THE NON-VOTE ON GENOCIDE 2007
by Daniel Smith

OpEdNews, PA
Nov 4 2007

When does a massacre rise to the level of genocide and when does the
world render such a judgment?

Those are the unspoken questions underlying this month’s rhetorical
firestorm created when leaders in both the Senate and the House
of Representatives suddenly highlighted legislation that had been
discreetly buried in sub-committees since the middle of March. The
virtually identical non-binding resolutions (S.106 and H.106,
respectively) called for U.S. foreign policy to reflect "appropriate
understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human
rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States
record relating to the Armenian Genocide" that occurred during World
War I in modern day Turkey – then the Ottoman empire.

The Turkish government went ballistic. Prime Minister Recep Erdogan
warned of serious consequences if either chamber of the U.S. Congress
passed its bill. The Bush administration warned that approval would –
not "could" but "would" – create a serious rupture with an important
NATO ally. Turkey is a vital link in the U.S. air logistics system
resupplying U.S. forces in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in
the course of answering a question during a mid-month press conference,
noted that 70 percent of all air logistics for Iraq and 33 percent
of fuel used in the war flow through or over Turkish territory.

Secretary of State Rice took issue with the timing of congressional
leaders. All living former secretaries of state and national security
advisors registered opposition to the resolutions. Secretary Gates
also took issue with the timing, as did the Commander of U.S. Central
Command, Admiral William Fallon, who observed that "the resolution
in the House on the Armenian genocide…just sticks a knife in and
just runs it around" (New York Post, October 23, 2007).

Ankara’s reaction seemed disproportionately swift and severe,
particularly considering that the dates most often given for the mass
executions of Armenians are 1915-1918, years before the official
founding of the modern state of Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Pasha
(Ataturk). A quick search revealed that in every decade since World
War II, one or more congressional resolutions condemning the Armenian
genocide creates a stir and may even advance down the legislative
road – a sparsely-attended hearing or a sub-committee vote in the
House of Representatives.

Starting in the 1980s, Ankara upped the ante by hiring top-flight
Washington public relations firms to undermine congressional sentiment
for pursuing legislation. The significance of this additional
element suggests that by the 1980s, Ankara was no longer on the
psychological defensive – the "sick man of Europe" as it was described
in 1914. Although not initially alarming, the slow emergence of the
"new" radicalized practitioners of terror transformed Turkey from
a "marginal" player in any NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict to a central
position, as the only Muslim-majority and the only "Oriental" member
of NATO, in Washington’s (and a reluctant European Union’s) efforts
to reduce violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other locales in the
Middle East.

Still, this year’s response was so vehement that something else
must be in play. Without question, Turks believe they have greater
freedom to act in 2007 because the Bush administration has failed
so miserably in its "global war on terror." And it has been only 55
months since the Turkish parliament voted against letting U.S. troops
cross Turkish territory to participate in the March 2003 invasion of
Iraq – and made it stick. Moreover, Turkey’s religious-based ruling
Justice and Development party has survived in power (and won 340 of
550 seats in parliament in elections held July 23, 2007) for more than
five years without a coup d’etat by the staunchly secularist Turkish
military is also a source of newfound confidence in the country.

Both the government and the military also agreed on the need to subdue
the Kurdish fighters of the PKK who use the rugged terrain of the
Iraq-Turkish border as a base for rest and rearming. This part of
Iraq is controlled by the Iraqi Kurdish parties and defended by the
100,000-strong pesh merga. They have proved unable or politically
incapable of implementing promises to the Bush administration and
Erdogan’s government to halt PKK attacks that are creating a low but
constant death toll – similar to the American experience in Iraq –
among Turkish units on the border. In response to this failure, the
Turkish parliament approved legislation empowering the prime minister
and the army chief to send more Turkish troops into Iraq to destroy
PKK fighters and base areas.

All authorities in Turkey stress that they will act only if the Iraqi
and coalition forces fail to rein in the PKK. They are not keen to
become further enmeshed in going after the PKK given the history
of the Armenian suppression. When spelled out, the psychology of
repression is ugly, as the following thumbnail sketch of Armenia’s
history and a more general look at 20th century genocides reveal.

The History of the Armenian Genocide At the end of the 19th century,
the once-mighty Ottoman Empire was struggling to control its restive
Christian Armenian minority.

Estimates of the number killed in uprisings against the autocratic
ottoman sultans in the last decade of the 19th century run to more
than 100,000. Ironically, it was a group of army officers – the
"Young Turks" – concerned about the widening gap in capabilities
between Ottoman and European armies, who forced the sultan to accept
limitations on his power. Not content sharing power, three officers
– Mehmed Talaat, Ismail Enver, and Ahmed Djemal – engineered a coup
d’etat in 1913 and assumed total control of the government as well as
the military. The next year they took Turkey into World War I on the
side of the Central Powers (Imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire) – the losing side.

But the war also held promise to be an excuse for solving what some
in the new regime called the "Armenian problem." The vision of the
triumvirate was a New Turkey – called Turan – stretching from the
Mediterranean islands off Turkey’s western flank all the way across
Central Asia to the Caspian Sea. Some 500,000 Armenians were in this
broad area whose boundaries included much of the historic Armenian
homeland. With the Eastern Front pitting Turks against Russians,
"special measures" were required to insure the integrity of the
war effort.

– All weapons held by Armenians were confiscated as the population
was considered sympathetic to their fellow Christians in Russia.

– The 40,000 Armenians in the Turkish army were disarmed and converted
to labor battalions.

– In April 1915, Armenian political, cultural, religious, and other
elites were seized in coordinated raids and then killed. Mass arrests
of Armenian men and their execution followed. Ironically, some Kurds
joined in the killing. The allied powers warned the Turkish rulers to
stop, but with the war grinding on, the implied threat was toothless.

– Undeterred, the three rulers initiated new measures against women
and children -forced marches with little food or water, with the
victims in some cases being marched into the desert.

– In May, 1918, Ottoman troops attacked eastward into the Caucasus to
destroy what remained of the Armenian homeland in their bid to reach
the Caspian Sea. The Armenians fought the invaders to a standstill,
and then the whole enterprise collapsed when, shortly before Armistice
Day (November 11, 1918) the ruling junta fled to Germany where they
received asylum. Despite more calls for a war crimes trial, the three
men were tried in absentia, found guilty, but never punished.

Meanwhile, in Anatolia (Asia Minor) a more moderate group of "Young
Turks" took over. After lengthy negotiations, this government signed in
1920 the Treaty of Sevres which reduced Turkey to a shadow of itself,
re-created a large Republic of Armenia, and called for a referendum
to be organized among the Kurdish populations in and around Anatolia,
Iran, Iraq, and Syria to determine if an independent Kurdistan was
desired.

However, the treaty was flatly rejected by another group of highly
nationalistic officers. Led by Mustafa Kemal, they successfully
waged war on France, Armenia, and Greece to force renegotiation
of the Serves treaty. The result was the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne
which effectively created the boundaries of modern Turkey, left a
rump Armenia as part of the emerging Soviet Union, and scuttled the
referendum on Kurdistan, leaving the Kurds the largest ethnic group
with no independent homeland.

Did the Ottoman Rulers Commit Genocide? This, then, brings us back
to the question of what makes mass murder or massacres genocide. The
distinction hinges on discovering or discerning the "intent" of those
doing the killing, as is clear from Article II of the 1948 Convention
Against Genocide: "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole
or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such…."

Arriving at a conclusion, unless proclamations or other statements
of intent have been published, can be problematical before the
fact of a genocide starting. For those with time and inclination,
being familiar with the circumstances of 20th century genocides and
massacres might permit earlier scrutiny of causes and processes that
led to the horrendous slaughter of civilian’s in that century and
that have carried over into the 21st century.

The first seven years of this century have already re-taught us the
basic lesson that naming an atrocity genocide – as the U.S. did in the
Sudan – does not prevent or stop the killing, even with the possible
penalties for any found guilty as described in international law.

Certainly, time does not appear to be a factor. In Rwanda
800,000-900,000 ethnic Tutsis and ethnic Hutus who refused to
participate in the organized killing perished in the space of 100
days in 1994. But in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the executions
and forced labor that eventually claimed 2 million intellectuals,
city dwellers, and "elites" ran four years (1975-1979).

The numbers who perish also is non-determinative as to whether
genocide has been committed. In 2004, Germany acknowledged as a
genocide the 1904 systematic destruction of 80,000 Herero tribesmen
in what was then called German Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia)
in retaliation for the deaths of 100 Germans killed when the Africans
rebelled against brutal German rule.

Contrast this event with what Joseph Stalin was doing in the Soviet
Union in 1932-33.

He purposefully condemned to death by starvation 7 million men,
women and children in the Ukraine where his program to collectivize
agriculture was being resisted, sometimes violently. Tiring of the
unceasing defiance, he ordered the Red army to seize every grain of
the harvest of autumn and winter 1932 and to completely seal Ukraine’s
border so no foodstuffs could enter Ukraine.

Furthermore, between 1934-1938, Stalin orchestrated a massive purge
of Communist Party, members, the intelligentsia, and army officers
whose loyalty to him he questioned. Some 13 million wee killed or
sent to gulags. In the army the purge removed so many experienced
officers that when the Nazis attacked in 1942, the Red army came
perilously close to total collapse – which, had it happened, would
have gone into history as one of the most egregious self-inflicted
errors ever made in warfare. (As it was, the Russian people bolstered
the army at both St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and Moscow against
the efforts of the Nazi armies.)

In terms of the number of people killed, Stalin is surpassed only
by Mao Ze-Dong. Again, excluding the lives lost in Mao’s military
campaigns against the Chinese Nationalists and the Imperial Japanese
army in the 1930s and 1940s, the Chinese civilian population endured
three major assaults – the subjugation of Tibet (1949-50), the Great
Leap Forward (1958-1961), and the Cultural Revolution (1966- 1969) –
that claimed as many as 1.2 million, 43 million and 7 million lives,
respectively.

War, of course, offers the perfect counterpoint by which murders and
revenge slayings among civilians are concealed. The world knows so
much about the World War II Holocaust in part because the Germans
kept meticulous records on the 6 million souls – Jews, ethnic Poles,
Romas (gypsies), and "undesirables" – exterminated during the period
1938-1945.

In the Pacific, Japanese troops are believed to have killed 300,000
Chinese civilians and prisoners in six weeks (December 1937- February
1938) in what is called the "Rape of Nanking." The broad consensus
today holds that over the entire 1937-1945 time frame of significant
combat in Asia, non-combatant deaths due to Japanese invasion,
occupation, and execution is approximately 6.8 million.

(In 1984, UNESCO estimated the total number of civilian fatalities
during 1937-1945 at between 21-27 million – nearly the same as
military losses.)

The World War II examples share a common characteristic: both occurred
within the conscious context of "low level" combat or preparation for
escalating armed conflicts when tensions already would be high and
moral restraints weakened. Yet while the deaths of 6 million at the
hands of the Nazis earn the condemnation of "genocide" by ordinary
men and women, of religious and secular leaders around the globe,
most of the other atrocities – at least as they are spoken of and
written about – do not carry the stigma of "genocide."

Genocide: Avoiding the Specific (Turkey) While Condemning the
Universal The Armenian genocide, for the Turks, arguably also shares
this association with war and "defense of the nation-state" against
internal subversion and should not be singled out as genocide. (The
U.S. internment camps in World War II are a less drastic example of
the same mind set.) As regrettable as the killings may be, the Turks
see the deaths as part of the larger war they were waging against
the imperial Russian army and, after Lenin’s successful revolution
forced the new regime in St. Petersburg to withdraw its army, were
still threatened by the new Communist regime.

The other and perhaps from the point of view of the Turkish people
the more significant reason for rejecting these events as genocide
is the belief that the reputation of Turkey’s "George Washington"
– Ataturk – and through him the honor of the entire Turkish people
would be sullied even though he did not emerge as the man in charge
of the residual Ottoman empire until he led the opposition to the
Sevres treaty during 19 20-1923..

In the end, the definition of "intent " remains the key to unlocking
the legalistic straightjacket into which we have tie ourselves by
a misplaced sense of personal and national reputation, "honor,"
and latent nationalism.

What we are left with is the observation by U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Potter Stewart: "I know it when I see it." But the world must look
and not hide its head in the sand. And by the way, Congress may yet
act on one or more of the pending pieces of legislation.

About the author: Colonel Daniel M. Smith graduated from the United
States Military Academy at West Point in 1966. His initial assignment
was with the 3rd Armor Division in Germany. He then served as an
intelligence advisor in Vietnam, following which he earned a graduate
degree at Cornell University and taught philosophy and English at
West Point.

Subsequent intelligence and public affairs assignments were at Fort
Hood, Texas; the Army Materiel Research and Development Command,
where he was speechwriter for the Commanding General; the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA); and Headquarters, Department of the Army.

Six of his years with DIA were in London in the British Ministry
of Defense and n as Military Attache in the U.S. Embassy. Colonel
Smith retired in 1992. He joined the non-partisan Center for Defense
Information in April 1993 becoming Associate Director in 1995 and
Chief of Research in 1999.

Colonel Smith, a graduate of the Army Command and General Staff
College, the Armed Forces Staff College, and the Army War College,
joined the Friends Committee on National Legislation in September
2002 as Senior Fellow on Military Affairs.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress