Common ground

FIVE YEARS AGO, Ronald Grigor Suny, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, sat in a tiny room on campus and waited nervously for a group of colleagues to arrive. ''What have we done?'' he asked his wife. ''What if these people choke each other to death?''

The conflict that Suny feared was no arcane ivory tower dispute. It was the first meeting of the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship, and most of the participants were of Armenian or Turkish descent. In other words, in addition to being historians, sociologists, and political scientists, they were members of ethnic groups that - particularly in the diaspora - view one another as sworn enemies.

Animosity between the groups stems from events in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey that Armenians - along with most prominent historians worldwide - call the ''Armenian genocide,'' and that many Turks call the ''so-called genocide'' or the ''Armenian allegations,'' if they don't use the phrase employed by Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, at a press conference last month: ''unacceptable claims by the [Armenian] diaspora to continue its existence.'' The Turkish government promulgates a view that the number of Armenians who died is much lower than Armenians claim - around 500,000 instead of 1.5 million - and that their deaths were the consequence of their collusion with Russian forces in World War I, not preplanned extermination. A revision to the Turkish penal code proposed last year would impose a prison sentence of up to 10 years for use of the term ''genocide'' to describe the events of 1915.

For decades, Armenian groups, particularly those in the diaspora, have lobbied governments, news organizations, and academic institutions to officially label the events of 1915 as genocide, observing April 24 as the date the massacres began. (The Boston area is home to one of the largest communities of Armenian-Americans whose families were dispersed from Turkey following the genocide.) And while Turkey is a long way from such recognition, public discussion of the issue has reached unprecedented levels there in recent months, following recommendations from many European Union leaders that Turkey take steps to resolve the issue before becoming an EU member.

When the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship held its fourth meeting last weekend in Salzburg, Austria, Turkish journalists were invited for the first time. Workshop members would like to see their work influence Armenian-Turkish relations, but they are adamant that scholarship and politics are separate enterprises. They also know from personal experience just how psychologically difficult it is for either side to take a neutral look at either history or current developments.

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For Suny, an Armenian-American, the idea of working with Turkish scholars was inspired by a visit to Istanbul's Koç University in 1998. Suny lectured about the genocide, and although several people walked out during his talk, others received him with curiosity and respect.

But following his visit, the New Jersey-based newspaper Armenian Reporter published a series of articles that accused Suny of being an agent of the Turkish state and questioned the intentions of Turkish and Armenian scholars who chose to work together. Suny replied with a blistering letter to the editor. ''What a colossal intellectual and political mistake it would be,'' he wrote, ''for Armenians to slam the door in the face of those Turks who want to open a dialogue, who are prepared to take risks and suffer the consequences from their own government by proposing a fresh discussion of the events of 1915.''

One of those Turks was Fatma Muge Gocek, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who co-founded the workshop with Suny in 2000. When Gocek came to the United States from Turkey in 1981, she quickly learned that to be a Turk among Armenian-Americans was to stand accused of crimes committed almost a century ago.

In 1998, at a Michigan conference marking the 75th anniversary of the Turkish Republic, an audience filled with Armenians drilled her and other speakers with questions about genocide denial. An elderly Armenian woman stood up and said, with great emotion, that her parents died in the massacres. Gocek was deeply moved. ''I don't have to be Armenian to feel terrible for you,'' she recalls saying. ''I can see that you're a person in pain, and I'm in pain with you.''

Her reply left the woman speechless. ''I had never realized, until that moment, the trauma that is created by a lack of acknowledgment,'' Gocek says.

Taner Akcam, another Turkish-born scholar in the workshop, is more accustomed to speaking out against mainstream Turkish views. Now an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Akcam was imprisoned in Ankara in 1976 for publishing an article stating that there were Kurds living in Turkey. (The legal term was ''mountain Turks,'' and even today the government does not recognize Kurds as an official minority, though they constitute 20 percent of the population.) Instead of serving his 10-year sentence, AkÁam dug his way out of jail - literally - and escaped to Germany. There, he became a researcher at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, working alongside German scholars who were studying the Holocaust.

Akcam is often credited with being the first Turkish historian to label the events of 1915 as ''genocide,'' but even he admits this did not come easily. ''It was a certain psychological process to use the word genocide,''' he says. ''That's why I can understand my Turkish scholar friends who are ready to talk about it openly, but never use that word.''

Suny welcomed colleagues to that first workshop at the University of Chicago by calling it ''a small, humble, and historic meeting'' inspired by ''tolerance of difference on the basis of equality and respect, rather than exclusivist and insular nationalism.'' The meeting was not without tension. Many Armenian scholars refused to attend, and some insisted (unsuccessfully) that participants sign a document stating that they recognized the genocide.

In the end, some used ''the G-word,'' others didn't. But the goal, Suny says, was no longer to decide whether it did or it didn't happen. ''We say, It happened,''' he explains. ''Now we have to find out: Why did it happen? How did it happen?'''

Simply asking these questions challenges not just Turkish orthodoxies but the mainstream Armenian attitude, which has been defined for many years by the quest for acknowledgment - for ''the G-word'' - above all. Suny says this is not enough. ''If you don't seek an explanation of why it occurred, it becomes a kind of racism,'' he says. ''Then the explanation implied is that Turks are a pathological group of people who simply do these things.''

Suny, whose great-grandparents died in the 1915 massacres in Yozgat and Diyarbakir, says he himself didn't use the term genocide until he'd done enough research on the subject. And he has questioned the view, held by many Armenian scholars, that the genocide was planned well in advance, arguing instead that even the deliberate massacre of a specific ethnic group could have been an emergency strategy, not a long-term plot. The point does not sit well with those who fear it bolsters Turkey's claim that the massacres were not genocide at all, but consequences of war.

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In Turkey, meanwhile, discussion of this once-taboo subject continues to develop. Last week, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, backed by opposition leader Deniz Baykal, called for an international investigation into the events of 1915. (Armenian president Robert Kocharian rejected the proposal, pointing out that many such efforts have already been completed.) And last Sunday the Turkish state archives released a list of more than 523,000 Turks allegedly killed by Armenians in Turkey between 1910 and 1922 - a move that added to suspicion that Erdogan's initiative was a bid to appease EU pressure, not a sincere reconsideration.

Yet some who would like to see Turkey officially recognize the genocide believe that it should not be tied to EU membership. If genocide recognition is imposed from the top down - just as genocide denial was - it may please Armenians in the short term, but it could be counterproductive by creating more hostility among Turks. Better, they say, to allow open discussion and study of the genocide to percolate from the bottom up.

Perhaps members of the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship will get a warmer reception from their own communities. In a near-comic example of mistrust, both sides have accused Gocek of being an Armenian posing as a Turk. Never one to rest easy on assumptions, Gocek reconstructed generations of family history to confirm that her ancestors were, in fact, ''Sunni Muslims to the core.''

But what, after all, does ethnic identity mean for someone who spends so much energy resisting the lure of nationalism?

A lot, it turns out. ''I love my country!'' declares Akcam, quoting the climactic line from a poem that Nazim Hikmet, Turkey's most famous dissident, wrote in an Istanbul prison in 1939.

Suny, too, is unequivocal. ''No one can take being Armenian away from me,'' he says. ''My grandmother always told me that I am Armenian and we are the most wonderful people in the world.''

Meline Toumani is a writer living in Brooklyn.