Zaman on Line
SAHIN ALPAY

04.09.2005 Saturday
ISTANBUL

What does Genocide Mean?

It may be said that there is no controversy over the fact that hundreds
of thousands of Armenians died due to hunger, cold or attacks and a
great tragedy occurred in the years 1915 and 1916 when the Ottoman
government decided to deport its Armenian citizens during the First
World War. The controversy focuses mainly on whether the deaths caused
by “deportation” can be called “genocide.” The holders of a widespread
view among the Armenian Diaspora define the tragedy as “genocide”
since the 1960s. Turkish Armenians call the tragedy “Metvocir / The
Great Catastrophe”. Armenian governments since Armenia’s independence
also call the tragedy as “genocide”. The prevailing view among Turkish
historians and commentators is that the events constitute a great
tragedy due to mutual massacres, and that the Armenian deportation
has no similarity to the genocide aimed at the total annihilation
of the Jewish people perpetrated by the Nazis in Germany during the
World War II.

Meanwhile those involved in the controversy define genocide in
many different ways. Let us assume that the definition given in the
“Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”
adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 is accepted. Genocide,
according to the Convention, means: “acts committed with the intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group as such, (a) killing members of the group, (b) causing serious
bodily or mental harm to the group, (c) deliberately inflicting on
the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part, (d) imposing measures intended to
prevent births within the group, (e) forcibly transferring children of
one group to another group. International Criminal Court which adopts
the Convention’s definition of genocide, the crime of genocide has
four elements: (i) The perpetrator has killed one or more persons,
(ii) such person or persons belonged to a particular national, racial
or religious group, (iii) the perpetrator intended to destroy in
whole or in part that group as such, and (iv) the conduct . is aimed
at extermination of the group.

International Center for Transitional Justice on the request of the
Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission assessed whether the UN
Convention could be applied to the events that took place in the
Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. It concluded that: (a)
no legal financial or territorial claim arising out of the events
could be made against any individual or state under the Convention,
and (b) the events matched the Convention’s definition of genocide.

But if the deaths of Armenians resulting from the deportation by the
Ottoman State during the First World War can be defined as genocide
according to the UN Convention, aren’t the massacres in those years of
unknown numbers of Muslim Turks in Van, Erzurum, Erzincan and elsewhere
in Eastern Anatolia by Armenian nationalist gangs fighting for the
creation of an independent Armenia also genocidal? The Convention
defines as genocide “acts committed with the intent to destroy,
in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious
group”. It is not at all important if the crime is committed by a
state or not, and if the persons killed are many or few. Is it not
proper that we put aside the allegations of “genocide” in order for
us to be able to face the great tragedy that occurred between 1915
and 16? What took place in history was a great tragedy resulting from
the clash of two ethnic nationalisms. Is not the allegations of the
“Armenian genocide” a tool used by ethnic Armenian nationalists to
incite enmity? Isn’t it time we look at history, not as Turks or
Armenians, but above anything else, as human beings?