Officials in Istanbul banned a ceremony attempting to mark the anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian genocide organized for Wednesday, an event perpetrated by the last remnants of the Ottoman Empire and continuously denied by Ankara to this day.
The Turkish outlet Bianet initially reported on Monday that a group in Istanbul called the “April 24 Commemoration Platform,” named after the day marking the beginning of the genocide, attempted to formally organize a public event on that day to honor the victims of the genocide. The event would have reportedly taken place in front of the Süreyya Opera House in Kadıköy district, Istanbul. The Istanbul Governor’s Office did not grant approval for the event. Bianet did not specify if the Istanbul Governor’s Office offered any reasoning for the ban.
While the Turkish government has never full acknowledged the genocide, prior to the rise of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), similar solemn memorial events were allowed. In a report on Istanbul’s recent history of marking the event published in October, author Özgür Sevgi Göral, observed that growing social awareness of the genocide and recognition of other atrocities by the Turkish government was growing but appeared to come to a halt following the rise of the AKP as a political heavyweight in 2003.
The event banned on Wednesday, the Turkish outlet Duvar recalled, had taken place freely from 2010 to 2019.
“The 2022 and 2023 commemorations were banned by the Istanbul Governor,” Duvar reported. Turkey imposed sporadic lockdowns on its population in 2020 and an official national lockdown in 2021 in response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, which limited public assemblies generally.
The April 24 Commemoration Platform issued an outraged statement condemning the regional government for preventing its members from honoring those killed in the genocide.
File/The mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War One remains a highly sensitive issue to this day. (Getty Archives)
“The commemoration event, which has been organized for years, is planned not only as a press statement but as a silent act of respect for those we have lost, which lasts for about an hour,” the statement read, according to Duvar. “We see the banning of our commemoration event without any justification as an insistence on an anti-democratic step.”
The organization accused the government of enabling “racists and xenophobes.”
Another Turkish organization, the Human Rights Association (IHD), has announced that it would hold a press conference to mark the anniversary on Wednesday, branded “Recognize, Apologize, Compensate.”
The Armenian genocide was the mass slaughter and relocation of Armenians – and Greeks and Assyrians in simultaneous genocides – from what is now Turkey. Historians largely agree it is the first modern genocide of its magnitude on record and it began on April 24, 1915. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, then the leader of the “Young Turks” movement who would ultimately found the current Republic of Turkey, was the architect of the policy, intended to eradicate Christians and non-Turks from the territory. Unearthed historical documents, including telegrams from Ottoman officials, have since revealed clear intent to “exterminate” Armenians.
The Armenian genocide resulted in the slaughter of 1.5 million of the 2 million Armenians living in the Ottoman empire at the time.
The government of Turkey under current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Islamist – unlike Atatürk’s secular, sometimes actively anti-religious regime – but nonetheless openly denies the genocide. Insulting Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is illegal in Turkey. Erdogan called the genocide in 2019 a “the most reasonable action that could be taken in such a period,” minimizing the killings as a “relocation.”
“Turkey has never committed any civilian massacre in its history and it never will. Our religion and culture would never allow to do it,” Erdoğan claimed.
On Monday, Erdogan urged the Armenian people to discard “fictional historical narratives” that stated they were the victims of a Turkish genocide. Erdogan appeared to present genocide denial as a requirement for diplomatic relations with Armenia.
Armenians take part in a torchlight procession in Yerevan, late on April 23, 2023, to mark the 108th anniversary of World War I-era mass killings. (KAREN MINASYAN/AFP via Getty Images)
“It is time to put aside baseless ideas. It is always better to act on the realities of the time than to act on fictional historical narratives that have nothing to do with reality,” Erdogan reportedly said, claiming he had spoken to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan “about the issue of the so-called Armenian genocide” and urged him to “choose the way to make new beginnings for a bright future.”
Erdogan’s denial of the 1915 genocide is made relevant today by the eradication of the Armenian Christian population of Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory between Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan. Largely thanks to the purchase of inexpensive Turkish drones, the Azeri government successfully seized Nagorno-Karabakh in a series of battles that began in earnest in 2020 and culminated with the ouster of Armenian officials from the region in September. The Azeri government also blockaded the region, starving out its population, in December 2022.
“This is an ongoing genocide. It is happening now,” Luis Moreno Ocampo, a former prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), told Congress at a hearing on Nagorno-Karabakh in September. “There is no doubt that genocidal intentions are there.”
At the same hearing, Georgetown University adjunct professor David L. Philips shared evidence that Turkey had flooded the war theater with “Islamist fighters” on Azerbaijan’s side, many of them believed to come from Syria.
The human rights organization Freedom House ranked Nagorno-Karabakh the least free place on earth in its 2024 “Freedom in the World” report, noting that “nearly its entire population of 120,000 ethnic Armenians was forced to flee the enclave under intense pressure from Azerbaijan’s military.”