The Weekly Standard
04/17/2006, Volume 011, Issue 29

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The Price of Denial
Why Turkey needs to come to terms with history.

by Ellen Bork

The Armenian Genocide
PBS, April 17

IN ISTANBUL LAST OCTOBER, an acquaintance invited me to lunch with
three participants in a conference of historians, journalists, and
civil society activists that had recently been held at Bilgi
University. Its subject was the fate of Armenians in Turkey during
the early part of the 20th century.

Although it received far less attention abroad than the prosecution
of novelist Orhan Pamuk for speaking publicly about the deaths of
over one million Armenians and tens of thousands of Kurds, the
conference was just as significant, demonstrating Turkish civil
society’s growing self-confidence in questioning the official line on
the Armenian genocide–and the ruling AKP party’s messy flexibility
in allowing such questioning to take place. Postponed, then blocked
in court after the justice minister called it a “stab in the Turkish
nation’s back,” the conference finally took place with the public
support of the prime minister.

According to my lunch companions, the conference participants agreed,
as one put it, that these massacres were “deliberately done by a
small group within the ruling party.” In other words, without using
the word “genocide,” the specific elements of its definition are
increasingly being accepted by Turkish society.

Describing the fate of the Armenians in Turkey as genocide is much
less charged in the United States. “Turkish deniers are becoming the
equivalent–socially, culturally–of Holocaust deniers,” says author
Samantha Power in The Armenian Genocide, a documentary by Andrew
Goldberg and Two Cats Productions, to be broadcast Monday, April 17,
on PBS. The one-hour program provides a compact, evocative, and
visually rich treatment of the massacres by the Ottoman sultan’s
Hamidiye regiments in the late 19th century, and the 1915
deportations and massacres of approximately one million Armenians,
including intellectuals from Constantinople, as Istanbul was then
called. It also includes the campaign of assassination against
Turkish diplomats by Armenian terrorists in the 1970s and ’80s.

Even here, however, the matter remains fraught. When PBS decided to
follow the documentary with a 25-minute debate among academics and
authors, there were objections that this would suggest the genocide
itself was in question. Some individual PBS stations, including the
Washington and New York stations, have decided not to air the panel
discussion.

The reason controversy persists has little to do with scholarship and
everything to do with the role the United States plays as a
battleground for efforts to achieve official recognition of the
genocide. While the Armenian-American community ensures that the
issue is brought up annually before Congress, Turkey, a NATO ally
with a high diplomatic profile in Washington, wages a campaign that
can be presumptuous. Speaking to the Congressional Study Group on
Turkey last month, the Turkish ambassador admonished American
congressmen to do their patriotic duty by voting down resolutions
recognizing the genocide.

Paradoxically, the importance of the Holocaust to Americans ensures
both sensitivity to the Armenian tragedy and a reluctance to accord
it the significance of genocide. There is also a disinclination to
criticize Turkey, a valuable Muslim ally of Israel. These
considerations inform the views of Turkey’s allies in the foreign
policy establishment, of which conservatives constitute a significant
part. Within the conservative camp, criticism of Turkey recently has
been concerned mainly with an Islamic tilt under the ruling AKP, and
growing anti-Americanism across the Turkish political spectrum. And,
of course, Turkey’s refusal to provide support for the Iraq war.

Little concern has been expressed about persisting limits on speech,
which are frequently connected (in the Pamuk case and many others) to
criticisms of Turkey’s treatment of minorities, and its relationship
to a Turkish national identity forged during a period of instability
and imperial collapse.

As The Armenian Genocide demonstrates, it is precisely this
historical background upon which a specious, yet persistent,
objection to recognition of the genocide is based. In its most
respectable form it is the contention that the deportations,
massacres, and starvation of Armenians took place in a particular
“context”–that is, amid (or in response to) rebellion and treachery
from Turkey’s Armenian population, in league with Russia.

“So, if the Armenians killed and were killed,” Yusuf Halacoglu, head
of the Turkish Historical Society, says in the film, “the fact is
there were two sides involved in a civil war.” The argument boils
down to a claim that the events were not genocide but a response to
provocation in which the victims, including unarmed women, children,
and the elderly, brought on their fate.

It is a variation on the argument, made by some in the 1990s, that
there was no obligation to stop the killing of Muslims by Serbs in
Bosnia since the people of the region had been “killing each other
for centuries.” Both justifications are red herrings, which can be
effective when made with confidence by articulate proponents.

In the documentary, Turkish historians reject this claim, providing
historical context that enhances rather than undermines an
understanding of the fate of the Armenians as genocide. The loss of
Balkan territory, the flow of refugees from these Christian quarters
of the empire telling of persecution–all combined, says Taner Akcam,
to make “fear of collapse . . . [the] basic factor of the emergence
of Turkish nationalism.”

The effects of this fear have been profound, and the documentary’s
most compelling moments come when the Turkish historians describe
their experience with their society’s most stubborn taboo. Halil
Berktay received death threats for being a “Turkish historian inside
Turkey that has spoken up.” He argues that the new Turkish republic,
launched in 1923, dissociated itself from the past by adopting
attributes of Western society, including secularism, and found itself
embraced and courted by Western powers.

“All kinds of reasons like this made it undesirable for the young
republic to maintain an honest memory of what had been done in 1915,”
says Berktay, and “as a result, you have an enormously constructed,
fabricated, manipulated, national memory.”

After decades of denial and silence, it took an act of courage for
these historians to question the official version. Fatma Müge Göcek
expresses the confusion she felt upon realizing “you could actually
live in a society, get the best education that society has to offer,
which I did, and not know about it or have any books or anything
available to read about it.”

This situation is changing, as this documentary and events like the
Bilgi conference make clear. While my acquaintances in Istanbul have
complicated feelings about international pressure on Turkey to
confront its past, America has been involved from the outset.
Reporters and diplomats relayed news of the atrocities, and charity
appeals raised enormous sums, all of which is documented in the film.
For some Turks, it was in the United States that they found the
freedom, the libraries, and the contacts with Armenian Americans that
enabled them to delve into the past and develop independent
judgments. Of course, the U.S. government is still the prime target
of Turkish efforts to prevent official recognition of the genocide.

It will be up to the Turks to come to a complete understanding of
their past, and consolidate their democratic institutions and civil
liberties. In the meantime, less deference to the Turkish official
position would put America on the side not only of justice for
genocide victims, but also of Turks, like the historians in this
film, who refuse to accept limits on their speech and scholarship.

Ellen Bork is deputy director at the Project for the New American
Century.

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