OWNING UP TO ITS HISTORY
By Edward Schumacher-Matos

Miami Herald, FL
Oct 16 2007

ISTANBUL — Self-righteousness feels good, but before Congress meddles
this week in the question of Armenian genocide in Turkey a century ago,
members should take a slow boat down the Bosporus.

More than just the stunning glories here of 1,500 years of Byzantine
and Ottoman empires — the massive domes of the Haga Sophia, the
soaring magic of the Blue Mosque, the splendor of Topkapi Palace —
members would see something more fundamental to mankind today.

They would see a muscular, dynamic Muslim country in the midst of an
extraordinary transition whose success is far from certain but will
influence the direction of the conflicted Muslim world.

They would see a country conflicted by its 84-year history of
authoritarian secular governments being led for the first time by
a Muslim party that, instead of imposing sharia, is writing a new
democratic constitution and negotiating to take the country into the
European Union, a technologically advanced country of skyscrapers,
malls and fashionable people, the women with or without head scarves.

They would see a country that has long been the only Muslim one in
NATO, a strategic crossroads of shipping and oil pipelines and a loyal
U.S. ally. Huge bases here are the staging point for U.S. supplies
into neighboring Iraq and — when the time comes — evacuation from it.

This also is a country complicated by its own Islamic fundamentalists,
a politically touchy military, nationalist opposition to the EU
demands and, biggest wild card of all, a separatist uprising.

Streak of anti-Americanism

Some 30,000 people have died fighting with ethnic Kurdish separatists
during the last 23 years. Thought to be largely resolved, the conflict
has flared again as terrorists raid from sanctuaries across the
border in Iraq’s Kurdish zone. Fifteen Turkish soldiers were killed
last week alone.

The attacks are stoking a streak of anti-Americanism here shared
right to left, secular and cleric. On top of anger for the Iraq
war making their neighborhood more violent, there is a widely held
belief that the United States is passive, if not complicit, in the
Kurdish raids. Unnamed Turkish military commanders grumble darkly
in the press that the United States, in supporting Iraq’s Kurds,
is arming the Turkish separatists.

Using the popular nickname for the ordinary Turkish soldier, a
banner raised by students last week at Istanbul University read,
"The murderer of Mehmetcik is America."

Now stepping blithely into this bubbling stew is the Democratic-led
U.S. Congress.

Last week the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution
branding as "genocide" the Turkish slaughter in World War I of what
most historians say was between 650,000 and 1.5 million Armenians.

Looking to please Armenian Americans and take a humanitarian high
road, a majority of the full House signed on as cosponsors. House
passage this week looks probable.

Most Turks are livid. "We’re fed up with the U.S.," wrote one columnist
in a typical reaction. Anti-American spite now puts Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a moderate Islamist, under even more pressure
to send troops into Iraq to chase the Kurdish separatists.

He plans to ask parliament this week for permission to do
so. U.S. commanders say they are powerless to stop the Turks. Iraqi
Kurds may retaliate, pitting our allies against each other and
worsening the Iraqi chaos.

So, are the Turks right about the Armenians? No. Most just don’t know
it, and the bill offends their identity.

The brunt of the slaughter took place between 1915 and 1917, when
the British were invading at Gallipoli in the west and the Russians
were attacking in the east with the aid of Armenian guerrillas. The
Ottoman Empire was in its last desperate gasps. An order to move
Armenians out of the eastern zone somehow — historians differ how —
degenerated into an extermination campaign of executions and forced
marches in the Syrian desert.

Modern Turkey was created from Ottoman remnants. The country’s leaders
have been single-minded in building a new national identity that
sets religious and ethnic differences aside. Part of that has been
a sugar-coating of the Armenian massacres in textbooks as smaller
and part of a civil war in which both sides suffered. A law making
it illegal "to insult the Turkish national identity" enforces the
now commonly believed version. Just last week, two editors of the
Turkish Armenian weekly, Agos, were found guilty of violating the
law for reprinting a genocide article.

U.S. interests first

Turkey will have to live up to its past and is slowly doing so. The
sentence of the two editors was suspended, a political consensus
agrees to abolish the law, the EU is forcing further opening, and
the government itself recently proposed an international commission
to open secret state archives and review the record.

The passion of Armenian Americans is understandable, but a wise
Congress would put fundamental U.S. interests first. Stopping genocide
is a duty. History, especially someone else’s, is usually best left to
historians. What if other governments passed bills on our treatment of
American Indians? Go back far enough and we all live in glass houses.

Edward Schumacher-Matos is a former editor and reporter with The New
York Times and Wall Street Journal. He writes an occasional ombudsman
column for The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald.

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