article_snippet.sent: Many Armenians living in Turkey still feel treated as second-class citizens.
article_snippet.sent: Van is a member of the delegation for the Armenian Genocide commemoration and is writing her Masters thesis on the issue at Ankara University.
article_snippet.sent: A century after her Armenian ancestors escaped death in Eastern Turkey, Van says her is frustrated that Turkey is unwilling to accept what happened.
article_snippet.sent: In Turkey, the word Armenian is still used as a curse.
article_snippet.sent: Whenever you want to hurt somebody, you say, 'you are like an Armenian.'"
article_snippet.sent: Van says an admission of genocide by Turkey would largely be symbolic.
article_snippet.sent: But the Turkish government called the Turkish government a "necessary deportation" during the messy and violent period of transition leading up to World War I -- when many Armenian radicals were threatening to side with Russia.
article_snippet.sent: But there are other issues, including fears that an official recognition of genocide could unleash a flood of lawsuits against the Turkish government.
article_snippet.sent: In 2006, descendants of exiled Armenians filed suit in a U.S. court against two German banks for restitution of assets, based on evidence that Ottoman ministries required that seized Armenian assets be turned over to the Turkish government and transferred to banks in Germany.
article_snippet.sent: Others say that a genocide is distracting the country from more pressing issues between Turkey and Armenia, like the closed border between the two hostile neighbors.
article_snippet.sent: Aybars Gorgulu, a foreign policy expert at TESEV, one of Turkey's leading think tanks, argues that it is Armenia, not Turkey, which suffers most from the tensions surrounding the issue.
article_snippet.sent: There's no diplomatic relations between the countries, and that plays into why Turks think there's a crazy diaspora obsessed with genocide, but that's not true," Gorgulu says.