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.

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