The Guardian, UK
Oct 12 2007

Making difficult situations worse

Leader
Friday October 12, 2007
The Guardian

Outside Turkey there is a broad consensus that the massacre and
forced deportations of more than a million Armenians in the latter
years of the Ottoman empire were nothing less than genocide. Last
year France voted to make it a crime to deny that, and on Wednesday a
US congressional panel approved a bill describing the massacres as
genocide. But the country where this debate matters most is Turkey –
and officially it continues to claim that as many Turks as Armenians
died in the civil unrest of the crumbling empire. The real test of
the vote by the US house committee on foreign affairs is whether or
not a Turkish reassessment of the events of 1917 is likely to happen.

The issue is not just a lightning rod for nationalists, but a litmus
test for the human-rights agenda on which EU entry talks depend. The
Nobel prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted under article
301, a law that makes insulting the republic punishable by up to
three years in prison. He had said in an interview with a Swiss
newspaper that the Armenian massacres and the killings of over 30,000
Kurds in the 1990s were taboo topics in Turkey. A Turkish-Armenian
journalist, Hrant Dink, was shot dead outside his newspaper in
January for saying the killings were genocide; he had been prosecuted
under article 301, and yesterday his son Aram received a suspended
sentence under the same law. The US vote is unlikely to make it
easier for Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, to amend article 301, as
he would wish; in fact it will reinforce nationalist support for it.
The tangled web of cause and effect does not stop there. Turkey has
yet to respond to attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) which
have killed 15 soldiers and 12 civilians in the past 10 days. There
are about 3,000 PKK guerrillas, many operating from camps in the
Qandil mountains in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, and the US is
desperate to stop a Turkish incursion. Ankara says that if neither
the leadership in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq nor the US is able
to curb the PKK, its troops will. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, succumbed this week to months of pressure from the army
chief of staff, agreeing that cross-border raids may have to happen.
Should they do so, the stability of the only area of Iraq untouched
by civil war would be under threat.

Mr Erdogan is a moderate on the Armenian and Kurdish questions, but
he knows that Turkish support for US regional policy is a house of
cards waiting to collapse. The US Democrats may hope to pick up easy
votes from the Armenian diaspora for their own election battles in
2008. But they should bear in mind that more than just domestic
politics are at stake: another country’s people is looking on.