FAREED ZAKARIA’S FOREIGN EXCHANGE PRGM: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Source: EurasiaNet.org

Foreign Exchange
April 14 2006

Show 215 Transcript – April 14, 2006

Americans are talking about immigration; we’ll get the international
perspective.

Hundreds of thousands died–was it genocide? Armenia says yes,
Turkey says no; we’ll take a look at a new film that tries to answer
the question.

And finally, will AIDS derail India’s economic future?

All this and more on Foreign Exchange…

[parts omitted]

In Focus: Genocide?

Fareed Zakaria: The word genocide did not exist until World War II
when it was used to describe Nazi atrocities toward the Jews. But
can something that took place well before the Nazis in a different
historical context still be called a genocide? For Armenia and Turkey
use of the word has been a source of deep debate. Historians have
established that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died due to
Turkey’s actions in the events during World War I; however Turkish
officials strongly reject the assertion that this was a genocide.

They argue that it was a tragedy of war in a war with many such
tragedies. A new film explores this complex history. Tune into PBS
stations this week to see more and now here’s a clip.

Speaker: As war broke out in August 1914 between Germany and Russia the
Turkish Empire had to decide what to do and [inaudible] particularly
wanted to join Germany and use the German alliance to expand the Empire
to the East. The major enemy for Turkey at that point was Russia and
their dream was to conquer the caucuses and Russia and Central Asia and
unite all the Turkey peoples of those lands in a grand Turkic Empire.

Speaker: In December 1914 led by their Minister of War, [Inaudible]
the Ottomans attacked Russia at Sarikamish along the Russian Border.

It was a strategic blunder; the Ottomans were overwhelmingly
defeated. Their hopes for a united empire were smashed. A few months
later as over 120,000 Russian troops advanced into the Empire their
ranks included a contingent of between 5,000 and 6,000 Armenian
soldiers; this Armenian contingent consisted of both Russian
Armenian conscripts and a smaller number of Ottoman Armenians who
had defected. Seeing their own Armenian subjects volunteering and
fighting for the enemy enraged the Turkish leaders; fearing that
still more of their subjects might join the enemy, they now saw the
Armenians of the Empire as a threat to the state.

Speaker: It was now in the wake of the disastrous loss at Sarikamish
that the CUP decided to disarm all the Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman
Army. They had decided that the Armenians were an unreliable group;
and Enver was blaming the Armenians for his loss at Sarikamish. And
then from disarming them they were thrown into labor battalions–that
is grunt work forces by which they were building roads, cleaning
latrines, and so forth, and were easily segregated, rounded up and
just massacred on mass.

Speaker: The massacres of the Armenian soldiers were the first stage
of the Armenian genocide but it was still just a beginning. The
International Association of Genocide Scholars affirms that over
1,000,000 Armenians died during the Armenian genocide. Other scholars
put the numbers as high as 1,500,000. The Turkish government today
denies that a genocide took place and has denied this historical fact
for nearly a century.

Speaker: In 1923 a new Turkish state, a new Turkish Republic was
created which really disconnected itself comprehensively from the
young Turks of 1915.

[Video Clip–News Clip] News Anchor: …impatient with former
methods, Anaturk banished ancient ways. Under Anaturk’s 15 year rule,
Constantinople was renamed Istanbul and became a westernized city
of modern well-planned buildings. Under his one-party government,
factories increased as the he industrialized Turkey. The social
revolution he accomplished was widespread. In everyway he emphasized
the change from the old Turkey to the new.

Speaker: What this new Turkish state then did was, it embarked on
an all-out program of westernization, adopting your western style
constitution, adopting secularism, dropping the old Arabic inspired
alphabet in favor of the Latin script, adopting western style
dress–costume, the civil code, everything; as a result Britain,
France, Germany–everybody else, they were now out to court this new
Turkey to try to become friends with it and the great powers did not
have any interest in pursuing the dirty matter of what had happened
in 1915. And all kinds of reasons like this made it undesirable for
the young republic to maintain an–an honest memory of what had been
done in 1915, and as a result you have an enormously constructed,
fabricated, manipulated national memory.

The “Dark Years” Armenians get 40% of their power from the Metsamor
nuclear power plant. The plant shut down for 8 years after a 1988
earthquake.

During this period “residents stripped the capital Yerevan of virtually
everything made of wood” to heat their homes.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress