Open wounds : Armenians, Turks and a century of genocide / Vicken Cheterian.

"The assassination of the author Hrant Dink in Istanbul in 2007, a high-profile advocate of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, reignited the debate in Turkey over the annihilation of the Ottoman Armenians. Many Turks with Armenian ancestry soon re-awakened to their heritage, reflecting on how their grandparents were forcibly Islamized and Turkified, and on the suffering their families endured to keep their stories secret. At last, the silence had been broken: there was now a public debate about the extermination and the confiscation of Armenian property. Vicken Cheterian's Open Wounds explains how, after the First World War, the new Turkish Republic forcibly erased the memory of the atrocities, and traces of Armenians, from their historic lands--a process to which the international community turned a blind eye. The result of this amnesia was, Cheterian argues, "a century of genocide." Many Turkish intellectuals now acknowledge that the nation collectively paid a price by forgetting such traumatic events, and that Turkey cannot solve its recurrent conflicts with its minorities--such as the Kurds today--nor have an open and democratic society without addressing the original sin on which the state was founded: the Armenian Genocide"-- Provided by publisher.