Turkey steps up efforts to rebuild Armenia relations

The Armenian Genocide

In 2005, Murat Bardakçi, a Turkish journalist, began publishing papers that he had received more than two decades earlier from the widow of Mehmet Talat. Talat served as the Ottoman Empire's interior minister for most of the First World War and is widely seen as responsible for implementing the empire's measures against its Armenian subjects in 1915. (Talat was assassinated by an Armenian in Berlin in 1921.) Earlier this year, Bardakçi published what may well be the single most explosive of these documents – official population figures suggesting that close to a million Armenians disappeared between 1915 and 1917.
Turkey has long held that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died or fled during the chaotic war, when the Empire was fighting its northern neighbour, Russia. Bardakçi himself defends the necessity for the Ottoman authorities to be tough on the traitors inside its frontiers. The Turkish republic – the successor to the Ottoman Empire – has made it a crime to call the events of 1915 a genocide, while other countries, including Switzerland, made it a crime to deny that what happened was a genocide. Most historians and scholars accept that the Armenians were victims of a strategy of extermination. A determination of genocide does not primarily hinge on numbers, however. The term was codified in the Genocide Convention of 1948, which defines it as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.