TURKEY AND US COLLIDE OVER GENOCIDE

First Post, UK
Oct 11 2007

Ankara threatens Iraq campaign as Congress debates Armenian genocide,
says Robert Fox

Few subjects set off explosions of national rage in Turkey like
the fate of one and a half million Armenians in the darkest days of
the First World War. Armenians say they were victims of the first
mass genocide of the 20th century. Driven from their homes in eastern
Anatolia, only a few hundred thousand made it to Syria and Mesopotamia,
today’s Iraq.

Turks, while acknowledging that many Armenians died in 1915-17,
have always denied the genocide, despite widely reported evidence of
massacres (right).

The issue has just burst into a major international row – and possibly
worse – between Turkey and its Nato ally, the United States, because
Congress has tabled a bill demanding that Turkey officially recognise
the fact of the genocide.

Turkey’s newly elected president, Abdullah Gul, is threatening
‘serious consequences’ – including cancelling arms deals and closing
the air base at Incirlik, vital to US military manoeuvres in northern
Iraq. This comes on top of Turkey’s ongoing threat to invade Kurdish
Iraq to sort out PKK terrorists.

Ankara has gone some way to admit that Armenians, once one of the
two favoured Christian minorities, the milyets, under the Ottoman
Empire, died as the Russians advanced. They perished of starvation
and thirst. But the government in Istanbul had accused the Armenian
nationalists of forming guerrilla groups to aid the Russians.

However, many eyewitnesses – including Gertrude Bell, the English
Arabist who helped set up modern Iraq – reported Armenian prisoners
and refugees being butchered.

Armenians are one of the most successful exile groups in the world
today, with a powerful presence in California, Europe, Lebanon,
Jerusalem and now with their own state of Armenia in the Caucasus.

An attempt to vandalise the Wikipedia entry on the Armenian massacres
gives clear evidence of the institutionalised Turkish resentment.