Gulf News, United Arab Emirates
Oct 27 2007

The horrible legacy of genocides

By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
Published: October 27, 2007, 01:07

Recep Tayyip Erdogan: call your lobbyist in Washington. Congressmen
there, choosing a bad time to pick a fight with Ankara over a
century-old dispute, are determined to put Turkey and the US on a
collision course.

Early this month, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of
Representatives voted to declare the massacres of roughly a million
Armenians by Young Turks in 1915 to be genocide.

The full House has yet to vote on the resolution, but the Turkish
government, reacting angrily, immediately recalled its ambassador,
hinted at denying the American military use of its vital supply line
at Incirlik airbase, and threatened to launch a major ground
offensive in northern Iraq in pursuit of guerrillas of the Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK), who in the past two weeks have killed well over
two dozen Turkish soldiers. A messy situation was about to get
messier.

Turkey considers the question of Armenian genocide not only a
sensitive issue, virtually taboo in the public debate, but places it
under the rubric of "insulting Turkishness" in the penal code, for
which a conviction will get you three years in jail.

To this day, 92 years after the incidents, Turkey continues not only
to obfuscate the facts surrounding the massacres but to deny them
outright. Very simply, you don’t bring up the issue, but if you must
do so, accept the official version: a "mere" 300,000 to 600,000
"died" at the time, and their deaths were "the unfortunate
consequence of war".

That is the version modern day Turks learn at school from their
sanitised textbooks, which barely mention the tragedy. They thus grow
up with little comprehension of its scope.

Turks must own up

It’s a mystery why Turks do not want to own up to their past and why
they persecute those intellectuals and academics in their midst who
do.

The novelist Elif Shafak, author of the critically acclaimed The
Bastard of Istanbul, and Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 winner of the Nobel
Prize for Literature, have both faced charges of (you guessed it)
"insulting Turkishness" when they spoke up.

And Taner Akam, a prominent professor of history at the University of
Minnesota, opted not to return to his homeland after writing his
seminal work Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of
Turkish Responsibility, in which he meticulously chronicled the
destruction of the Armenian community whose members where hunted down
and slaughtered throughout their habitat by the Ottoman military.

Hundreds of thousands of others were deported to what was then called
Greater Syria or, in Arabic, Bilad Al Sham. For what are these
Armenian enclaves that exist in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and
Iraq today, but the survivors of that dreadful act?

If this narrative is not factual, and these figures are wrong, and
the killing of Armenians was indeed the "unfortunate consequence of
war", then the Turkish authorities have nothing to fear of an open
debate at academic conferences and panel discussions devoted to
exploring the issue.

By silencing or incarcerating those who have something to say, you
make a pact with the devil who will shield your history and your name
from shame. But the devil will return one day asking for his fee to
be paid.

Turks should exercise their right to throw a backward glance at their
past without fear of retribution, in the name of intellectual
integrity of nothing else.

Congressmen on Capitol Hill, however, opting to probe another
nation’s historical experience and pass judgment on it, is another
story. If these folks are such titans of moral rectitude, guardians
of the truth, why not pass a resolution, say, identifying the mass
killings and deportations of Chechens by Stalin’s regime in 1944 as
genocide?

At the time, in February that year to be exact, in the dead of
winter, Russian troops, after slaughtering thousands who resisted,
deported virtually the entire population of Chechnya to the Kazakh
steppe in Central Asia.

About half a million Chechens were loaded on trains, like cattle, and
expelled. As many as 78,000, men, women and children, among them the
elderly, the sick and the infirm, died on the road from starvation
and the cold.

Or a resolution condemning Israel for its genocidal acts in Deir
Yassein in 1948 and the ethnic cleansing it mounted against the
entire population of the twin cities of Lydda-Ramlah that same year?
Or the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 against 500,000 Tutsis, whose
misfortune was that they belonged to the wrong tribe?

Why not, you ask? Because Chechens, Palestinians and Tutsis do not
have large, organised communities with arm-twisting lobbies in
Washington.

And, yes, I do share the Turks’ anger, indeed their outrage, at
Congressmen, pandering to constituents in California, who feel
entitled to dig into the long-gone past of a country half way around
the world and issue it a report card.

Here’s how it should be done. Instead of souring their relationship
with the US or embarking on an ill-conceived military adventure in
Iraq (heaven knows we don’t need another of these over there!),
Turkish parliamentarians should give their counterparts in Washington
a taste of their own medicine: they should pass a resolution, in the
same cavalier fashion, condemning the United States for the genocide
it inflicted on Native Americans and African Americans almost two
centuries ago. And leave it at that. Deal?

Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several
books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He
lives in Washington D.C.

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