The Globe and Mail
It’s no use papering over Turkey’s past

Thursday, October 26, 2006

The Canadian government has taken the contradictory position of recognizing
the 1915 genocide of more than one million Armenians in Turkey and, as of
this week, supporting Turkey’s proposal for a fresh study of those events.
It would be possible to square those two acts if there were any reason to
believe that Turkey is ready to openly and honestly look at the historical
truth. There isn’t.

This is a country that persists in laying criminal charges for "insulting
Turkishness" against writers who dare to question the official state denial
that the genocide happened. Novelist Orhan Pamuk, who won this year’s Nobel
Prize for literature, was one of those charged. Turkey also persists in
threatening to limit trade with countries that use the g-word. In May, after
Prime Minister Stephen Harper explicitly recognized the genocide, Turkey
recalled its ambassador and withdrew its jet fighters from NATO exercises at
CFB Cold Lake in Alberta.

Turkey did do Canada the courtesy this summer of taking in thousands of its
nationals who otherwise would have been stuck in a war zone in Lebanon. But
surely Turkey does not expect that every time it does a favour for a North
Atlantic Treaty Organization ally, the quid pro quo will be some form of
symbolic support for the Turkish denial of its past.

As an act of realpolitik, this support for more "study" is far from Canada’s
first sop to the Turks. In 1996, when a Bloc Québécois MP put forward a
motion to recognize the genocide, none other than the Liberal secretary of
state for multiculturalism, Hedy Fry, amended the motion to say tragedy
instead of genocide. When a Reform MP amended that amendment to say "the
tragedy of genocide," the government voted to defeat the motion. Mr. Harper
is not the first to bow to Turkish pressure, but his backtracking is at odds
with the principled stand he prides himself on taking on international
issues.

Twenty years ago, Benjamin Whitaker of Britain, a special rapporteur to the
United Nations Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the
Protection of Minorities, included the massacres of the Armenians on a list
of 20th-century genocides. "At least one million, and possibly well over
half of the Armenian population, are reliably estimated to have been killed
or death-marched by independent authorities and eyewitnesses." Corroborating
information, he said, was in reports in U.S., British and German archives
and in those of contemporary diplomats in the Ottoman Empire; as he noted,
Germany was Turkey’s ally in the First World War. The Turkish position was
that all evidence to the contrary was forged.

Some day Turkey will have to do what most of Europe has done and acknowledge
its genocidal past.

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