TURKEY WARNS OF DIPLOMATIC DAMAGE OVER ARMENIAN ISSUE
By Andrew Borowiec
Washington Times, DC
May 11 2006
NICOSIA, Cyprus — Turkey this week summoned its ambassadors to France
and Canada for consultation in an escalating row over the World War
I massacres of more than 1 million Armenians.
The government in Ankara has warned of “irreparable damage” to its
relations with France if the National Assembly approved law to make
any denial of the massacre a criminal offense.
In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently referred to the
deaths of Turkish Armenians as genocide, drawing Turkish ire.
In an unusual move, the Turkish Foreign Ministry has suggested that
the French government should prevent the adoption of the denial bill
by the lower house of parliament.
“Accepting this draft law would cause irreparable damage to
Turkish-French relations. It should not be permitted,” the ministry
said.
Unlike Germany, which has acknowledged the Holocaust of the Nazi era
and compensated some of the survivors, Turkey dismisses the massive
documentation of the Armenian massacres by the Ottomans.
The European Parliament has already approved a nonbinding resolution
requiring Turkey to recognize the death of Armenians as genocide
before it is admitted to the European Union.
The draft bill before the French National Assembly was strongly
influenced by the presence in France of some 400,000 Armenians,
the largest Armenian diaspora in Europe. Many are active in French
political life.
Turkish authorities continue to oppose any public discussion of
the Armenian problem. Several journalists have been charged with
violating the code on “insulting Turkishness” for writing about the
90-year-old massacres.
However, under strong EU pressure, similar charges were dropped
against Orhan Pamuk, an internationally known Turkish novelist who
had called on Turkey to admit its guilt.
According to the prevailing Turkish version, Armenians living in
Turkey had to be resettled in the desert areas of the Ottoman Empire
because they were “the fifth column” on behalf of Russia and the
Western Allies.
Turkey fought on the side of Germany and Austria in World War I.
According to the version of the London-based Minority Rights Group,
in the spring of 1915, less than a year after the start of the war,
“Turkish Armenians in the Ottoman army were disarmed and herded into
labor battalions where they were starved, beaten or machine-gunned.
“A ‘resettlement campaign’ followed in which most Armenian men were
summarily executed while women and children were “forced to walk
southward in huge convoys to the burning desert of northern Syria.
Few survived the privations of these terrible death marches.”
The Minority Rights Group concluded that before 1914 over 2 million
Armenians lived under the Ottomans, but the figure has hardly exceeded
100,000 since World War I.
“Thus the number of Armenian dead may safely be put at around
1,500,000. Another half a million became homeless refugees whose
descendants, with their tragic memories, can be found today in a
score of countries.”