A veteran Turkish journalist has characterized the World War I massacre of Armenians in his country as genocide in a new book, defying the government’s stance on the sensitive issue, AFP writes.
Hasan Cemal, a columnist with the Milliyet daily, and the grandson of WWI Ottoman Empire general Cemal Pasha lays out the evolution of his thinking on the issue in the book “1915: The Armenian Genocide”.
“The pain of 1915 is not an issue of the past, but of the present,” he writes in the foreword. “We can only find peace and finally rest by making our peace with history – but with the real history, not an invented or altered one like ours – and ridding ourselves of the virus of exploiting it.”
“I know your pain of the genocide, I share it,” Cemal last year told a Los Angeles conference attended by many members of the Armenian Diaspora.
