Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide

Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide

The assassination of the author Hrant Dink in Istanbul in 2007, a high-profile advocate of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, reignited the debate in Turkey on the annihilation of the Ottoman Armenians. Many Turks soon re-awakened to their Armenian heritage, reflecting on how their grandparents were forcibly Islamised and Turkified, and the suffering their families endured to keep their stories secret. There was public debate around Armenian property confiscated by the Turkish state and the extermination of the minorities. At last the silence had been broken. Open Wounds explains how, after the First World War, the new Turkish Republic forcibly erased the memory of the atrocities, and traces of Armenians, from their historic lands -- a process to which the international community turned a blind eye. The price for this amnesia was, Vicken Cheterian argues, "a century of genocide." Turkish intellectuals acknowledge the price society must pay collectively to forget such traumatic events, and that Turkey cannot solve its recurrent conflicts with its minorities -- like the Kurds today -- nor have an open and democratic society without addressing the original sin on which the state was founded: the Armenian Genocide. "Cheterian's book offers one of the most complete tellings of the twisted, emotional story of the decimation of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915, during the fury of World War--and the story of the political struggle over the massacre in the century since it occurred."-- Foreign Affairs "[A] rigorous, historical study of genocide denial. Cheterian examines genocide's aftereffects as they have befallen millions of Armenians both in diasporic communities around the globe and in the homelands of Turkey, Armenia, and Nagorno-Karabakh."-- Los Angeles Review of Books "Coming from a journalistic and political science background, Cheterian writes in a style easily accessible to nonspecialist readers, keeping them company through each step as he establishes links between the past, present, and future of a troubled country."--Yasar T. Cora, H-Nationalism Open Wounds explains how, after the First World War, the new Turkish Republic forcibly erased the memory of the atrocities. Vicken Cheterian lectures at Webster University in Geneva, Switzerland. As a journalist and historian, he has worked on contemporary conflicts in the Middle East and post-Soviet space, publishing widely in Le Monde Diplomatique, Al-Hayat, and Open Democracy. He is the author of War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia's Troubled Frontier .