TITLE:
Commemoration and Memorialization of Ahiska (Meskhetian) Turks in Türkiye Foreign Ministry’s Commemoration Statements-(2015-2021)
AUTHORS:
Abdulmelik Alkan
KEYWORDS:
Ahiska (Meskhetian) Turks, Diaspora, Turkey, Transnationalism, Commemoration, Memorialization
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Political Science,
Vol.12 No.4,
September
29,
2022
ABSTRACT: This study aims at exploring press release regarding
Anniversaries of the Deportation of Ahiska (Meskhetian) Turks from their
homeland commemoration statement by Ministry of Turkey Foreign Affairs.
Therefore, this article is based on the single official documents as a primary
resource. Only one primary source is used to gather empirical data which
extracted from Turkish Foreign Ministry official website. Turkey has been
celebrating the Ahiska (Meskhetian) Turks Commemoration Anniversary between
2015 and 2021 with a gap in 2016 in which it was not released for the unknown
reason. The span time for this research has chosen according to the available
official press release and official letter by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The text content analysis is applied to commemoration statements to find the
nature of the language used in the letters to define and underline Turkey
approach to the community using the commemorative language. It concluded to
verify the correlations between transnationalism, commemoration and
diasporaziation process with analysis content of the commemoration letters.