Rabble.ca, Canada
Jan 26 2007

Conservatives modify position on Turkey

Turkey’s state policy of denial continues to serve as a daily affront
to all Armenians.

>by Anthony Wing
January 26, 2007

Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay recently modified the Canadian
government’s official acknowledgement of the 1915 Armenian genocide
with a statement of support for the government of Turkey’s proposal
to establish a joint commission with Armenia to investigate the
events of that period.

This apparent gesture of goodwill towards conflict resolution between
neighbour states admits of an astonishing naiveté that may
effectively kill the government’s acknowledgement resolution first
passed in 2004 by the Liberal government and briefly reaffirmed by
the ruling Conservatives.

Even a cursory glance behind Turkey’s proposal should have been
enough to stay the Minister’s hand: the government of Turkey, after
denying for decades historical responsibility for the organized and
bureaucratic extermination of an unarmed Christian Armenian minority
by Ottoman Turks (which in recent years featured arrests and show
trials for writers mentioning the genocide, including current Nobel
laureate Orhan Pamuk), first floated the joint-commission idea in
2005.

However, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)
quickly revealed that this gesture amounted to a further act of
aggression: Turkish authorities had sought the help of U.S. scholars
to obfuscate the historical record and, the IAGS argued, this
spurious scholarship would be used to sabotage such a panel. The IAGS
expressed this in a June 2005 letter to the Turkish Government,
re-sent nearly a year later:

We are dismayed that your government, in asking the Armenian
government to establish a so-called objective commission to study the
fate of the Armenian people in 1915, is refusing to acknowledge the
resolved discourse on the Armenian Genocide in the mainstream
international scholarly community outside of Turkey. We are concerned
that your request is a political ploy designed to create controversy
over the Armenian Genocide when in fact, outside of your government,
there is none.

Also not open to debate is the government of Turkey’s transparent
record of human rights abuse. Eager to speed negotiations for terms
of accession into the European Union, Turkey officially abolished the
death penalty and state torture in a new Penal Code adopted in 2004;
however, Amnesty International has since reported that torture and
extrajudicial executions have persisted outside official detention
centres, largely unchecked by a feeble investigation process.

Moreover, persecution of the Kurdish minority in the southeast has
not abated, and the 32-year control of an impoverished military
colony in the northern third of Cyprus bestows on Ankara the title of
sole occupying power in mainland Europe since 1945; indeed, the EU
recently suspended membership negotiations over Turkey’s latest
paltry concessions over the latter issue.

Here at home, the Harper government’s decision to modify their
Armenian genocide acknowledgement was criticized by columnist Jeffrey
Simpson, but for a different reason: The Globe and Mail’s sophist
emeritus disagreed with the acknowledgement in the first place. For
some time The New York Times had a policy that the term `Armenian
genocide’ could be used freely and without qualification; not so the
Globe’s editorial board, which twice recently allowed Simpson to
place quotation marks around the word `genocide’ when writing of the
event.

Moreover in a recent Globe online Q&A, Simpson appeared to argue
simultaneously that 1) the events of 1915 are a matter for genuine
debate and 2) Canada should ignore 1). But in the case of 1), I am in
agreement with Simpson, albeit on very different terms:

Rafael Lemkin, international law professor and U.S. War Department
adviser during WWII, coined the term `genocide,’ later furnishing a
definition in his 1944 work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. His
proposal that the neologism enter language as a violation of
international law was adopted by jurists at the Nuremberg trials and
thereafter by the United Nations General Assembly. Appearing on U.S.
national television in 1949, Lemkin was the first to call what
happened to the Armenians `genocide.’ Earlier he had elaborated on
components of the term in an address to the Geneva Conventions:

The objectives of a [genocidal] plan would be the disintegration of
the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national
feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups,
and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health,
dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such
groups.

Applying this calculus today, Turkey’s state policy of denial
continues to serve as a daily affront to all Armenians. Could it not
therefore be put that zero acknowledgement of historical
responsibility will postpone indefinitely the reconciliation and
healing process for the affected group, thus perpetuating several of
the articles of genocide as defined in the Geneva Conventions? This
may well be the matter for genuine debate, not the `question’ of
whether the massacres occurred at all.

As for Canada, there is absolutely no place for credulity as we begin
to emerge as a world leader in 21st century international
jurisprudence. The United States government sponsored and encouraged
Rafael Lemkin’s efforts to entrench genocide into international law,
yet in 1994 the U.S. proxy at the United Nations helped block a
resolution to assist the UN Rwanda mission on the eve of the 100-day
genocide of close to one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

This avoidable event may have occasioned the demise of peacekeeping,
and after an intervening period of UN confusion and indecision it was
Canada who seized the initiative with their support of the
`Responsibility To Protect’ commission. The latter’s 2001 report
provided a template for the policy behind Canada’s current Afghan
deployment, but if our leaders still hope to maintain a conscientious
world leadership in foreign policy, missteps of this magnitude must
be addressed.

The world’s failure to remember the Armenian genocide was an
inspiration for both Adolf Hitler, who borrowed its techniques of
cattle-car transport and pit-burial for the Final Solution, and
Rafael Lemkin, who made an indivisible contribution to human rights,
international law and language in the wake of the Holocaust. If the
Canadian government supports the formation of a joint commission to
look into `genocide allegations,’ then we should immediately appoint
a committee to investigate whether the 1922 discovery of insulin has
really been of any help to diabetics.

The Foreign Affairs Minister must interrupt his human rights
posturing with China to condemn forthwith Turkey’s latest attempt to
avert the world’s gaze from the 20th century’s first genocide.

Anthony Wing is a Toronto writer.

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