Newly-independent Armenia’s ostensibly mature policy—which I supported as the nation’s first foreign affairs minister—of seeking establishment of diplomatic relations without the positing of any preconditions can today, 18 years into the game, be pronounced dead on arrival.

Turkey has always had its share of decent folks. One close example is the righteous family who, during the great genocide and national dispossession of 1915, risked its own to save my grandmother Khengeni from certain death in the coastal town of Ordu. The stories of thousands like them have not been told because of the Turkish state’s official dialectic of denial.