Daily Star – Lebanon
Jan 23 2007
The Turkish curse after a death in Istanbul
By Hugh Pope
Commentary by
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Is there a curse hanging over Turkey? Each time the country achieves
sustained development, something trips it up. This time it is the
assassination on Friday of Hrant Dink, a newspaper editor, peacemaker
and one of Turkey’s most prominent Armenians. Turkey is trying to
rise to the challenge. Denunciations of the murder fill the airwaves,
from the government to Islamic leaders to the army. Thousands of
Turks marched through the streets hours after the shooting, shouting:
"We are all Armenians, we are all Hrant Dink."
Turkey’s credibility as a future European Union member state is at
stake. A man who confesses to pulling the trigger has been caught –
a nationalist, by all accounts – but no murkiness must remain about
the people and the thinking behind the killing. Hrant Dink was not just
left unprotected by the police. Bad laws, malevolent prosecutions and
a growing nationalist hysteria created the lynch-mob atmosphere that
transformed the sweet-mannered Dink into a public enemy number one.
What killed Dink, in short, is the Turkish Republic’s inability
to deal with the Armenian issue – the charge that its predecessor
state, the Ottoman Empire, killed 1.5 million Armenian men, women
and children in a 1915 genocide. Official Turkey is still stuck in
a rut of denial. Efforts to open archives and to "leave it to the
historians" lead into dead ends, partly because of intransigence in
the Armenian diaspora, but also partly because of Turkey’s anti-free
speech laws – still extant in the form of Penal Code Article 301,
with its catch-all penalties for "denigrating Turkishness."
Discussing the great omissions in Turkey’s public education remains
taboo. Even as moderate a politician as Foreign Minister Abdullah
Gul angrily rejects that there is any room for a Turkish apology.
That’s because the Turks have reasons to feel victimized themselves.
Christian powers don’t apologize much for the ethnic cleansing
carried out during the century until 1923, during which years they
rolled back the borders of the Ottoman Empire. American historian
Justin McCarthy estimates 5 million Muslims were killed. In 1915,
World War I was raging. Turkey was again under attack from Russia in
the east and Britain and France in the west. The Armenian leadership
openly sided with Turkey’s enemies, forming anti-Ottoman militias
and demanding a state on Ottoman land.
Turkey also fears that an apology would trigger claims on its land
or on seized Armenian assets. Turks cannot believe the sincerity of
foreign parliaments who, usually ill-informed about the Turkish case,
give in to Armenian diaspora lobbying for genocide declarations. One
such bill looks more likely than ever to pass the US Congress in
April. Politics often seems to trump history. Would the French
Parliament have made it a crime last year to deny the Armenian
genocide if an unrelated desire to keep Turkey out of the EU had not
been prevalent?
Some maximal views of Turkish evil by Armenians were even criticized
by Hrant Dink. He once wrote that diaspora Armenians should spend
their energy supporting independent Armenia and not "let hatred of
the Turks poison their blood."
But Turkey has an attitude problem, too. Idiotically, it was the
newspaper column mentioned above by Dink that caused him to be put on
trial for violating Article 301, on the pretext that he had said that
Turks were "poisonous." Why is it that, of all the Turkish authors
charged with Article 301 offenses, only Dink actually received a
jail sentence (six months, suspended)? Three years ago, Dink says he
was told "something will happen to you if you continue" by officials
working for the same Istanbul governor who now smugly suggests the
police win a prize for their swift apprehension of the assassin. (The
governor’s office denies making any threat).
Commentators are subtly shirking responsibility by labeling the murder
a "provocation" or blaming "outside forces." Many expressed pain
since Armenians were a "trust" under Turkey’s protection. It took
one of Prime Minister Reccep Tayyip Erdogan’s advisers, Omer Celik,
to point out that they were not guests and "were as much owners of
this country as Turks are."
Neither Turks not Armenians should go on like this. Erdogan – whose
government was the first to grant Dink’s simple request for a Turkish
passport – could try a grand gesture. The prime minister might open the
border with Armenia, closed since the early 1990s. He could advocate
an international conference, where Turkey could argue its case that
there was no centralized attempt to wipe out the Armenian race. After
all, Turkey already officially accepts that 300,000 died.
Recent years have also seen brave Turkish novels, films, exhibitions
and academic conferences that addressed the gaping loss to Turkish
society represented by the Armenian disappearance. Best of all,
Erdogan could abolish Article 301, which made all intellectuals like
Dink a target. What debate can there be if Turkey drags anyone who
deviates from the official line into court?
None of this, however, is likely to happen. Turkey has presidential
and parliamentary elections this year, and ultra-nationalists pose
the main challenge to Erdogan’s centrist, pro-Islamic Justice and
Development Party. Europe – whose support is critical in making a
Turkish regime feel safe to reform – seems in no mood to extend lines
of political credit to Turkey.
So the gap between Turkey and Europe will widen again. Muddled thinking
and inward-looking nationalism will continue to plague Turkey, and
not only in its approach to the Armenian problem. After all, Dink’s
murder is the symptom of negative currents that persist, not their
cause. And that, of course, is why Turkey’s curse keeps returning to
strike with such tragic ease.
Hugh Pope is an Istanbul-based journalist. His latest book is "Sons
of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World" (Overlook Duckworth
2005). This commentary was written for THE DAILY STAR.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
