Turkey Calls For a New Study of Armenian Genocide Claims

Voice of America
April 19 2005

Washington
18 April 2005

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for an unbiased
Armenian-Turkish study of the Armenian genocde claims. Last month,
Turkey made an unprecedented gesture by offering its neighbor Armenia
to conduct a joint study of the historic events that took place during
World War One in Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkey. Armenia rejected
the proposal.

Peter Balakian, author of several books on Armenian history, says ample
research has already been done. He notes that many studies, including
one by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, concluded
that mass killings and deportations of Armenians from Anatolia under
the direction of the Ottoman government amount to genocide.

“I think there is a growth in recognition of the Armenian genocide
worldwide — the Canadian government last year, the French government
in 2000, the Swiss government last year, the Danish Parliament, the
Italian Parliament the Vatican and many countries in Latin America
and the Middle East as well. It is the result of education, of the
fact that scholars have done increasingly brilliant work over the
last couple of decades, writing objective, detached histories of the
Armenian genocide.”

According to Armenians, on April 24, 1915, the government headed by
the Young Turks , the ruling political party of the Ottoman Empire,
began to deport and massacre its Armenian Christian minority
population, approximately 2.5 million people. Turkey denies that
there was a planned campaign to eliminate Armenians from Anatolia.
It says that both sides suffered losses in the war. Atrocities may
have occurred, they say, but only at the hands of rogue groups or
individuals, Turkish as well as Armenian. Turkey says no more than
300-thousand Armenians perished in the clashes.

Turkish-born Muge Gocek, a historical sociologist at the University
of Michigan, says ordinary Turks have denied the massacres for many
years because they haven’t had access to their historic documents.

“Turkish society knows very little about what happened in its own
past for two reasons, says Professor Gocek. “One is because of the
alphabet reform that happened in Turkey in 1928, where the Arabic
script was abandoned and Latin script was adopted. Turks cannot read
their own past historical documents. And the second is that things
from the past were selectively translated and therefore very little
scholarly information has been made available to them about the
Armenian question.”

But after World War One, says professor Gocek, there was an
international condemnation of the Turkish atrocities and the allies
conducted trials against the perpetrators.

“They had more than a thousand trials held, but only a couple of
people were punished. The rest were not at all punished for these
crimes because a lot of them joined the nationalist movement, the
war of independence. And as such they became important people who
went on to found the Turkish Republic,” says Professor Gocek.

In the 1920’s, Turkish reformist leader Kemal Ataturk established a
strong and When Pope John Paul II visited Armenia in 2001, he paid
respect to the Armenian victims of massacre. independent Turkey,
which was able to use its political clout to squelch Armenian claims
for reparations and return of their land. Turkey continued to do
so later as a strategic US ally and a member of NATO. But with the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the government of the newly independent
Armenia began a worldwide effort to gain international condemnation
of the World War One massacres as genocide. Subsequent mass killings
of civilians in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Sudan focused international
attention on such crimes. And scholars say, this has renewed interest
in the Armenian question worldwide and among many in Turkey.

Some groups are interested in fostering reconciliation between
Armenia and Turkey. David Phillips, a fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations in New York, says pre-conditions to reconciliation would
be counterproductive.

“The idea that exists in some ultra-nationalist circles in
Armenia that before you even talk to Turks, they have to admit the
genocide, pay the reparations and give back territory is completely a
non-starter. Ultranationalists in Turkey also oppose any movement on
Armenian issues and try to link that with the restoration of so-called
occupied territories in Azerbaijan.”

David Phillips says both countries need to be moderate while acting
in their national interests. And, he adds, Turkey and Armenia would
benefit from opening their common border for travel and trade. That,
many analysts agree, would be the quickest road to reconciliation.
From: Baghdasarian