Talking turkey about Armenian history
By Christopher Atamian

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Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Few issues in recent memory have incited as much fervor, debate,
applause and concomitant outrage as the recent bill passed by the
French Lower House, which proposes making denial of the Armenian
genocide punishable by law. Not surprisingly, Armenians around the
world have supported the initiative almost unconditionally, while
most Turks have opposed it on historical grounds – i.e. they still
refuse to label the massacres of 1915-1923 as genocide. A few Turkish
scholars accept the genocide label, but along with many in the West,
oppose the bill as an encroachment on free speech. Should the bill
pass and become law – an unlikely event given political realities
such as Turkey’s EU bid – it would mirror the existing Loi Gayssot,
which criminalizes the public denial of the Jewish Holocaust.

Ordinarily, the right to free speech should be protected with only
limited constraints and exceptions. For example, if an American citizen
wants to insult the United States, it is his or her right to do so,
as it is his or her right to desecrate the American flag. The first
amendment is clear on these and other issues of free expression. In
certain instances, however – for example, when national security
is endangered – it is acceptable for the state, after the proper
consultations and votes, to step in to (hopefully momentarily) curtail
certain rights. The fact that George W. Bush has now shamelessly
abused this right on more than one occasion should not mean that
the French government should not, conversely, use its full powers to
protect its Armenian citizens from continued insults and affronts –
by Turks or anyone else. Similarly, the French state ought to protect
its Turkish citizens from anti-Turkish or anti-Muslim attacks as well.

The French bill, as already mentioned, follows legal precedent,
namely the existing Loi Gayssot. Le Monde and other publications have
claimed that the two laws are different because the latter essentially
serves as a bulwark against existing and future anti-semitism. Yet the
Armenian genocide law, nay-sayers to the contrary, would function in
exactly the same way, given the existing racism and discrimination
against Armenians in France. Armenian genocide monuments in the
country have recently been desecrated, while Armenians have been
subject to all sorts of vile abuse – physical and otherwise –
including violent attacks by French Turks at a recent Armenian
genocide commemoration. The question then becomes: Do Armenian
citizens of France (and other countries who have passed similar
anti-Holocaust denial laws) not deserve the same protections as their
Jewish compatriots? Is the suffering of one people to be placed above
that of another? When push comes to shove, what applies to one group
should also apply to the other. Furthermore, the French quite rightly
consider historic memory to be a basic human right, and thus denial of
historic events that incite or abet racism a violation of that right.

The positive human rights reforms that have occurred within Turkey
in recent years (discussion of the Armenian genocide in newspapers
and certain intellectual circles, the opening of a Kurdish-language
television station etc.) have been cosmetic at best: anti-semitism and
anti-Armenianism are in fact rampant in the land of the Moon and Stars,
and Islamic fundamentalism on the rise. And although Elif Shafak, the
noted Turkish novelist, and Armenian journalist Hrant Dink have been
acquitted of charges of "insulting Turkishness" under the nefarious
Article 301 of the Turkish criminal code, they have both been harassed
to a degree beyond the norms of any civilized country. Dink has now
been accused five times by the Turkish state, each time under the
same ludicrous law that smacks of the worst in state fascism. His
life has been threatened and he has become persona non grata almost
everywhere he goes – within Turkey where nationalists want his head,
as well as within the Armenian diaspora, where he is alternately
seen as an accommodationist or a traitor for his views on the issue
at hand and the Armenian genocide in general.

The problem, then, is not just that Turks deny the Armenian genocide
within Turkey, but that they have exported this denial to European
countries. To deny the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians, as well
as another 1.5 million Christian Pontic Greeks and Assyrians, is
malevolent and in and of itself a denial of Armenians’ basic human
dignity. France has every right to tell Turks: "You can spew your
venom in Turkey, but leave your denialism at home." The degree to
which France acknowledges its own colonialist past in Algeria is
beside the point, although one would hope that it does so as well.

Turkey has threatened to "retaliate" against the French by passing
laws about the "Algerian genocide," further polluting the historical
debate. Algeria may have been many things – colonialist, insulting,
invasive – and French dominion there may in fact have visited
wide-scale killings on a foreign population of differing religion and
language, but genocide it was not, according to accepted definitions.

Armenians endured the loss of lands, property and self-respect during
the Armenian genocide. From 1915 to 1923, they watched their men
slaughtered outright, and their children and women raped, tortured
and sent to their deaths in the most inhumane ways, including the
torching of sulfur caves and churches, where practitioners seeking
refuge were burned alive. Mass drownings in the Black Sea, hangings
and crucifixions were commonplace. Billions of dollars of goods,
property and lands were expropriated.

Unlike the Germans vis-Ë~F-vis the Jews, the Turks have not only
failed to apologize or compensate Armenians, but they continue
their vile campaign of denial, which they now export all over the
globe. As Elie Wiesel has accurately pointed out, denial is the last
stage of genocide and a symbolic re-enactment of the crime itself. In
this case, the French have said: Enough! You cannot kill the victims
again, at least not within our borders. It is disingenuous to suggest
that because of a French law, Turks will now have an added excuse to
continue what they have been doing for 90 years – i.e. finishing off
the complete annihilation of its native Christian populations. The
correct response from Turks should be shame and an acknowledgment that
yes indeed, these sad events took place, rather than the bombastic
nationalism that has kept the country on the margins of the civilized
world for the better part of the 20th and 21st centuries.

As Jacques Chirac rather pompously declared in his recent speech in
Yerevan: Vive la France! Vive L’ArmŽnie!

Christopher Atamian is a New York-based writer and journalist of
Lebanese origin who writes frequently on culture and politics for
the The New York Times, Gourmet, New York Press and more. He wrote
this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

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