The Jewish Week
09/21/2007

Turkey Must Acknowledge Its Past

Peter Balakian and Deborah Lipstadt

In the wake of the Turkish government’s anger over the Anti-Defamation
League’s recent decision to acknowledge as genocide the extermination
of more than a million Armenians in 1915, crucial issues concerning
human rights, historical memory, and ethics have come to light.

Turkey’s ambassador to Israel, Namik Tan, told The Jerusalem Post
(Aug. 27) that Israel must force the ADL to retract its
acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide, that failure to do this
would be a stab in the heart of the Turkish people and that the
Turkish people do not distinguish between Israeli Jews and Diaspora
Jews on this issue. Tan also said that recognizing the Armenian
genocide will mean that "my ancestors have done something
inconceivable," and it will set off "a campaign against Turkey and the
Turkish people." Though he subsequently tempered his language, this
was a very harsh attack with overtones of classic views of Jewish
power.

Turkey has told Israel and various Jewish organizations that if they
favor a congressional resolution acknowledging the genocide it will
not bode well for Israel’s relationship with Turkey or for Turkish
Jews. It is true that Turkey is the only Muslim nation willing to
maintain a close diplomatic relationship with Israel and remains the
only Muslim country that allows a small Jewish community to live in
relative freedom. We know that Turkey is pressured by internal
factions and by other Muslim nations to sever ties with Israel. And it
is also clear how fragile and tenuous, despite seeming quite
comfortable, Jewish life in Turkey is.

Nevertheless, it is equally crucial that historical denial of genocide
be addressed in an uncompromising fashion. While historians are taught
to be skeptical, it is absurd to be skeptical or neutral about events
of the magnitude of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, which are
attested to by reams of documents and material evidence as well as
testimonies by victims, perpetrators and bystanders. Neutrality or
skepticism in the case of these two tragedies constitutes denial,
which is the final stage of genocide in that it seeks to demonize the
victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.

The broad and international record on the Armenian genocide has been
created by an international body of dispassionate scholarship for
decades, and notably, affirmed by The International Association of
Genocide Scholars in repeated statements that note that this history
is not controversial anywhere in the world but in Turkey. Raphael
Lemkin, the noted legal scholar who lost 49 members of his family in
the Holocaust, invented the concept of genocide, in part, on the basis
of what happened to the Armenians in 1915.

The main actor here, however, is Turkey. It is time for Turkey to end
its nine-decade campaign to erase the Armenian genocide. It is time to
stop bullying and attempting to coerce states and organizations that
engage history honestly. Such a campaign is immoral.

By passing the resolution (H.R. 106) before it, Congress must make it
clear to Turkey that, even as we welcome its alliance with the United
States in so many arenas, the time for this denial is over.

Turkey’s calls for a commission of historians to resolve this issue
are disingenuous, especially for a country that has a law that makes
it a crime to "insult Turkishness," under which scholars and
publishers who have spoken about the Armenian genocide have been
prosecuted and even killed. It is wrong and unbecoming for the Jewish
community to participate in what can best be described as a charade,
i.e. the notion that the jury of historians is "still out" on this
issue. Imagine if Germany had taken a similar stance with the
Holocaust. While hindsight may be 20/20, it is regrettable that the
Jewish community telegraphed a message to Turkey that this is a matter
of debate and negotiation.

We understand Turkey’s difficulty in acknowledging these dark episodes
in its past. However, acknowledging this crime would, rather than
spawn a campaign against Turkey, as ambassador Tan claims, prompt
applause from the international community. It will be a sign that
Turkey can critique its past honestly. The most effective way for a
country to resolve its criminal past is to acknowledge the criminal
act, try to make some form of recompense and become a force in trying
to prevent the repetition of such events. Germany has, with varying
degrees of success, achieved that. It is time for Turkey to do the
same with the Armenian genocide. And it is time to stop threatening a
small vulnerable Jewish community or the one other parliamentary
democracy in the Middle East for acknowledging historical truth.

The time has come for the U.S. Congress to join more than 20 other
countries, the Vatican, the European Parliament and other world
organizations, in affirming the Armenian genocide. Given that H.R. 106
is a nonbinding resolution with no "teeth in it," the hysteria over
the resolution has reached a point of absurdity. It is time for Turkey
to acknowledge the moral perspective of other countries, and time to
move on.

Peter Balakian is professor of the humanities at Colgate University
and the author of "The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and
America’s Response," which won the Raphael Lemkin Prize. Deborah
Lipstadt is professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University and
author of "History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving," which
won the National Jewish Book Award.

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