ABETTING TURKISH DENIAL AT THE UNITED NATIONS
International Herald Tribune, France
April 13 2007
More than 90 years ago, when Turkey was still part of the Ottoman
Empire, Turkish nationalists launched an extermination campaign there
that killed 1.5 million Armenians.
It was the 20th century’s first genocide. The world noticed, but
did nothing, setting an example that surely emboldened such later
practitioners as Hitler, the Hutu leaders of Rwanda in 1994 and
today’s Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
Turkey has long tried to deny the Armenian genocide. Even in the
modern-day Turkish republic, which was not a party to the killings,
using the word genocide in reference to these events is prosecuted
as a serious crime.
Which makes it all the more disgraceful that United Nations officials
are bowing to Turkey’s demands and blocking this week’s scheduled
opening of an exhibit at UN headquarters commemorating the 13th
anniversary of the Rwandan genocide – because it mentions the mass
murder of the Armenians.
Ankara was offended by a sentence that explained how genocide came to
be recognized as a crime under international law: "Following World
War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey,
Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin urged the League of Nations to recognize
crimes of barbarity as international crimes." The exhibit’s organizer,
a British-based anti-genocide group, was willing to omit the words "in
Turkey." But that was not enough for the UN’s craven new leadership,
and the exhibit has been indefinitely postponed.
It’s odd that Turkey’s leaders have not figured out by now that every
time they try to censor discussion of the Armenian genocide, they
only bring wider attention to the subject and link today’s democratic
Turkey with the now distant crime. As for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon
and his inexperienced new leadership team, they have once again shown
how much they have to learn if they are to honorably and effectively
serve the United Nations, which is supposed to be the embodiment of
international law and a leading voice against genocide.