Ankara: Before Challenging Check It

[Yervant1]

Radikal, Turkey

Nov 7 2006

 

Translated from Turkish {KMP}

 

 

`Before challenging check it'

 

Murat Belge

 

When our Prime Minister speaks, he speaks tough. He sounds very self-

confident. This might be ok. But there is a concept called

philosophical doubt which implies that strong declarations need to be

avoided.

 

Upon being challenged by an Armenian journalist last week, our

Premier boasted saying, `I am challenging...'. What is the challenge?

The current `archives question'. Prime Minister Erdogan said, 'We

have made our state archives public; you Armenians should also make

yours public. All archives around the world should be accessible to

judge whether the Genocide happened or not.'

As long as I know the Armenians do not reject this. They are also

asking, `Is the Genocide issue so much unknown that we will be able

to discover it now?'

Anyhow, it is not important what the Armenians are saying. It is much

more important and meaningful what we say.

 

More than a year ago (17 August, 2005), in Turkey, Mr. Nihat Sahin,

the Assistant Director of The Land Registry Office sent a letter to

the National Security Counsel. In this letter, he asked for advice

regarding the question of all property-registration books, whether or

not these documents should be sent to the administration of the State

Archives. At the time, there was an ongoing program called TABIS to

update and digitalize the old registry of real property.

 

The Brigadier General of the National Security Counsel, Mr. Tayyar

Elmas, replied to this with a letter. We learn from the daily

Hurriyet that he is the chief of the Department of Mobilisation and

War Planning. He wrote in his letter:' The contents of the

above-mentioned registry books dated from the Ottoman era are liable

to ethnic and political manipulations (like the unfounded genocide,

the Ottoman Foundation, property claims, etc.).For the sake of

national interests, it is undesirable that those documents, partially

or completely, be multiplied, or delivered to centers where archival

work and research are done. Hence, it is more desirable that those

books stay in the Land Registry Offices with limited access'.

 

Every body knows that in the state archives mentioned by Mr. Erdogan

the possibility to discover something new is very small. There is no

smoking gun since there have been no official written orders. Nobody

does this. No one has discovered any written order by Hitler to

exterminate the Jews either. But undoubtedly, it is impossible in a

state mechanism that a deed in this magnitude has not been registered

somewhere in the archives. Back to Talat (Interior Minister), Enver

(War Minister) Bahaettin Sakir (Chief of Special Organisation) and

others; after their defeat, they escaped the country on board a

German U- boat. It is well-known that they took a load of top secret

archival documents with them.

 

The land Registry books will not unveil such a `kill order' but they

will prove who the owners at the time were and when and in which

circumstances did changes in ownership occur. We know that it is

forbidden to search in the old land registry books. This means a lot.

 

Thus, we advise the Prime Minister to be more careful when he raises

his voice. For his sake, he shouldn't use the word `challenge.'