Globe and Mail, Canada
May 12 2006

The bonds of history
PATRICIA MARCHAK

acting director, Liu Institute for Global Issues

University of British Columbia — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan says he wants a bilateral academic inquiry into the mass
killing of Armenians in the early 1900s (Turkey Tried To Head Off
PM’s Verdict On ‘Genocide’ — May 11), but I can save him the
trouble. A few years ago, for a book I was then writing on genocide
and crimes against humanity, I conducted a search of the academic and
journalistic literature on the Armenian deaths of 1915-16 in the
Ottoman Empire. I found many references to the genocide, including
exhaustive histories and analyses of why it occurred, even some
sympathetic accounts of why Turks felt threatened by European
attempts to carve up the empire and Armenian attempts to get
Europeans involved.

Sympathetic accounts by non-Turks, however, did not go so far as to
pretend it was not a genocide. The only accounts that denied the
genocide were by Turks, who claimed variously that the deaths were
caused by the chaos of the First World War and by Armenian political
actions. What seems to be difficult for Turks to understand is that
the motivations (fear of political opponents, for example) do not
constitute an acceptable reason for committing genocide.