Cyprus Mail
Oct 14 2006

Historical truths belong to no political policy

THE LOWER House of the French Parliament on Thursday adopted a bill
criminalising denial of the Armenian genocide in a move that has, not
surprisingly, infuriated Turkey.

One can be cynical about France’s motives: look at the influential
Armenian lobby and the looming elections, suggest that perhaps the
bill has as much to do with unease at possible Turkish membership of
the EU as it does with historical memory. One can also point (as
Turkey has done) to France’s (and others’) failure to come to terms
with an often shameful colonial past.

The move will certainly not have eased the growing tensions between
Europe and Turkey, as Ankara nears its progress report next month,
facing a possible `train crash’ over its refusal to meet commitments
over Cyprus. Many will rightly point out that confronting Turkey at
such a stage is more likely to create a nationalist backlash than
facilitate a political maturity that would allow acknowledgement of
past crimes.

But the fact remains that Turkey’s blinkered refusal to confront its
brutal past is illustration of how distant it is from the values on
which the EU has been built. It was only a few months ago that Nobel
prize winner Orhan Pamuk was put on trial for `insulting Turkishness’
in comments he made about the Armenian question.

Of course, not all of Europe is perfect in this regard. Far right
groups routinely revise history across Western Europe, while
questions of collaboration with Nazi Germany or with Communist
authorities in the former Eastern bloc remain extremely sensitive in
many countries.

But society is watchful to guard historical truth against political
revisionism. In much of Europe, holocaust denial is a crime, with
France now adding Armenian genocide denial to the same category. In
Turkey, genocide denial is state law, with those who speak out about
it facing jail. If Turkey ever hopes to join the EU, that has got to
change.

Rats, we’re all settlers

RAUF DENKTASH once famously said that the only true Cypriot was the
donkey, the others were Greeks and Turks.

The time has come to revise that view. After all, the donkey was
brought to the island from somewhere, by someone, a Mycenaean,
perhaps, or a Phoenician – the zoologists will know.

No, the real Cypriot it turns out is a mouse, Mus cypriacus, which,
we learned this week, established itself in the Cypriot environment
several thousand years before the arrival of man and has survived as
a unique species to this day.

So the indigenous population is not Greek or Turk… but rodent. The
rest of us are settlers, human visitors who have been colonising the
island in waves, from Neolithic times until today.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress