The Economist
October 21, 2006
U.S. Edition

Where the past is another country;
Armenians in Turkey

This article contains a table. Please see hard copy.

WHAT has to happen before a nation can look honestly at the darkest
chapters in its own past? Moments of truth can occur when a country
isdefeated, occupied and helpless, like Germany and Japan in 1945. At
the other extreme, such moments are also possible when a nation feels
so secure that it can discuss past misdeeds without fearing for its
future existence: think of the British, French and Belgian historians
now uncovering murky chapters of the colonial era. And there is a
third answer: after a big revolution (like the Bolshevik one), the
new rulers are often keen to show up the moral turpitude of their
predecessors.

None of these conditions has ever prevailed in modern Turkey,
although things came close after 1918; and that is why the fate of
hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians who died horribly in 1915
is still a bitterly disputed question, for diplomats and judges as
well as scholars.

What is contested is whether, in addition to the overt orders given
to deport the Armenians – on grounds that they were a fifth column for
the tsarist enemy – secret orders were also given by the Committee of
Union and Progress (CUP), the shadowy clique which wielded effective
authority over the Ottoman empire, to make sure that very few
Armenians survived theexperience.

This timely and well-researched work by Taner Akçam, a Turkish-born
scholar who now lives in America (and would risk prosecution if he
tried to go home) highlights at least two things. First, how many
foreign observers of the deportations, including Germans and
Austrians who were allied to the Turks, did conclude that the
intention was to kill, not just deport. And secondly, the book helps
to explain why the conditions in which these events might be freely
discussed in Turkey have never quite fallen into place.

The Ottoman empire did, of course, accept defeat by the Entente, and
in the months that followed, Britain had much sway over the Ottoman
institutions. From March 1920, Britain and its allies formally
occupied Istanbul. But the occupation, at a time of British-backed
Greek expansion in Anatolia, backfired: the real moral authority of
the war victors over Turkey ebbed rapidly, as did the Turks’
readiness to receive moral lessons from their foes. So too did
Turkish willingness to accept that crimes had been committed against,
as well as by, the eastern Christians.

Things might have been different. During the first world war, all
decisions on the conduct of the war (and the treatment of the
Armenians) were taken by the committee. When the war ended, its
leaders fled, fearing prosecution for their atrocities against the
Armenians. At that time, the Ottoman government was desperate to
distance itself from the CUP’s actions, and agreed readily to a
series of trials in which the fate of the Armenians was considered;
some grisly evidence came to light. But the mood of self-reproach was
short-lived.

Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk), the brilliant general who smashed the
Greeks in 1922 and created modern Turkey, might in theory have
renounced all the deeds of the Ottoman era – given that the republic he
proclaimed was supposed to mark a rupture with the past. But as Mr
Akçam shows, Ataturk’s movement was too close to the committee for a
clean break to occur. That laid the ground for today’s odd
situation – a modern republic that passionately defends, on pain of
prosecution, theimperial regime which the republic’sfounders
overthrew.

GRAPHIC: A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of
Turkish Responsibility.