According to the Turkish newspaper Radikal, approximately 500 Turkish citizens of Armenian descent have sent an open letter to the Turkish Ministry of Education requesting that they be exempted from showing the documentary "Sarı Gelin." In Turkey, Armenians (along with Greeks) have the right to attend (if they choose) specifically Armenian public schools, of which there are perhaps two dozen in Istanbul.

"Sarı Gelin," which was produced in 2003, represents an attempt to present the Turkish government's perspective on the Armenian genocide issue. While it is often claimed that upwards of 1.5 million Armenians were killed in a genocide undertaken by the Ottoman government in 1915, the Turkish government argues that Armenian deaths were caused primarily through 1) the Ottoman army's response to Armenian revolts against the government, 2) irregular skirmishes between Armenians and Muslims in the region, and 3) accidental death during the course of the Ottoman government's transfer of 700,000 Armenians from eastern Turkey to northern Syria.

I haven't seen "Sarı Gelin," but judging from the documentary's website, it appears to be a fairly standard reflection of the position of the Turkish government and like-minded historians. Emphasis is placed upon the "tolerance" of the Ottoman state and atrocities committed by Armenian nationalist organizations Armenian irregulars in attacks upon Muslim villages in eastern Anatolia in 1915. 

The AK Party government in Turkey has, in recent years, taken an active role in trying to publicize this version of events. According to Radikal, in 2008 the Turkish Ministry of Education ordered that all primary schools in Turkey show "Sarı Gelin" to their students. The story in Radikal also states that, prior to the July 2007 parliamentary elections in Turkey, the AK Party distributed seventy-five thousand copies of "Sarı Gelin" through its local party offices.

The Armenian genocide issue is a very complicated one, and for the historian it's really a no-win situation. Just about anyone who attempts to treat this terrible chapter in history with any nuance is inevitably attacked by partisans on both the "Armenian" and "Turkish" sides (I put the two nationalities in quotation marks because I refuse to reinforce their claims to represent the views of Turks and Armenians more generally), who each brook no criticism of their generally one-dimensional views of the issue.

As I've written elsewhere, in Turkey it is becoming more acceptable to publicly discuss this issue with a greater degree of sophistication than in the past. However, there has also been a strong backlash against efforts (in France, the United States, and elsewhere) to officially recognize the events of 1915 as a "genocide." For every step in the right direction, such as the creation of a website petition expressing remorse for the events of 1915 (without accepting culpability for a genocide), there are also  dismaying events, such as the creation of a rival web petition expressing no remorse for these events (the link to which I've deliberately left off this page).

It's sad to say, but discourse concerning the Armenian genocide issue has gotten a lot uglier than it was when I was living here in the 1990s. Back when I lived here from 1992-1999, just about everyone I knew strongly believed that the Ottoman state had committed no wrongs vis-a-vis the Armenians in 1915—a position which was hardly surprising, given the one-sided treatment the issue received in schools, newspapers, and on television. At the same time, however, there was little animosity regarding the issue. Rather, people simply seemed perplexed that the rest of the world would think that "Turks" could have done such horrible things.

Over the last decade, however, the genocide issue has become far more politicized, especially in the context of international relations. In recent years, countries like France, Italy, and Russia (all of which could, it might be added, be likewise accused of having committed genocide in their histories) have officially recognized the events of 1915 as a "genocide,"  while efforts to pass a similar recognition in the  United States (which were previously stymied by presidents Clinton and George W. Bush) appear to have the support of President Obama.

Meanwhile, people in Turkey have also become more divided in their views on this issue. In the past, when just about everyone went to state schools, watched the same television, read the same newspapers, and had no access to internet, there was a generally broad consensus that the issue was purely a creation of anti-Turkish sentiment abroad. Today, however, it is a lot more common for academic and cultural figures to publicly adopt a more nuanced position on the issue. Others, meanwhile, denounce these figures.  When, for example, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, many Turks that I know weren't able to take much pride in the event because they were so angry at him over comments he'd made to a Swiss newspaper about Armenian deaths in 1915. Perhaps not without some reason, they saw the awarding of the prize to  Pamuk as a reward for having taken a public stand (however vague) on the issue.

Ultimately, this issue is one of many which reflects tensions here over adjustments that are being made to the country's political-historical discourse. For years, state control over education, broadcasting, publishing, and other sectors of knowledge-production kept certain components of this discourse (such as the Turkish state's version of the events of 1915) largely under wraps. Since the late 1980s, however, this control has gradually been slipping out of the state's grasp, with the creation of huge numbers of private schools, the proliferation of private television channels, and—for the last ten years or so—relatively easy access to the internet. While the state is involved in a half-hearted struggle to reclaim this terrain (such as through the totally ineffective "banning" of more than 1500 websites in Turkey), the state's power to transmit and control information in Turkey is nowhere near what it used to be.

The case of the Armenian genocide issue is one example of both the enlightenment and the animosity which can be generated when these controls are lifted. While the range of public discourse relating to the genocide issue is considerably broader than it used to be, the level of vitriol emanating from this discourse is also a lot higher than it was in previous decades. In cases like this one, the role of public figures is important. The AK Party, as a political organization which defends the public display of Islamic piety, has been a great beneficiary of the re-evaulation of Turkish political culture that has occurred over the past two decades. This party therefore bears, in my opinion, a special responsibilty to set an example for responsible public discourse with regard to how questions like the genocide issue are discussed in Turkey.