The diaspora I argued will be always more intransigent than Armenia itself and here in the parenthesis, we have to understand that the disapora is a big issue and there’s a huge literature on disapora nationalism on basically how people in the diaspora cling much more strongly to the collective memory and oftentimes, they want integration in the communities that they live, that they live, they’re part of but they also want to avoid total assimilation. They also want to have a strong memory of who they are, where they come from. And for the diaspora, I would argue, the genocide is such a integral part of who they are that they will always be more intransigent than people in Armenia itself who tend to be more pragmatic, who have, who basically of course are also very attached to the idea of the collective memory but they have to be more pragmatic simply because of the political economic reality of Armenia, that they need to have basically an approach that takes into consideration the daily difficulties of living in a small relatively underdeveloped country whereas for the dispora, the idea of basically putting a question mark behind what happened in 1915 is not acceptable. I will come back to that point because I think that’s an integral part of the problem. When I say liberal intellectuals have an easier time to understand what happened in 1915, I’ll refer to one example, let me read you this sentence and I think you will be able to recognize what the sentence is about. This is how it starts, “My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the great catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them.” Can anyone of you recognize what this sentence is about?
Male Speaker: Yeah, it was the online campaign, the petition campaign that was originated in Turkey.
Interviewee: Yes, an online petition campaign originated in Turkey that did not refer to the term genocide but that referred to the fact that my conscience does not accept insensitivity showed to and the denial of the great catastrophe and the great catastrophe is, correct me if I’m wrong, is the Armenian term, Meds Yeghern, used in Armenian which refers to genocide. The Ottoman Armenians, Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them. Can you take a guess of how many people basically signed up for this petition in Turkey?
Male Speaker: 30,000.
Interviewee: 30,000. This is not a small number given the debate in Turkey, given the fact that for even university professors in Turkey, acquaintance with this problem and knowledge of what happened access to non-Turkish sources were so limited for a very long time. To this day, if I’m correct, you have very few, probably less than five or six Turkish historians, intellectuals, I was a historian, academic historians who are basically are in total convergence with the mainstream of history that what happened in 1915 was genocide. So in that sense, such an angle which argues that what happened in 1915 was a great catastrophe and that there is a need to apologize to Armenians. It’s something very new, newly discussed in Turkey and I would not minimize the number of people who signed it. This is 30,000 people and it was spearheaded by a group of 500 intellectuals who put first their signature and there was a huge campaign about this. So this shows that I think there is hope as far as intellectuals are concerned in Turkey, liberal intellectuals are concerned. The problem remains in the nationalist narrative and the nationalist narrative of basically the media, the education system, and overall politics, the fact that you have to win elections in Turkey and it’s very difficult for a political party to win elections in Turkey without playing to the nationalist narrative. So in that sense, the difficulty is not, I think, between intellectuals and I think there would be an equivalent, a parallel image of this kind of narrative in Armenia too who would empathize with Turkey’s dilemmas in terms of Turkey’s democratization, in terms of the context of 1915, putting 1915 context why this happened.