PanARMENIAN.Net
EU membership inconceivable while Turkey refuses to
face up to mass murders of Armenians
26.01.2007 17:51 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The impasse in Turkey’s EU accession talks has
whipped up xenophobia. Brussels says that despite major reforms to
entrench human, democratic and minority rights, Ankara has not done
enough to protect freedom of expression or subordinate the army to
civilian control, reports The Financial Times. Turkey’s neo-Islamist
government says the Europeans are acting in bad faith, raising the bar
to entry ever higher to pander to anti-Muslim prejudice, particularly
in France, Germany and Austria. Both are right. But there are,
nevertheless, rightly unalterable membership criteria. No country with
a penal code that makes it a crime to "denigrate Turkishness" (Article
301) will meet them. European membership is also inconceivable while
Turkey refuses to face up to the mass murders of Armenians as the
Ottoman Empire crumbled during the First World War.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister, has called for reputable
historians to establish the truth, confident this would place the
killings within a conflict in which millions of Turks also perished as
western powers dismembered Ottoman territory. Yet for generations
there has been nothing but silence or denial. Rare conferences to
discuss these terrible events have been cancelled after pressure from
the army-dominated nationalist establishment. Turkey closed its
borders with Armenia in 1993.
Critically, nationalist cabals have used Article 301 to silence
writers and intellectuals who have dared to raise the Armenian tragedy
and ask whether it was centrally directed genocide. Mr Dink himself
was given a suspended jail sentence and Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel
prize-winning novelist was also dragged to court (where yesterday he
was publicly threatened by a well-known extremist who prosecutors say
provided the gun that killed Mr Dink). Mr Erdogan has reacted forcibly
to Hrant Dink’s murder and made gestures of reconciliation towards the
Armenians. It is unrealistic to expect more ahead of fiercely
contested elections this year. But Turkey must demonstrate its
commitment to free speech by repealing Article 301, not only a
mechanism for exacerbating ultranationalism but evidently an
incitement to murder too. Once the elections are over, Turks and
Armenians need to move towards a public reckoning with history, the
newspaper says.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
