THE ARMENIANS AND TURKEY; NO LIMITS TO HYPOCRISY; A FAITHLESS WORLD
Peter Balakian
International Herald Tribune
nion/edletters.php
Feb 29 2008
France
The suggestion by Timothy Ryback and Elazar Barkan in "A $12 billon
history lesson" (Views, Feb. 26) that Turkey’s call for an independent
international historical commission on the Armenian genocide is
necessary is devoid of context and unfair.
The Armenian genocide has been documented so thoroughly and with such
overwhelming evidence and scholarship that to claim there is need
for a Nuremberg-like trial is absurd. The Armenian genocide has been
proven as fact by foreign office records of the United States, France,
Britain, Russia and perhaps most important, by Turkey’s own World War
I allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, as well as by the records of
the Ottoman Courts-Martial of 1919-20, and by decades of scholarship.
To present Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide as if it were
equal in meaning to the world’s general consensus on this history is
not only misleading, it gives credence to the denial. Your readers
should know that Turkey has sanitized its archives since the time of
the crime and has created a false narrative about the extermination
of the Armenians to serve its own national self-interests.
Turkey spends millions of dollars annually in a fierce international
campaign to deny the moral reality of the Armenian genocide. It should
also be known that Turkey’s refusal to deal with the unambiguous
record honestly is part of a larger history of human rights crimes
and repression of intellectual freedom. This is hardly a government
that should be attempting to initiate public discourse about scholarly
issues.
Peter Balakian Hamilton, New York Author of "The Burning Tigris:
The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response"