TURKEY’S ROLE IN ARMENIA RESONATES

Daily Press, VA
Oct 17 2007

It goes without saying that the House resolution condemning Turkey
for the "genocide" of Armenians in 1915 will serve no earthly purpose
and that it will, to say the least, complicate if not severely strain
U.S.-Turkey relations. It goes without saying, also, that the Turks
are extremely sensitive on the topic and since they are helpful in the
war in Iraq and a friend to Israel, that their feelings ought to be
taken into account. All of this is true, but I would feel a lot better
about killing this resolution if the argument wasn’t so much about
how we need Turkey and not at all about the truthfulness of the matter.

Of even that, I have some doubt. The congressional resolution
repeatedly employs the word genocide, a term used by many scholars.

But Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish emigre who coined the term in
1943, clearly had what the Nazis were doing to the Jews in mind. If
that is the standard — and it need not be — then what happened in the
collapsing Ottoman Empire in 1915 was something short of genocide. It
was plenty bad — maybe as many as 1.5 million Armenians perished,
many of them outright murdered — but not all Armenians everywhere in
what was then Turkey were as calamitously affected. The substantial
Armenian communities in Constantinople, Smyrna and Aleppo were largely
spared. No German city could make that statement about its Jews.

Still, by any name, what was done in 1915 is unforgivable and,
one hopes, unforgettable. Yet it was done by a government that no
longer exists — the so-called Sublime Porte of the Ottomans, with
its sultan, concubines, eunuchs and the rest. Even in 1915, it was
an anachronism, no longer able to administer its vast territory —
much of the Middle East and the Balkans. The empire was crumbling. The
so-called Sick Man of Europe was breathing its last. Its troops were
starving and both in Europe and the Middle East, indigenous peoples
were declaring their independence and rising in rebellion. Among
them were the Armenians, an ancient people who had been among the
very first to adopt Christianity. By the end of the 19th century,
they were engaged in guerrilla activity. By World War I, they were
aiding Turkey’s enemy, Russia. Within Turkey, Armenians were feared
as a fifth column.

So contemporary Turkey is entitled to insist that things are not so
simple. If you use the word genocide, it suggests the Holocaust —
and that is not what happened in the Ottoman Empire. But Turkey has
gone beyond mere quibbling with a word. It has taken issue with the
facts and in ways that cannot be condoned. Its most famous writer,
the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, was arrested in 2005
for acknowledging the mass killing of Armenians. The charges were
subsequently dropped and although Turkish law has been in some ways
modified, it nevertheless remains dangerous business for a Turk to
talk openly and candidly about what happened in 1915.

It just so happens that I am an admirer of Turkey. Its modern leaders,
beginning with the truly remarkable Ataturk, have done a Herculean
job of bringing the country from medievalism to modernity without,
it should be noted, the usual bloodbath. (The Russians, for instance,
never managed that feat.)

Furthermore, I can appreciate Turkey’s palpable desire to embrace
both modernity and Islam and to show that such a feat is not
oxymoronic. (Ironically, having a dose of genocide in your past —
the U.S. and the Indians, Germany and the Jews, etc. — is hardly not
"Western.") And I think, furthermore, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
should have spiked the House resolution in deference to Turkey’s
immense strategic importance to the United States. She’s the speaker
now, for crying out loud, and not just another House member.

But for too long the Turks have been accustomed to muscling the truth,
insisting either through threats or punishment that they and they alone
will write the history of what happened in 1915. They are continuing
along this path now, with much of official Ankara threatening this
or that — crossing into Iraqi Kurdistan, for instance — if the
House resolution is not killed. But, it may yet occur to someone
in the government that Turkey’s tantrums have turned an obscure —
nonbinding! — congressional resolution into yet another round of
tutorials on the Armenian tragedy of 1915. Call it genocide or call it
something else, but there is only one thing to call Turkey’s insistence
that it and its power will determine the truth: unacceptable.

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