Commemoration and Memorialization of Ahiska (Meskhetian) Turks in Türkiye Foreign Ministry’s Commemoration Statements-(2015-2021)

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.