Washington Times, DC
May 8 2005

Forum: Bitter remembrances of Armenia

Last Tuesday’s Commentary contribution by Turkish Ambassador O. Faruk
Logoglu was a vivid reminder the Turkish government still rigidly
clings to its unseemly denial of the Armenian massacres of 1915, the
first genocide of the 20th century, even as it seeks admission to the
European Union.
Moreover, the ambassador seeks sympathy for Turks as if they were
equally wronged. It was all a result of wartime diseases and famine
and “the Armenian revolt in the Eastern provinces of the Ottoman
Empire, in which hundreds of thousands of Turks and Armenians died.”
And then this, an astonishingly mendacious thing to write: “We should
.. acknowledge the grief and sadness felt by present generations of.
Armenians over the terrible losses suffered by their parents and
grandparents. The same compassion must be extended to the Turkish
people.”

Mr. Logoglu certainly knows better. Even the Turkish government
archives show how the Ottoman Turkish government planned and carried
out the massacres of the Armenians because of their race and
Christian religion, “ethnically cleansing” the heavily Armenian
provinces in the East and other parts of Turkey, including Istanbul,
with the loss of an estimated 1.5 million Armenian lives.
The ambassador mentions some Armenian revenge assassinations of
Turkish officials in the 1970s and ’80s — abominable events, to be
sure. He does not mention assassinations of guilty Turkish officials
more than a half-century earlier. The story of Soghomon Tehlirian
suggests why.
He shot and killed the former interior minister and planner of
the genocide, Talaat Pasha, in Berlin in 1921. Tehlirian’s sisters
had been raped and his brother beheaded; his parents had died on a
death march that killed tens of thousands of Armenians. Before
shooting Talaat, he shouted: “This is to avenge the death of my
family.”
He was exonerated by a German jury that found “the official
Turkish documents… proved beyond question that Talaat Pasha and
other officials had ordered the wholesale extermination of the
Armenians.” I wrote about Tehlirian in my California weekly newspaper
almost 40 years later. I found him still careful to be as invisible
as possible for fear of Turkish reprisal (justified or not), and my
story said nothing of where and how he lived. He was buried by the
Armenians as a hero. We might have done something similar if an
American had assassinated Adolf Hitler.
Hitler, by the way, told his top generals as they prepared to
invade Poland and the Nazis pressed on with the Holocaust: “Who
today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Many Americans knew what was happening in 1915 and thereabouts
and tried to help, but too late. They included Theodore Roosevelt,
who criticized Woodrow Wilson for not sending troops into Turkey to
fight to save the Armenians. “The Armenian massacre was the greatest
crime of the war,” he said, “and failure to act against Turkey is to
condone it.”
That failure, he said, “means that all talk of guaranteeing the
future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense.” America’s
failure, he said, showed “our announcement that we meant ‘to make the
world safe for democracy’ was insincere claptrap.”
Others who spoke out and raised funds for rescue of the Armenians
over the next few years included John D. Rockefeller, William
Jennings Bryan, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, William Lloyd Garrison
Jr., Stephen Crane, H.L. Mencken, Ezra Pound and (despite Roosevelt’s
words) Woodrow Wilson. They all knew this was genocide.
Henry Morgenthau, ambassador to Turkey during the massacres,
confronted the Turkish government about its treatment of the
Armenians and led our diplomats’ valiant efforts to help Armenians
escape. He wrote when he left in 1916: “My failure to stop the
destruction of the Armenians had made Turkey for me a place of
horror.”
Religious organizations speaking out included the Central
Conference of American Rabbis (which earlier appealed to Europe in
1909 to protect the Armenians from barbarism in Turkey), Protestant
missionaries (numerous in Turkish Armenia, witnesses to the
atrocities and sometimes rescuers and victims) and leading American
Catholics.
In due time, I hope, Turkey will be a member of the EU and by
then will have firmly emplaced democratic government and First
Amendment freedoms. But it would be another atrocity if that happens
before Turkey accepts, as any European nation should, its
responsibility for the massacres. Can we imagine Germany as a EU
member if it denied the Holocaust and asked equal sympathy for
Germans and Jews because of what happened?
America once stood tall in response to the Armenian massacres.
The pursuit of oil and influence in the Middle East changed that soon
after World War I. It was easier to end the humanitarian clamor.
Today some politicians even refuse (though not President Bush) to use
the word “genocide” lest they offend Turkey. Americans in general do
not even know of these atrocities, although in one of their finest
hours Americans had cried out for the Armenians and for holding
nations accountable for genocide.
Maybe Hitler was right. But I have many Armenian and Turkish
friends who do know (the latter silent just now, because of Turkish
suppression of the truth). I believe young people in Turkey may
change this some day if they have a chance, if they even learn what
happened.
Ambassador Logoglu believes this stain will just go away. We must
make sure lies do not corrupt history as they now corrupt the Turkish
government.

REESE CLEGHORN
Washington, D.C.