking about. I think we have come a long way from imagining each other as brutal murderers. It's about time that we change that image and use another one based on civil dialogue. The more this happens on the base level (between the two people) the more it will affect the upper governmental echelons. Politics is politics and we know how dirty a game it is. But there is the level of civil society in both countries, which I think can do a lot in terms of defusing the problems that politics brings to the issue.

In the case of Mountainous Karabagh there have been atrocities on both sides. If you remember the dislocations of Azeris from the area, I, on the other hand, can't forget the pogroms THAT preceeded that in Sumgayit and Baku, which were VERY ugly too. But these were the bangs of the destruction of the Soviet Union. We must still insist on dialogue.

Yes, our histories are intertwined with lots of similarities. The "Milleti Sadika" that Armenians were called, changed during the last decades of the 19th century. This was due to Western interference in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire. Even the corrective attempt that Armenians and Young Turks tried to implement didn't work. Even today, the world is rife with problems that are the result of direct Western interference (Africa, Middle East are good examples). They know how to play with our religions, sectarian sentiments to divide and rule.

Let's keep talking. It's good. I hope we will be able to do this face-to-face one day soon.

Best Regards,
Garabet