IGNORANCE STILL CLOUDS EUROPE’S VIEW OF THE TRUE NATURE OF TURKEY

Canberra Times (Australia)
October 4, 2005 Tuesday Final Edition

I S TURKEY ready to join the EU? As the debate rages on, there is
only one constant -the appalling ignorance about the country and its
history. Begin with the constant references to Turkey as a moderate
Muslim state. It has, in fact, been a secular state for more than
80 years.

Continue with the other favourite line -that Turkey has no place in a
“Christian club”. Not only is this a slight to the 15 million European
Muslims already living in the European Union -it ignores Turkey’s
long service in that other Christian club, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation.

In Germany, France, Austria, Belgium andthe Netherlands, through which
millions of Turkish guest-workers have passed during the last 40 years,
there is the spectre of an immigrant flood. But the agreement Turkey
reached with the EU last December stated immigration would be subject
to severe limits only to be lifted when Turkey’s economy (which grew
last year by 9 per cent) was deemed sufficiently strong.

Even in countries friendly to Turkey, thereis a worrying fondness
for the “two-Turkey” thesis. By this line of reasoning, half of the
country is racing Westwards, while the other half -the part closest
to Syria, Iraq, and Iran -is mired in its old, Eastern ways.

While it’s true that Turkey is a land ofmany contrasts, it is not and
never will be a game of two halves. To give just one example, most
of Turkey’s Kurds live in the east. If they look poor on television,
it’s because the region is only just emerging from the Turkish army’s
long conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). If they support
Turkey’s EU bid, it’s because they dream of a social democratic future
in which all Turks, whatever their ethnic origins, can prosper.

If modern Turkey has one great untold story, it is the growing
grassroots movement to embrace its diverse ethnic roots, and to face
the less beautiful chapters in its history.

Though the EU has played a central role in this process, it was born
in Turkey

But there is one highly sensitive matter ithas handled very badly. A
bit of history here: at the end of the Ottoman Empire, there were
more Christians living in Anatolia than Muslims. But by the 1920s,
when the Republic of Turkey was founded, they were pretty much all
gone. Anatolia’s Greeks were exchanged for Greece’s ethnic Turks
following an agreement overseen by the Allied powers. The Turkish
state has never acknowledged what most of Europe holds to be true
-that between one and two million were systematically killed or
perished on forced marches; they say “only” a few hundred thousand
died during the chaos.

That the official line was underwritten bythe penal code became
world news last month, when prosecutors charged novelist Orhan Pamuk
with the “public denigration of Turkish identity” for asserting in
a Swiss newspaper that “a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were
killed and no one dares to talk about it except me”. By and large,
some European politicians saw this for what it was: an attempt by
anti-EU nationalists in the judiciary to spoil Turkey’s chances.

There is still a mind-boggling lack ofinterest in what Turks themselves
have to say. So -to give just one example -there was glancing interest
last northern spring in the government-condoned closure of a conference
organised in Istanbul by Turkish scholars to depoliticise the Armenian
question and open it up to serious, non-partisan study. There were
mentions of efforts to ban a second attempt at the conference last
weekend. But you will need a fine-toothed comb to find mention of
the conference itself -which was a resounding success.

Only a hundred demonstrators turned upto throw a few eggs -in Turkey,
this was viewed as a humiliation for the nationalists.

The burning issue last week was not the Armenian question but whether
or not Turks had the right to discuss it. The important news for Europe
should have been that, whether or not their penal code gave Turks the
right, there was more than one Turk daring to break a 90-year taboo.

There was, however, no mention of thiswatershed last Wednesday, when
the European Parliament made a resolution pinning Turkish entry on
an acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide. Once again, Christians
tell heathens what to do.

If Europe fails to bring Turkey into theEU, and if Turkey -angered,
misunderstood, and disrespected -moves away from social democracy,
Europe only has itself to blame.