THE SPECTRE THAT HAUNTS TURKEY
Buzzle, CA
Oct 12 2007
"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
said Adolf Hitler, before ordering storm troopers to kill men,
women and children in Poland so Germany could have Lebensraum, or
living space.
Hitler was wrong about the killings of Armenians as about so many
things.
The death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians between 1915 and
1917 after the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the emergence
of modern Turkey in 1923 has not been forgotten and now bedevils
US-Turkey relations.
Turkey has condemned a vote by the House of Representatives foreign
affairs committee yesterday that recognizes the massacres as genocide –
the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious or
national group.
Turkish governments have consistently denied the accusation; they
say the killings occurred at a time of civil unrest as the Ottoman
empire fell apart and that the numbers are inflated.
To say that claims of Armenian genocide touch a raw nerve in Turkey
is an understatement.
When the French parliament decreed last year that criminal charges
be filed against anyone who denied genocide was committed against the
Armenians, Turkey cut off military contacts with France and canceled
some contracts.
In January, Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist, was shot dead
outside his newspaper, Agos, after he called the killing of Armenians
genocide. More than 100,000 people marched at his funeral procession,
chanting: "We are all Armenians."
Yet, although an outspoken critic of Turkey’s denial that the events
of 1915 amounted to genocide, Dink was equally opposed to international
attempts to politicize the issue.
When the French parliament made denying the Armenian genocide a crime,
he vowed to travel there to deny it.
Orhan Pamuk, the winner of last year’s Nobel prize for literature, was
hauled before an Istanbul court in 2005 for "belittling Turkishness"
– a criminal offense – by raising the issue of genocide.
Pamuk was taken to court after telling a Swiss newspaper that the
massacres of more than one million Armenians and of more than 30,000
Kurds in Turkey [in the 1990s] were taboo topics in his country.
The trial in Istanbul turned ugly, with a mob of baying nationalists
scuffling with the writer’s supporters as riot police looked on.
Pamuk was acquitted on a technicality, but the case damaged Turkey’s
efforts to project itself as an increasingly liberal country seeking
to join the EU.
The notorious article of the penal code remains.
Turkey’s harsh reaction to those who dare to break political taboos by
wanting to discuss the Armenian genocide comes despite the fact that
22 countries and organizations, such as the Elie Wiesel Foundation
for Humanity, recognize it as such.
The mass killings of Armenians, one of the largest minorities in the
Ottoman empire, followed Turkey’s disastrous military campaign against
the Russians in the Caucasus in 1914 after Ankara sided with Germany.
The Turks blamed the defeat on the Armenians living in the region
siding with the Russians.
In 1915 Armenian intellectuals were rounded up and laws were passed
authorizing the deportation of Armenians and the confiscation of
their homes and property.
Over the next two years the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey
was uprooted and expelled to the desert regions of Mesopotamia.
In the process between 500,000 and a million Armenians were killed
or died of exposure or disease.
President Theodore Roosevelt would later call the episode "the greatest
crime of the war".
Turkey’s official position is that deaths occurred during the
"relocation" or "deportation" and cannot be called "genocide".