What’s the Turkish for genocide?
Ben Macintyre
The Times, UK
June 18 2005
HISTORIANS HAVE become the moral accountants of our time, poring over
the archives to establish, as nearly as possible, the unpaid debts
still owed by the present to the past.
In China there have been violent demonstrations demanding Japan’s
penitence for its wartime aggression. In Mississippi, an elderly white
man and reputed Klansman has gone on trial accused of murdering civil
rights workers more than four decades ago. The Argentine Supreme Court
this week opened the way for a full inquiry into the crimes of the
“dirty war” between 1976 and 1983. Even France, for so long in denial,
has begun to address the unquiet ghosts of Vichy and Algeria.
The process of historical self-examination is neither simple nor
easy. In the wrong hands, history becomes a weapon of recrimination
and revenge, intercepted by bigots who would use old battles to stoke
new ones. Yet historical introspection is crucial to democracy. The
fledgeling South African democracy bravely sought to cauterise a
traumatic past through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The
Bloody Sunday inquiry may have been expensive and lengthy – seven
years, £155 million and 1,700 witness statements – but it was a
necessary step towards freeing Northern Ireland from the locked grip
of competing histories. Postwar Germany has confronted its demons in
a conscious and continuing act of national catharsis.
The alternative is self-delusion. Treat the past as self-serving myth
and it forms a canker of moral equivocation.
Amid the debate over Turkish membership of the EU, there is one matter
that has hardly been raised, and that is Turkey’s bitter and blinkered
refusal to make peace with its past.
In Turkish history, no event is more divisive and explosive than
the “Armenian question”, the long-disputed massacre of hundreds of
thousands of Armenians during the First World War. Armenia claims that,
as the Ottoman Empire crumbled in 1915, Turkish soldiers and Kurdish
tribesmen were unleashed in a deliberate act of genocide that killed
1.5 million Armenians.
Turkey has refused steadfastly to accept that version of events,
declaring that the Armenian death toll was far lower, and that the
dead perished mainly through civil war, hunger and disease. This, the
Turks insist, was not a systematic slaughter, but a bitter partisan and
ethnic conflict in which Armenians sided with the invading Russians
against Ottoman rule, leading to the deaths of at least 350,000
Turkish Muslims.
This month, historians at Bosphorus University scheduled a conference
to debate the tragic events of 1915-1916. Turkish nationalists reacted
with fury. Cemil Cicek, the Justice Minister, described the planned
conference as “treacherous” and accused the historians of “preparing
to stab Turkey in the back”. With government pressure mounting, and
nationalist students threatening to converge on the university campus,
the conference organisers buckled. The event was cancelled.
The argument, which continues to poison relations between Turkey and
Armenia and destabilise the region, boils down to a single, intensely
emotive word. As Caroline Finkel writes in her excellent forthcoming
book Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923: “The
Armenian question today has come to focus exclusively on whether the
massacres constituted genocide . . . and all other aspects of this
acutely sensitive matter tend to be scrutinised for their value in
clarifying this central point.” But clarity is impossible in a debate
that evokes such violent emotions. The Turkish Foreign Minister has
dismissed the term genocide as “pure slander”, and when the celebrated
Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk dared to declare this year that a million
Armenians had been murdered in Turkey, he received three lawsuits for
“damaging the State” and a volley of death threats.
To complicate matters further, much of the killing in 1915 appears to
be have been carried out by Turkish secret societies, whose records
have disappeared and whose relationship to the Ottoman authorities is
unclear. Turks point out that there is no official document ordering
the killing of Armenians. Armenians allege that the archives have
been purged.
The parliaments of 17 countries, including France and Russia, have
already passed resolutions recognising the Armenian genocide. Britain
and America have held back, wary of angering a powerful and important
ally. But staying silent is not the act of a friend, and it is hard
to see how Turkey can join the EU – an organisation founded on a
determination to avoid repeating the mistakes of history – without
first acknowledging its own bloody past.
The precise numbers of dead, and the meaning of the term genocide,
can be debated for ever, but of this there is no doubt: hundreds of
thousands of innocent Armenians perished as a consequence of Turkish
actions. Most historians outside Turkey now agree that what happened
after 1915 constituted “ethnic cleansing”, for which the Ottoman
Government was ultimately responsible. Acknowledging this, while
genuinely encouraging the widest and most dispassionate debate on
the subject, would establish Turkey’s commitment to freedom of speech
and democratic ideals in the run-up to accession talks in October.
So far, British officials have side-stepped the issue, insisting that
the Armenian question is a matter for historians. As a country with
its own ghosts, Britain has a responsibility to encourage Turkey to
see it own history beyond confining notions of treachery or loyalty.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, while reiterating
his belief that the genocide never happened, has called for a joint
commission to look into the Turkish archives.
But a far more emphatic demonstration of openness would be to revive
the conference at Bosphorus University and open it to the widest
possible range of scholarly opinion.
“Who today, after all, remembers the annihiliation of the Armenians?”
Thus spake Adolf Hitler, reassuring his generals that the Jewish
Holocaust would be forgotten in the glow of Nazi victory. Ninety years
after the killing, the Armenians remember one way, and the Turks
another. The passage of time has calcified these rival histories,
but Turkey’s desire to enter the EU represents an opportunity for
genuine historical reconciliation. The Armenian question may yet be
answered, if Turkey can be persuaded to ask it.
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