Turkish human rights activist Ragip Zarakolu is often referred to as Don Quixote fighting against the denial of the Armenian Genocide; he started publishing books and openly speaking out on the issue still in the 1990s, but says that not much has changed since then – Turkey continues its “indecent policy”.
“They continue poisoning the new generation with misinformation. The Armenians generously extended a hand, but the Turkish authorities failed us, since Turkey keeps bowing to Azerbaijan’s whims. Karabakh is not Turkey’s concern, and if Turkey insists that it is, it only proves that Turkey is carrying on with its pan-Turkic ideology and policy”, Zarakolu told ArmeniaNow and reprimands his own country:
“Turkey should be the last country to talk about the Karabakh issue, the people of Artsakh were only defending themselves. Or should they have allowed to be massacred as well?!” he exclaims.
The founding director of the Belge publishing house, 63-year-old fighter for human rights, is one of the rare individuals in Turkey to whom the Armenian Genocide, the Kurdish issue are a matter of justice and dignity rather than a dangerous but easy way of becoming known.
In 1990 Zarakolu’s late wife Ayse Nur Zarakolu, who was facing a lawsuit for translating and publishing French writer Yves Ternon’s book titled Armenians, history of a genocide or The Armenian Taboo, said in court:
“It is not a crime to speak about the Genocide; rather, not admitting and denying it is the gravest crime.”
For these words she was sentenced to two years in prison, and this wasn’t a single case: in years that followed the spouses were repeatedly condemned and punished, but they never stopped believing that the policy of denial has to be fought against.
“If we didn’t believe we wouldn’t have published. I think the Genocide is not the past, but rather the future, the present day, and if we didn’t speak about it the same would have been committed against the Kurdish people.”
Zarakolu’s Begle publishing house founded in 1977 was the only one to start translating into Turkish and publishing pieces of literature, such as Franz Werfel’s Forty Days of Musa Dagh, Verzhine Svazlian’s Armenian Genocide and Collective Memory, professor Vahagn Tatrian’s The Armenian Genocide (in the chronicles of the triple alliance’s state archives), United States Ambassador to Ottoman Turkey Henry Morgentau’s memories, Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate, and George Jerjian’s The Truth will Set Us Free; for the latter Zarakolu was again prosecuted in 2008 but, luckily, this time his punishment was limited to paying a penalty.
Despite the fact that bookstores take 50 percent of the income from the sales of those publications because of the potential risk of assault by nationalists Zarakolu, nonetheless, says that’s not important: “We are not pursuing profit, our main goal is to raise awareness in the society, so it doesn’t matter how much we have to pay for it.”
“The books have certainly made a difference; right from the beginning we named the 1915 events by their proper legal term – genocide. Without using this word we couldn’t have touched people’s minds, there are not many today who understand the truth, but at least there are some, and that has caused a split in the society, which, as time goes by, will eventually force the state from the bottom up to admit the genocide,” he says.
Zarakolu has been interested in ethnic minority issues since early age, when his mother said while telling about the Armenians who lived in her birthplace - Sebastia [city in Western Armenia, modern-day Turkey]: “We cried inside, the Armenians cried outside”.
“When I was at school I, too, received the kind of nationalistic education that is still taught in Turkey, but heard and learned completely different things in my family,” he recalls.
Zarakolu is upset with the continued practice of not only basing school education on the policy of denial, but also presenting Armenians as enemies: “The Turkish people does not know either its history or its country, since Turkish history in school textbooks covers the period after 1923 (the creation of the Turkish Republic), when Armenians were not massacred anymore,” he says.
The human rights activist believes that if Turkish people are taught that “everything they have – the palaces, the Turkish theatre building, various architectural monuments – were created by Armenians, a question would naturally arise: and what happened to those Armenians?”
“They simply have to be prepared to give the true answer to that question,” he says with strong belief that the answer to that question would become the beginning of Turkey’s modern history.
“Admitting the genocide would save Turkey; those in Turkey believe it would be humiliation, but no, on the contrary – admitting once faults and asking for forgiveness is greatness and something that any person or a state has to do,” says Zarakolu. Many people who know him are worried about his safety; however he himself is convinced that nothing threatens his life, apart from a prison cell.
“I face a lot of persecution, but they won’t kill me since after Dink’s case they don’t want to create new heroes; they realized that it has a greater converse effect,” he says and re-states his point with a smile.
“I am not Armenian by blood, but until Turkey admits committing the genocide I am an Armenian, until Kurds are granted freedom I am a Kurd, I am a universal human being to whom the establishment of human rights comes before nationalities.”
Gayane Abrahamyan spent a month in Istanbul, Turkey, reporting from there with the support of the Global Political Trends Center (GPoT) and Internews Armenia
