The Driver of Türkiye’s Persistent Denial of the Armenian Genocide

After the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, the Ottoman Empire embraced a policy of aggressive Turkification, targeting non-Turkish minorities — Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians — as existential threats. Between 1915 and 1917, Armenians were systematically exterminated or exiled. Churches were leveled, villages emptied, cultural artifacts destroyed, and generations erased. This was no collateral damage of war. It was genocide, planned, executed, and justified. Yet the crime remains unpunished, its memory resisted, its truth suppressed. In 1998, French jurist Louis Joinet outlined four foundational principles for justice in the wake of crimes against humanity: 1) The right to know the truth; 2) The right to justice; 3) The right to reparation; 4) The guarantee of non-recurrence.  In Türkiye’s case, all four are under siege. The truth is buried. Justice is denied. Reparations are rejected. And the cultural and political currents that enabled genocide — ultranationalism, historical revisionism and intolerance persist. Worse still, some voices in Türkiyé do not merely deny the genocide — they glorify it. They describe the extermination as “necessary,” even “righteous.” These statements are not only morally repugnant, but they also represent a dangerous normalization of atrocity. History has taught us, time and again, that silence in the face of such crimes is complicity. Denial is not neutral; it is violence sustained through indifference. The world cannot look away. Türkiye must confront its past, not just for the sake of justice for Armenians, but for its own moral and democratic future. Without truth, there can be no healing. Without acknowledgment, there can be no trustworthy relationship between the Armenians and the Turks.

Why, then, does denial continue unabated? Is it about economics? Fear of territorial concessions? The threat of reparations? National embarrassment? Or something deeper and more entrenched? These soul-searching questions pushed me to dig further — specifically into the deliberations of the Turkish Military Tribunal that prosecuted the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress after World War I. I hoped to uncover something more revealing, something that might expose the psychological underpinnings of this culture of denial—and perhaps still echoes in the realpolitik of modern Turkey.

I believe I found one compelling reason why the Turkish state continues to resist acknowledging the Armenian Genocide, which began in 1915 and extended until 1923. Key insights lie buried in the official records of the Turkish Military Tribunals, published between 1918 and 1920 in the Takvîm-i Vekâyi (Calendar of Events), the official gazette of the Ottoman Empire. Established in 1831 by Sultan Mahmud II as part of the Tanzimat reforms, Takvîm-i Vekâyi served as the Empire’s first government bulletin, a vehicle for broadcasting laws, imperial edicts, state appointments, treaties and administrative decrees. Modeled after European state bulletins such as France’s Moniteur Universel, it aimed to modernize and centralize the empire’s communication. It was widely circulated to civil servants, religious authorities, and provincial administrators, and eventually published in multiple languages, including Arabic, Persian, French and Armenian, reflecting the empire’s multiethnic makeup.

For historians, Takvîm-i Vekâyi remains an invaluable primary source. It captured the Ottoman state’s official voice and documented key events with bureaucratic precision. While its content was highly curated, often shaped by the regime’s ideological agenda and censorship, it remains a trustworthy archive for understanding state policies, especially when read critically alongside other sources. It revealed not just what happened, but how the state wanted events to be remembered. Buried within the proceedings of the Ottoman Military Tribunals and in Takvîm-i Vekâyi it is startling to find often neglected historical truth: the very court that prosecuted and condemned the architects of the Armenian Genocide also issued a death sentence, in absentia, against the leaders of the nascent Turkish nationalist movement, including none other than General Mustafa Kemal, the man who would later become the founding father of modern Turkey. Sixteen people with ties to the Nationalist Movement were sentenced to death, and four were eventually executed on June 12, 1920 for attempting to assassinate then the Prime Minister Damad Ferid Pasha. This jarring overlap is not merely a historical curiosity it is a profound and unsettling convergence. It reveals that the Republic was born not only from the ashes of a fallen empire, but also amid the very flames of atrocity and upheaval that consumed millions. To fully recognize the Armenian Genocide is not simply to indict the Ottoman past; it is to confront the uncomfortable reality that the foundations of the modern Turkish state were poured during a period of mass dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and cultural erasure. The lands were emptied, the homes seized, the bank accounts appropriated, and the memory of an entire people deliberately extinguished—all while the Republic’s earliest champions were positioning themselves as the architects of a new national identity. To accept this truth would be to fracture the carefully curated nationalist mythology that undergirds the Turkish Republic’s origin story. This, perhaps more than fears of reparations or international shame, lies at the core of persistent denial. It is not merely a defense of the past — it is a defense of the present. For to acknowledge the genocide is to risk unraveling a foundational narrative, to admit that modern Turkey was not only a project of reform and independence, but also one entangled in the unresolved crimes of empire. And so, the silence endures, not because the truth is unknown, but because its full weight may prove unbearable.

During the brutal years of the Kemalist campaign to remake the Turkish Republic, a period that historians, dubbed it as the “Final Phase of the Genocide,” or as has been dubbed, “Finishing the Genocide.” The machinery of ethnic cleansing did not pause with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. While Kemal’s nationalist movement was condemned as a coup against the Empire his share in ethnic cleansing of Christian minorities is abundantly evidenced though scholarly publications and through personal experience. Beginning with the city of Smyrna (modern-day Izmir), Kemalist forces set the city ablaze on September 19, 1922. Once a thriving and cosmopolitan port, home to large Armenian and Greek communities, Smyrna was reduced to ashes within days—over ninety percent of the city destroyed. What followed was a brutal campaign of pillage, rape, and mass slaughter carried out with impunity. Western powers, eager to safeguard their oil concessions and commercial interests in the newly emerging Turkish Republic, looked the other way. Their silence, and refusal to intervene, amounted to complicity in one of the gravest atrocities of the early 20th century. However, according to Takvîm-i Vekâyi Kemal’s death sentence is solely attributed to his Nationalist’s coup attempt against the Empire. Without any mentions of his decisive orders of forced deportations of remaining Christian populations including the Armenians across all the Turkish land. Amid this silent storm of state-sanctioned brutality, an eleven-year-old Armenian boy lived with his family in the Tarla Mahallesi district of Konya, a central Anatolian city far from the frontlines of war and turmoil but not far enough from the reach of nationalist zeal. One morning, without warning, Kemalist gendarmes on horseback thundered into the neighborhood, their sabers gleaming in the sunlight, raised high not just as weapons, but as instruments of terror. With cold authority, they ordered the family to abandon their home immediately, no time to gather belongings, no chance to say anything. The message was brutal and unmistakable: leave now, or face the consequences (yallah şimdi buradan geden). No explanation. No appeal. Just an order to vanish. Clutching only what they could carry, the eleven-year-old boy with his family joined the long and harrowing trail of forced displacement. Their journey began on foot, southward toward the Mediterranean, walking for weeks toward the port city of Mersin, and eventually crossed the border into Syria, finally arriving in Damascus in the winter of 1922.

That eleven-year-old boy was my father, Anania Karagueuzian.