AN UGLY TRUTH
by Jay Tolson

U.S. News & World Report
October 29, 2007 Monday

HIGHLIGHT: The challenges of confronting the Armenian genocide

Call it a tragic episode, a massacre, even a crime against humanity.

But don’t–at least officially–call the death and forced displacement
of up to 1.5 million Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire a
genocide. That is what the government of Turkey has long insisted,
though seldom more strenuously than in the wake of the most recent
attempt in the U.S. Congress to pass a nonbinding resolution that
would do just that. Were it to pass, the United States would be on
record as seeing the events of 1915-1919 as, in the words of the 1948
U.N. Convention on Genocide, acts "committed with intent to destroy,
in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."

At the moment, however, it looks as though Turkey and an impressive
array of supporters–from the White House to K Street and beyond–will
prevail in blocking the attempt. Twenty earlier backers of the bill
have already defected in response to a tsunami of pressure that
includes millions of lobbying dollars, eight former secretaries of
state, three former secretaries of defense, Gen. David Petraeus, the
patriarch of the Armenian church in Turkey, and even The Daily Show.

The case put forward against the bill is powerful: Its passage would
alienate Turkey, America’s strongest ally among Middle Eastern Muslim
nations and a crucial geostrategic partner. Not only might Ankara shut
down the American-run Incirlik air base (through which 74 percent of
Iraq-bound U.S. air cargo transits), it would feel even less reluctant
to send troops into northern Iraq to crush the Kurdish separatists
who have found a haven there. In return for an entirely symbolic
resolution, the voices of realism declare, an already colossal mess
in Iraq would grow even worse.

Despite the dwindling number of supporters, House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi insists that the bill will still go before the full House. But
even if the measure meets the fate of earlier ones, the forces that
repeatedly bring the issue up will not go away. Foremost among these
are the some 1.4 million Armenian-Americans who are part of a larger
world diaspora that dwarfs the number of Armenians now living in
Armenia itself. To them, this is not ancient history but something
that lives on painfully in their present lives, a crucial fact of
"our narrative," as Ross Vartian, executive director of the U.S.

Armenian Public Affairs Committee, calls it. "This is about the U.S.

being on the record about the Armenian genocide," he says, "and it’s
about confronting genocide in general, even when it’s hard."

Denials. But just as much a force, in a perverse way, is the obstinate
refusal of the modern Turkish republic to acknowledge a historical
episode for which it was not itself responsible.

Ironically, the vehemence of persistent denials–including a 2003 law
requiring schools to deny the massacre and a provision added to the
penal code that made "insults to Turkishness" jailable offenses–has
made this sad historical chapter loom even larger in the Turkish
present. The assassination of Hrat Dink, an Armenian-Turkish journalist
who had been charged under the new law for writing about the massacre;
the near imprisonment of Nobel-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, who
had mentioned the killing of a million Armenians in an interview;
the death threats that hang over Taner Akcam, who has written an
unflinching history of the genocide–all of these have been cited by
the larger global community as proof that Turkey has done nothing to
set its own record straight.

Yet repeatedly, Turkish officials say that the events of 1915-19
are questions that historians and scholars should adjudicate, not
ones on which governments should pass laws or pronouncements. (When
France proposed a law in 2006 criminalizing the denial of the Armenian
genocide, Ankara responded by cutting off military relations and some
commerce.) Even many self-critical Turks say that political pressure
from the outside will suppress nascent efforts to confront the history
and even create a backlash. "This resolution will just block the way
to dialogue," says writer Mustafa Akyol, deputy editor of the Turkish
Daily News. But the response of UCLA historian Richard Hovannisian
is pointed: "I don’t think the resolution will stifle investigation
in Turkey. They’ve had over 90 years to study this."

The question is whether Turkey will ever enter a debate in which the
consensus of scholars holds that the killings and mass deportations
of Armenians did indeed constitute a genocide. According to the
International Association of Genocide Scholars, the historical record
on the Armenian genocide is "unambiguous": In the years approaching
World War I, a new breed of Ottoman officials, the Young Turks, heirs
to two centuries of imperial decline, saw themselves as the defenders
of the Turkish remnant state in the Anatolian core of the empire.

Embracing an ultranationalist and supposedly secular ideology, Young
Turk leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress pointedly excluded
non-Muslim minorities, particularly Armenians, from their vision of
Turkish purity. The outbreak of war allowed these leaders to paint
all Armenians as pro-Russian fifth columnists (which only a small
number were) and undertake organized and widespread massacres and
deportations that led to further deaths from starvation and disease.

Most historians conclude that the massacre was carefully planned
and executed. They base their evaluation on American diplomatic
cables, some Ottoman documents, and Austrian and German archives,
as well as accounts of the Turkish courts-martial of 1919-20 which,
under Allied pressure, tried and convicted many of the Young Turks
for the atrocities.

By contrast, the populist Turkish take on this history emphasizes
the war conditions and the threat of Armenian disloyalty to discredit
allegations of an intentional policy of extermination. As Akyol says,
almost every Turk today has heard a grandparent’s tale of treacherous
Armenians. The Turkish view has found at least partial support from
a small number of scholars abroad.

"Nonnegotiable." If a consensus exists, then, there are at least
grounds for discussion. So why is it unlikely that truly open
conferences will occur within Turkey? To some degree, both Armenians
and Turks are at fault. The former insist that Turks embrace the
"G" word even at the outset of discussion. Akcam says that what
Armenians expect is "an acknowledgment of moral wrong, and most are
not worried about what exact word is used." But Vartian, speaking
for many activists, says, "The ‘G’ word is nonnegotiable."

That hard stance doesn’t bode well as an opening move. But neither does
the overly defensive outlook of many Turks–an attitude reminiscent
of the late Ottoman mentality. Seeing fifth columnists everywhere
(now mainly among Kurds rather than Armenians) and overly suspicious
of foreign intentions (the proposed resolution is denounced as
proof of "American imperialism"), the Turks view any concessions
on the Armenian question not only as an affront to national pride
but as something Armenians will use to extort reparations or even
restoration of property. The fact that the International Criminal
Court has imposed strict limitations on the retroactive use of the
genocide charge to recover damages does little to assuage Ankara.

But what about the broader meaning of the resolution, and even
implications for the prosecution of genocide cases? Michael Scharf,
a professor of law at Case Western Reserve University and a frequent
adviser to genocide tribunals, doubts that the resolution would be
of any practical prosecutorial value. And he adds that because there
was no scholarly debate in Congress, the measure appears to Turks to
be nothing but pure politics. Yet, like many, he wonders at Turkey’s
inability to put the matter to rest: "Why doesn’t Turkey do a mea culpa
and move on? There just doesn’t seem to be a downside to doing that."