Washington Times, DC
Oct 14 2007

Turkey haunted by Ottoman deed of a century ago

By Andrew Borowiec
October 14, 2007

NICOSIA, Cyprus – "The men were usually led away and shot down just
outside their villages. A far worse fate awaited the women and
children: they were forced to walk southwards in huge convoys to the
burning deserts of northern Syria. Few survived the privations of
these terrible death marches."

Such descriptions of the plight of Turkey’s Armenians during World
War I by the respected London-based Minority Rights Group are banned
in Turkey as an insult to "Turkishness."

Turkish writers and journalists have been sentenced to jail for
publishing foreign versions of the deaths of some 1.5 million
Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.

The rare authorized versions of the Armenian episode by the Turkish
republic, which replaced the Ottomans, claimed the figures quoted in
the West are exaggerated, that Turkish Armenians sympathized and
collaborated with Russia, then at war with Turkey, and had to be
removed far from the areas where they could damage the war effort.

Besides, today’s Turkish republic, a candidate for membership in the
European Union, is not responsible for acts committed by the Ottoman
regime, Turkish officials say.

With the U.S. House of Representatives poised to vote on a resolution
branding the deaths of Armenians as genocide, Washington’s relations
with Turkey have hit a new low. The stakes involve a host of issues
including U.S. use of Turkish bases for supplying Iraq, Turkey’s role
as a trusted ally, the future of Turkish democracy and its threats to
pursue Kurdish rebels on Iraqi territory.

Meanwhile, the dominant question in the Turkish press is: Why now?
Why are countries such as France and the United States so preoccupied
with events almost 100 years old as if there were no other problems
in the world?

Writing in Zaman newspaper, Sahin Alpay, a liberal Turkish academic,
warned: "The more foreign governments insist that our forebears
committed crimes against humanity, the less likely anybody in Turkey
is to face up to the hardest moments in history."

There has never been any question of repentance on the part of Turkey
similar to modern Germany’s atonement for Nazi crimes. And countries
such as France, which penalize those who deny the Armenian deaths
were genocide, have seen their relations with Turkey curtailed.

The European Union has been pressing Turkey to abolish the
contentious Article 301 in the current constitution on offenses to
Turkishness as incompatible with freedom of expression in a
democracy. Senior Turkish officials have promised to address the
problem in a new constitution, which is being drafted.

However, according to Bruce Clark, a British specialist on Turkey,
"things have been moving in the opposite direction."

He said the revised Turkish penal code and its preamble, adopted in
2005 "make even more explicit the principle that people may be
prosecuted if they insult Turkishness."

ticle/20071014/FOREIGN/110140030/1003

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress