The American Chronicle
July 16, 2007
Are the Turks Confessing from Conviction or from Convenience?
Rauf Naqishbendi

>From denial to admission, suppression to confession, innocence to guilt –
the Turks are pressured to confront their past and to finally acknowledge
their commission of genocide against the defenseless Assyrians and
Armenians.
But the purpose of admitting past mistakes is typically to disconnect with
past behavior, come clean of moral indecencies, wholeheartedly join
humanity, and through good deeds and actions console the pain of the
victims. When the Turks truly bear the responsibilities of the genocide they
committed, then they should be credited for their courage and humility.
However, the truth is that their coming forward now and confessing past
crimes is merely a requirement for EU membership, not spurred by a heartfelt
desire to change. Furthermore, this acknowledgement of genocide and the
supposed repentance of the Turks are nullified by their continued and
conspicuous human rights abuses against the Kurds today.
Since the genocide, the Turks have made a concerted effort to exonerate
themselves through a campaign of misinformation and heavy propaganda. They
have tried to shift the guilty verdict to the Armenians, telling the world
it was the Armenians who betrayed the Turks, sided with their war enemies,
and killed thousands of innocent people. But the facts speak for themselves,
showing that the Armenian genocide was a protracted process that went on for
almost two decades.
First between 1884 to 1896, Sultan Abdul-Hamid II massacred up to 30,000
civilians and left tens of thousand of others destitute. In 1908, a group of
Turkish extreme nationalists, called Young Turks, designed to save what was
left of the collapsed Ottoman Empire. Less than a year after they took
control, they committed a large-scale massacre against Armenians and
Assyrian Christians.
As the Ottoman Empire started to crumble, the Turks made a last-ditch effort
to pursue a pan-Turkish state that would stretch to central Asia. Since they
wanted a purely Islamic Pan-Turkish state, they were convinced that the
final impediment to their objectives was the existence of the Christian
minorities.
In 1915, the Turks initiated an organized and systematic genocide against
Armenians and Christian minorities, killing 1.5 million people. They started
with killing Turkish intellectuals in Istanbul and other major cities to rob
Armenians of their leadership. Then they asked the Armenians to hand over
their hunting rifles as a contribution to the war against the Russians
during World War I. As the Armenians turned over their weapons, the Turks
used the numbers of weapons confiscated as proof that the Armenians had been
planning a revolt. Once this proof was established, the Armenian villages
and towns were obliterated, their churches flattened, and many innocent
Armenians executed. The Turks killed them in groups or individually, in
public or in remote locations, whichever was most expedient, using every
tool and resource in their disposal to annihilate the Christian minority in
Turkey.
A massive group of Armenians was rounded up for deportation, their final
destination being the Syrian Desert, Der Zor. Most of the deportees died
from hunger and starvation. Females over the age of ten were raped and many
were seized from their families and taken as slave brides. Few of the
victims were able to escape the desert and tell their stories to a silent
and deaf world.
Half a century after this ferocious crime, the Turks continued to pursue the
destruction of everything and anything associated with the Armenians, so
that no evidence would be left behind for Armenians to claim as proof of the
genocide. Per David Holford, "as the curator of the Armenian Museum in
Jerusalem told William Dalrymple, ‘Soon there will be no evidence that the
Armenians were ever in Turkey. We will have become a historical myth.’"
The EU is to be praised for setting high standards for Turkish membership in
this economic and political union. For contrast, consider that the United
States has made a mockery of freedom and liberty by fueling the vicious
regime of Turkey for near half a century. It never occurred to the US to
attach human rights strings to their enormous aid to such a repressive
regime. In February of 1990, a commemorative resolution was introduced to
both houses of representatives in the US to acknowledge the Armenian
genocide. The state department feared the passage of such a resolution might
harm US-Turkey relations, thus the resolution never received enough votes to
pass.
During the time of genocide, Ambassador Morgenthau pleaded with the American
State Department to intervene in any way possible, but the response he got
was "we just don’t know what is going on." The Turks are not the only ones
who need to offer remorse for the genocide they committed. What about the
silent world that made no difference, particularly the United States and
United Kingdom, who both were aware of this horror? The fact that they did
nothing to stop these atrocities from continuing can only mean that they
were willing participants in them, however silently they looked on.
It’s admirable to see the Turks come to terms with their past crimes against
humanity, but they shouldn’t be allowed to stop there. They also need to
address their present human rights abuse practices against the Kurds in
Turkey, a minority that, until recently, had been deprived of the most basic
of human rights, including speaking their mother tongue. Since the rise of
Turkish nationalism after the collapse of Ottoman Empire, the Kurds have
been the subject of Turkish brutalities. Since the 1980’s, more than 5,000
Kurdish villages across Turkey’s border with Syria and Iraq have been
demolished and their inhabitants forced to relocate elsewhere in Turkey.
Moreover, tens of
thousands of Kurds have been jailed and subjected to the most inhumane
torture for no other reason than being Kurds. These are the kinds of
brutalities practiced in today’s Turkey.
Turks need to face their current human rights abuses before turning the page
on their past atrocities against humanity. Coming to terms with past
evil-doing requires decency in one’s present actions and a sense of remorse
that originates from the heart rather than from external forces. The latter
circumstance indicates a degree of convenient self-interest, nothing more
than lip service and pretense, and therefore should not be taken seriously.
What is even more absurd is that the Turks continue to proclaim their
innocence of genocide, and want the world to see them as the victims of an
unfair EU, who is forcing them to confess a crime they never committed. If
and when they ever do acknowledge their hand in Armenian atrocities, what
will that really mean?