ARMENIAN ACTIVISTS WIN ONE MORE BATTLE IN THE WAR TO ISOLATE TURKEY
By Gwynne Dyer
New Zealand Herald
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Oct 15 2007
New Zealand
Nothing much will happen right away. The Turkish Ambassador to
Washington has gone home for "consultations" after the Foreign Affairs
Committee of the House of Representatives approved a bill declaring
that the mass killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World
War I was a genocide.
But he will come back to Washington, and it will be weeks before the
full House passes the bill. This will be a slow-motion disaster.
The White House tried hard to stop this bill. President George W. Bush
declared that "this resolution is not the right response to these
historic mass killings". All eight living former US Secretaries of
State, Democratic and Republican, signed a joint letter to the Foreign
Affairs Committee urging it not to approve the bill.
But it did, by a 27-21 vote, and next month the full House will do
the same: more than half the members have signed up as co-sponsors
of the bill.
Bush promises that it will die in the Senate but by then the damage
will be done. The US-Turkish alliance will be gravely damaged and
American use of Turkey as a major supply line for its troops in Iraq
– 70 per cent of US air cargo for Iraq goes through Turkey – will be
at an end.
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Advertisement"I can assure you that Turkey knows how to play
hardball," Egeman Bagis, an adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyib Erdogan, told reporters in Washington. Turkey may also send
its troops into northern (Kurdish) Iraq, destabilising the one stable
and fairly prosperous part of that country.
The United States will be the 23rd country to fall to the Armenian
campaign to link the Ottoman Turkey of 90 years ago with the Nazi
Germany of 60 years ago – and, by extension, to implicate the current
Republic of Turkey in the crime of premeditated genocide.
Once such a law is passed, to question the Armenian take on what
happened is to become the equivalent of a denier of the (Jewish)
Holocaust. The Armenian desire to have their national tragedy given
the same status as the Jewish Holocaust is understandable but it
is mistaken.
The facts are horrifying, and certainly justify calling the events in
eastern Turkey in 1915-16 a genocide, but the key elements of prior
intent and systematic planning that distinguish the Nazi Holocaust
are absent.
When I was a graduate student in Middle Eastern history, as a
translation exercise I was given the hand-written diary of a Turkish
soldier who was killed during the retreat from Baghdad in 1917.
Mehmet Cavus (Sergeant Mehmet) was a youthful school teacher who had
been called up in 1914.
At first he had a safe billet guarding the Black Sea entrance to the
Bosphorus but in 1915 his unit was suddenly ordered to march east to
deal with a Russian invasion and an Armenian rebellion.
And then, in the diary of this pleasant, rather naive young man,
I read the phrase "iyi katliam etmistik". Loosely translated, that
means: "We really massacred them".
I asked my teacher if it really said what I thought it did. "Oh yes,"
he said. "Those were different times."
That excuses nothing but it explains much. The foolish young officers
who led the Ottoman Empire into the war panicked when they realised
that the Russians were invading from the east and the British were
about to land somewhere on the Mediterranean coast.
At that point, Armenian revolutionaries (Dashnaks and Hnchaks), who
had been plotting with the Russians and the British to carve out an
Armenian state from the wreckage of the empire, launched feeble, futile
revolts to assist the invaders. The Turks responded by slaughtering
many Armenians in what is now eastern Turkey. At least 600,000 died,
and perhaps as many as 1.5 million. It was certainly a genocide but
it was not premeditated nor was it systematic.
Armenians living in other parts of the empire were largely left alone.
So why is the US Congress "recognising" the Armenian genocide but
not the more recent genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda? Because there
are not many voters of Tutsi descent in key Congressional districts.
This is all about domestic politics. Today’s Armenian activists aren’t
looking for "justice". They want to drive the Turks into extreme
reactions that will isolate them and derail the domestic changes that
are turning that country into a modern, tolerant democracy.
They do not want Turkey to succeed. And Western countries are falling
for it.