A Century of Injustice

By Margarita Krtikashyan, Yerevan, 2 May 2025

When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk declared the birth of the Turkish Republic in 1923, it was presented as a radical departure from the Ottoman past. A secular, Western-oriented nation-state was said to have risen from the ashes of the empire. According to the official narrative, it would usher in modernity, progress, and national unity. However, beneath this modernist rhetoric lay a disturbing reality: the Turkish Republic was founded on the physical destruction and cultural erasure of its indigenous Christian peoples, especially Armenians, and on the systematic denial of the Armenian Genocide.

One hundred years later, under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey appears to be undergoing another transformation. Yet while Kemalism and Erdoğanism may seem ideologically opposed, they share a profound structural continuity. Both systems are anchored in state control over historical narratives, deep-rooted nationalism, and the exclusion, even demonization, of minorities. For Armenians, this is not a story of reform, but of uninterrupted injustice.

The foundations of the Turkish Republic were not laid in a historical vacuum. Between 1915 and 1923, the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, along with Assyrians and Greeks, was subjected to extermination, forced deportation, and mass dispossession. Survivors were left stateless and voiceless. Rather than acknowledging these crimes, the Republic’s founding elite institutionalized their denial and codified a national amnesia.

The Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which granted international recognition to the new Republic, excluded meaningful minority protections for Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks outside Istanbul. The “new Turkey” adopted a civic-secular appearance, but in practice enforced a monoethnic, monoreligious identity: to be Turkish was to be Sunni Muslim. Reminders of Anatolia’s pluralistic past were systematically removed from textbooks and official maps to public monuments and place names.

The Kemalist regime’s motto, “Happy is the one who says, I am a Turk,” became a national creed. But for Armenians, this happiness was predicated on their absence. Armenian churches stood empty or were converted into mosques or storage depots. Armenian schools, where allowed, operated under strict surveillance. The trauma of genocide was compounded by the enforced silence of a state that claimed to represent progress and modernity, while erasing those who once embodied the land’s diversity.

When the AKP came to power in 2002, Erdoğan promised democratization and historical reckoning, partly in line with European Union accession requirements. For a brief moment, civil society in Turkey grew bolder. In 2005, a groundbreaking academic conference on the Armenian Genocide was held in Istanbul. Public intellectuals like Hrant Dink began speaking out with unprecedented courage.

But the 2007 assassination of Dink, carried out with the complicity of state-linked networks, marked a tragic turning point. The so-called “deep state” had not disappeared; it had merely adapted. Erdoğan’s regime quickly revealed that it would not dismantle the Republic’s foundational taboos but would instead reinforce them, now buttressed by religion and populist rhetoric.

Under Erdoğan, the Turkish state has embraced a neo-Ottoman, Islamic identity, one that glorifies the imperial past while vilifying its Christian subjects. The Armenian Genocide remains officially denied, and the prosecution of individuals who label it as such is still permitted under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. Turkish foreign policy from northern Syria to Nagorno-Karabakh reflects the same ethno-religious expansionism that animated the Ottoman policies of 1915.

In 2020, Erdoğan offered full political and military support to Azerbaijan’s war against Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, including the deployment of Syrian mercenaries and Turkish drones. This conflict was not only geopolitical but deeply symbolic, a modern-day extension of the unresolved violence of the past. Ankara’s framing of this intervention as a historical mission, encapsulated in the phrase “One nation, two states,” served as a chilling reminder to Armenians that the mindset of 1915 endures.

While Kemalism relied on top-down secular nationalism, Erdoğanism fuses Islamic conservatism with historical revisionism. Despite their apparent ideological divergence, both operate within a rigid political framework that criminalizes memory and suppresses dissent. The denial of historical atrocities, most notably the Armenian Genocide, remains state policy, as school curricula continue to exclude references to it and legal penalties are imposed on those who defy the official narrative. Nation-building proceeds through selective historiography: whether through Atatürk’s statues or Erdoğan’s sermons, Turkey’s national story is curated to emphasize heroism and innocence, while omitting or distorting the experiences of non-Muslim populations.

Minorities persist as second-class citizens in both symbolic and institutional terms. The continued closure of the Halki Seminary, state interference in Armenian community foundations, and the cultural erasure of Assyrian heritage sites exemplify this enduring legacy of exclusion. The transition from Kemalism to Erdoğanism is not a rupture, but a remodeling of authoritarian governance. The tools of repression remain intact; only the ideological symbols have changed.

For Armenians, the story of the Turkish Republic is not merely one of denial but of deliberate continuity. Both Kemalist and Erdoğanist regimes have built their legitimacy on the suppression of the truth of 1915. Until that truth is fully recognized, Turkey’s transformation, no matter how modern, religious, or populist it appears, remains fundamentally incomplete.

As Turkey enters its second century, Armenians and other minorities continue to be excluded from the national narrative. Memory is punished, justice is deferred, and impunity is normalized. But the Armenian people do not seek vengeance they seek recognition. From the ruins of churches in Western Armenia to the families displaced from Artsakh, Armenians live with the consequences of a century of denial. True peace begins with truth. And until the Turkish state, regardless of who leads it, reckons honestly with its past, the wounds of 1915 will remain open.

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Margarita Krtikashyan is a PhD candidate in Turkology at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Yerevan State University. Her research focuses on cultural policy, the role of music in diplomacy and politics, Armenian-Turkish relations, the issues of Armenians living in Turkey, and the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople. She is also interested in religion, culture, and music. e-mail: [email protected]