Open Wounds

The assassination in Istanbul in 2007 of the author Hrant Dink, the high-profile advocate of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, reignited the debate in Turkey on the annihilation of the Ottoman Armenians. Many Turks subsequently reawakened to their Armenian heritage, in the process reflecting on how their grandparents were forcibly Islamised and Turkified, and the suffering they endured to keep their stories secret. There was public debate about Armenian property confiscated by the Turkish state and books were published about the extermination of the minorities. The silence had been broken. After the First World War, Turkey forcibly erased the memory of the atrocities, and traces of Armenians, from their historic lands, to which the international community turned a blind eye. The price for this amnesia was, Cheterian argues, 'a century of genocide'.Turkish intellectuals acknowledge the price a society must pay collectively to forget such traumatic events, and that Turkey cannot solve its recurrent conflicts with its minorities - like the Kurds today - nor have an open and democratic society without addressing its original sin: the Armenian Genocide, on which the Republic was founded.

'Cheterian provides a well-documented account of the events and politics leading up to [Dink's] assassination as well as the controversy surrounding the involvement of so-called Deep State's actors such as Kemal Kerinsiz and Veli Kk in the murder...insightful glimpses into the "re-awakening" of memory work on the part of so-called "Crypto-Armenians".' - The Los Angeles Review of Books

'Open Wounds provides a comprehensive insight into many relevant issues with regard to the consequences of denial for Armenians and other minorities such as the Kurds...an impressive account of how survivors and successive generations resisted erasure through Armenian historiography, memory politics and the composition and evolution of the diaspora'. - International Journal of Middle East Studies

'Extraordinary and beautifully-written.' - Ronald G. Suny, former chairman of the Society for Armenian Studies

'Cheterian's book offers one of the most complete tellings of the twisted, emotional story of the decimation of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915, during the fury of World War I - and the story of the political struggle over the massacre in the century since it occurred.' - Foreign Affairs