The Armenians’ late revenge

Kathimerini
October 15, 2007

By Nikos Konstandaras

The outrage with which the Turks greeted a US congressional committee
resolution last Wednesday to recognize the Armenian genocide indicates
the vital importance of the issue.

The greatest problems that Turkey is facing today are the increasing
pressure from abroad to acknowledge the Armenian genocide of 1915, the
Kurdish guerrilla war, the relationship between the state and religion
and between the state and the military, relations with the United
States and the European Union and relations with Turkey’s neighbors.
In this last issue, there is a section devoted to Greece and Cyprus (a
sobering detail for those Greeks who are obsessed with Turkey’s
behavior).

All nations have a hard time dealing with the revision of their
history, with a change in how they see themselves. We experienced this
recently in Greece with the tumult provoked by the stillborn effort to
provide sixth-grade school pupils with a history textbook that played
down the sense of victimhood that constitutes a large part of our
common identity.

The national identity is forged by the clashes and cohabitation with
neighboring nations and by domestic dynamics.

Consider, then, what forces come to the fore when a nation is pressed
>From abroad to acknowledge that its forefathers were the merciless
killers of other people. For the Turks, the history of their modern
state begins with Kemal Ataturk’s victory over the Greeks and the
establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. They see the years
before this as a long, heroic march in which their nation was born out
of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, beat back various foreign enemies
and set course for accession into the Western world.

The Armenian question is a bomb deep in the heart of this foundation myth.

The Turkish authorities claim that the slaughter of 1915, in which 1.5
million Armenians are believed to have been massacred, was no more
than an unfortunate consequence of a turbulent time. They add that
there were victims on both sides. The Armenians, of course, and the
archives of many countries, have the documents to prove that this was
part of an organized Turkish effort to «cleanse» the country of
Armenians. The German historian Ulrich Trumpener notes a dispatch that
the ambassador of Germany (a Turkish ally at the time) sent to his
chancellor in July 1915 declaring that there was no doubt that the
Turks were trying to «exterminate the Armenian race in the Turkish
empire.» Ambassador Hans von Wangenheim and other foreign officials
tried to stop the Turks from continuing the slaughter, but in vain.
(«Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914-1918,» cited in David Fromkin’s
«A Peace to End All Peace.»)

In the Turks’ favor at the time was the fact that despite the
countless eyewitness accounts, the global slaughter of World War I
obscured the horrendous events in Anatolia. But the Turks finally fell
victim to their own successes: The Armenian presence was eliminated
>From the nation’s ancestral homeland and the survivors of the genocide
scattered across the world. Many took root in the great democracies of
the United States, Canada, France, Australia and so on. As their
living standards rose, they and their children gained increasing
political leverage in their new homelands and were thus able to press
with increasing stridency for the genocide of their people to be
acknowledged. Today this demand is at the core of the Armenian
identity, along with the wounds of the slaughter.

The Turks, who seem never to have fully compromised with their
neighbors and former subjects, now have to face demands from abroad
that they change the way they see themselves. Today’s Turks have
nothing to do with the events of nearly a century ago, but the sins of
their forefathers and their fathers’ denial of events have brought
about a most painful collision between the Turks’ past and their
future.

Among the many unsolved problems that Turkey faces, at a time when its
troops are massing on the border to fight the Kurds in Iraq, the
Armenian issue could become the greatest obstacle the country has to
face in its long march Westward. The Turks, like everyone else, have
no option but to try reconcile themselves with their past as it is and
not as they would like it to be.

Hìåñïìçí&# xDF;á : 15-10-07

Source: mns_2248559_15/10/2007_88943