This paper aims to make a comparative analysis of the policies of coming to terms with the past crimes of the military regimes in three countries, namely Turkey, Chile and Argentina, which have gone through periods of military rule in 1970s and 1980s. None of these countries had a smooth process of coming to terms with the legacy of military dictatorship. It has been a very long and arduous process with its ups and downs that still continues today. However, there is a crucial difference between Chile and Argentina on the one hand and Turkey on the other hand. Argentina has gone the furthest with respect to trying and punishing the perpetrators of human rights violations. It has also been a source of innovations such as the legal innovation of right to truth, initiated by both its government and its human rights movement. The mechanisms to confront the past abuses of power by the former military regimes in these two countries were truth commissions, trials, reparations given to the victims of the military dictatorships and indemnification of state employees. Furthermore, the civilian governments and civil society organizations in these countries have striven for the remembrance of the past through social memory works such as archives, museums. In contrast to these countries, we can speak of an ‘absence’ of truth, reparation and justice policies in Turkey, which could not even prosecute one official of the military regime because of crimes perpetrated during the military rule due to immunity bestowed on acts of the military regime. This different trajectory followed by Turkey with regard to its approach to legacy of the military regime constitutes the main research question of this paper. Focusing on the process of transition to democracy and the following political conditions defining the scope and depth of democratization in these countries, this paper argues that there are a number of reasons explaining this difference: the mode of transition to democracy in these countries, the commitment of the following civilian regimes to liberal democratic values and the existence of political issues such as minority issues confronting these countries.
