INTERVIEW: 'Turks and Armenians should escape vicious circle of assertion and denial'

Turkish-Armenian relations are back under the spotlight ahead of the centenary commemorations of 1915 on April 24. The date will be especially strained this year, after Turkey opted to rearrange the international Gallipoli campaign remembrance service to compete with genocide commemorations in Yerevan on the same day. This unhappy maneuver is just one example of the bitter narrative war that continues over 1915. 

Stepping onto this minefield is Carnegie Endowment scholar Thomas de Waal, whose new book ?Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide? (reviewed here) examines the last hundred years of bitterness, violence and missed opportunities between the two sides.

De Waal spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News about his work and the prospects for the future of ties between Ankara and Yerevan - as well as between ordinary Turks and Armenians on the ground.
 
Let?s start broadly. What in particular did you want to achieve when you set out to write this book?

My original intention was to write a book about the last 20 years, during which a lot has changed in Turkey and in Armenian-Turkish relations. But I quickly realized it would be impossible to do that without looking at the whole aftermath of 1915 ? in particular looking at how what Armenians called the ?Meds Yeghern,? or ?Great Catastrophe,? came to be known as the ?Armenian Genocide.? The story is about how the word genocide has come to define the issue of what happened in 1915, even though the term postdated the events by 30 years. 

It seemed to me that there was a gap in the literature for an ?Armenian/Turkish book? that would look at how what happened to the Armenians in 1915 was reconceptualized through the generations, and why it?s still such a live...