TURKEY CAN’T BULLY HISTORY
The Chronicle Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
May 22 2006
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WHY would you resettle hundreds of thousands of people in a desert,
without providing for their basic needs – unless you meant to murder
them?
How could up to 1.5 million people of a single nationality – or even
500,000, if one accepts the current Turkish government’s figures – lose
their lives simply due to “civil unrest,” as Turkey now tries to claim?
The answer, as historians from countries around the world have
documented – with evidence that is simply overwhelming – is that the
Ottoman governments ruling Turkey during and just after the First
World War set out to exterminate Armenians as a people.
The Armenian genocide – or Armenian Holocaust, as it’s also known
– became an international scandal when news of massacres and mass
starvations of Christian Armenians inflicted by Muslim Turks in the
tottering, war-ravaged Ottoman Empire first hit Western newsstands in
1915. That Turkey continues to deny the magnitude of the slaughter,
or the full complicity of the country’s former governments in the
mass killings, remains a scandal today.
More than denial, in fact. For Turkey actively, and shamefully,
continues to attack anyone who speaks the truth about what happened
to the Armenians more than nine decades ago. After Canadian Prime
Minister Stephen Harper issued a statement last month commemorating
a sombre anniversary, the beginning of the genocide in 1915, Turkey
recalled its ambassador to this country for consultations, and warned
that Canadian-Turkish relations could be seriously damaged. It did
the same to France, where lawmakers are set to pass a law making it a
crime – punishable by five years in prison or a fine of 45,000 euros –
to deny the existence of the Armenian genocide, similar to a current
law on the books there referring to the Nazi Holocaust of about six
million Jews during the Second World War.
Turkey has criminally prosecuted its own countrymen for saying the
genocide ever happened.
The Turks, however, cannot bully history. Dozens of countries –
including Canada and France – have officially recognized the Armenian
genocide. Those responsible were indicted by the international
community for crimes at the end of the war. Many were tried in absentia
and found guilty.
And although it is not a formal requirement, several EU officials
have stated that Turkey’s pending membership in the European Union
may depend upon that country finally acknowledging what most of the
world already knows to be true – the Armenian genocide, at the hands of
the Turks. Turkey’s continued defiance of history, and world opinion,
is a road leading nowhere but upon itself.
Mr. Harper did the right thing in acknowledging what historians note
was the 20th century’s first holocaust. Turkey’s butchering of the
Armenians – whose pre-war population of some two million people
was reportedly reduced by three-quarters – eventually led to the
international community’s decision to set up an independent Armenia,
which, to this day, faces a completely closed border along its Turkish
frontier. If Turkey wishes to move ahead in its relations with other
countries, it should acknowledge what is one of the darkest stains
in its history.