Turkey: Hidden Truths or True Lies

Raffi Bedrosyan – 26/11/2012 ISTANBUL — In 1915, an entire people was physically wiped out in a couple of years from its homeland of several thousand years, but how can you wipe out the remnants of this people, its creations, its assets, its traces, its very existence from the collective memory of the rest of the citizens within the country, or for that matter, from the collective memory of the rest of the world? This has been an immense challenge for successive governments of Turkey, a mission mostly successful for almost four generations, and yet, here and there the true lies or the hidden truths keep coming out with increasing frequency, especially in recent years. Hiding the truth and historic facts about 1915 from its own people has been the government policy since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, through indoctrination of the education system, control of the media and academia, destruction of the Armenian buildings and monuments and so on.