CAVEAT EMPTOR…BUYER BEWARE!
By Tatul Sonentz-Papazian
15 November 2008
In the light of the present Turkish political and diplomatic foray
into the Caucasus, with its benign facade and ‘football diplomacy’,
one can’t help but remember another planned incursion into the region,
with ominous overtones. Indeed, in October 1993, Ankara, encouraged
by the political instability resulting from a severe power struggle in
Moscow — pitting factions of the Glastnost Nomenclatura against each
other — had made all necessary preparations for a military assault on
Armenia to achieve a Turkish imposed solution on the raging Nagorno
Karabagh conflict which, at that time, was not going too well for
the Azeri side.
Heir to a multi-national empire, The relatively new Kemalist Turkish
‘nation state’, has been trying very hard since its inception in the
early’20-s, to assemble an exclusive "nationhood" on the historic
patrimonies of indigenous nations, whose existence outdates recorded
history. Faced with the inevitable irredentism of the original
inhabitants of the territories on which the Turkish ‘national’ state
has been grafted by a brutal, on-going process of ethnic cleansing
through wholesale physical annihilation or cultural and religious
assimilation of all minorities, Ankara has resorted to any and all
methods to manufacture a ‘national identity’ at the expense of its
minorities and hapless neighÂbors.
This long-standing disregard for factual integrity — at the genuine
dismay and astonishment of legitimate scholars and intellectuals,
both Turkish and foreign — has visibly undermined the formation of
a credible and secure Turkish self-image as well as the assessment
of Turkey’s rightful place and legitimacy in the modern world. Given
these facts, a certain amount of insecurity — and paranoia concerning
chronically restive minorities and neighbors – have been instrumental
in the shaping of both domestic and foreign policies pivoting around
a stance of unyielding denial of the factual narrative of events as
perceived and subscribed to by the rest of the civilized world.
In 1921, after pushing the Sevres Treaty off the docket of world
diplomacy with the collusion of major powers and international oil
cartels, Ataturk — who, with the active support of the Soviets, had
already grabbed Western Armenian lands — in anticipation of future
litigations resulting from a possible revival of the Armenian Case,
insisted on the inclusion of the Armenian provinces of Nakhijevan
and Karabagh in the newly formed Azerbaijani Republic as "autonomous"
regions ruled by Baku. This far-reaching diplomatic maneuver pushed
the boundaries and the immediacy of future Armenian irredentism from
Western Armenia to the heart of t he Caucasus, creating a long range
"buffer" confined within the domain of the newly created Tatar republic
of Soviet "Azerbaijan", while giving Turkey ample time to ‘digest’
Western Armenia.
Eighty-seven years after these events, on a recent visit to Washington,
Ahmet Davutoglu, the chief schemer of Turkish foreign policy in recent
years, tried to warn, then Democratic Party presidential candidate Sen.
Barack Obama, against any revision of the existing American policy
of denial concerning the recognition of the Armenian Genocide, at the
same time emphasizing the present Turkish administration’s readiness
to improve relations with Armenia. Furthermore, In remarks made at a
Brookings institute event on October 28, the Turkish diplomat stated,
that Ankara wishes "to have best relations with Armenia," and "good
relations" with Armenians of the diaspora, and that Ankara "does not
see Armenia as a threat…"
Then, responding to a question of the Armenian Reporter, Mr. Davutoglu
stated, that President Gul’s recent visit to Yerevan had been made for
"…the purpose of improving relations, and not as a reaction to the
crisis in Georgia…" and as a response to the question put to him
by a senior staff member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee as
to Ankara’s thus far entrenched stand on the Nagorno Karabagh issue,
he clearly intimated, t hat unlike its firm position on the Armenian
Genocide, Ankara may consider dispensing with its preconditions on
a settlement of the Karabagh conflict…
After more than eight decades, the very same aggressor who, with
the blessings of the Soviets, had planted the seeds of inter-ethnic
clashes, wants to reap the harvest, playing the role of a pacifier and
"arbiter" in the Nagorno-Karabagh conflict, by offering the Armenians
what de facto is already theirs, in exchange for their de jure rights,
imbedded in the Treaty of Sevres, hoping, that the renascent Armenian
irredentism will thus be silenced once and for all at the expense of
Azerbaijan’s ‘territorial integrity’…A cynical example of Kemalist
Turkey’s foreign policy towards its neighbors.
A brief review of related events of the past century may throw light
on the emergence of ‘modern’ Turkey and its modus operandi In crisis
management.
In 1915, before the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the
Central Powers, declaring war on the Allies of the Entente Cordiale,
and starting the Armenian "deportations" as the first stage of a
carefully planned and executed genocide, the Armenians, the Kurds
and the Greeks in Asia Minor together, constituted the majority of
the population.
Six years later, the defeated Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of
Sevres, which=2 0assigned Eastern Thrace and the Smyrna district to
Greece, while discussing a separate and independent Greek state in the
Pontus. The Allied Powers took these steps based on a conclusion best
formulated earlier, in 1920, by the president of the Supreme Allied
Council, Alexander Millerand, who stated: "The Turkish government not
only failed in its duty to protect its non-Turkish citizens from the
looting, violence and murders, but there are many indications that the
Turkish government itself was responsible for directing and organizing
the most cruel attacks against the populations, which it was supposed
to protect." Indeed, the Young Turks had sought to rid themselves of
troublesome non-Muslim ethnic groups in order to build an exclusively
Islamic-Turkic "super nation" on the territories of the crumbling,
once multi-national Ottoman Empire.
The endemic persecution of non-Muslims had intensified earlier, during
the Balkan Wars of 1912 – 1913, in the form of repeated lootings,
expulsions and murderous pogroms, and the harassment of the peaceful
civilian population intensified after the wars to such a degree,
that on May 25, 1914, the Ecumenical Patriarchate found it necessary
to sound the alarm by publicly declaring that "the Orthodox Church
was under attack!"
At the conclusion of World War I, after 40 long months of war, with
considerable overt and covert foreign assistance and intrigue, the
Kemalist forces secured the collapse of the Greek military front in
Anatolia and reoccupied Asia Minor. They entered Smyrna on September
8, 1922 and set the city on fire, completing the genocidal cycle by
savagely decimating the helpless population of both the Greek and
Armenian communities of the city, in plain view of Allied warships
anchored around the harbor, whose crews, by and large, limited their
"rescue" operations to photographing and filming the unfolding drama
of that historic holocaust….
On 24 July, 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne ended the Greek-Turkish
war and imposed the arbitrary exchange of 300,000 ethnic Turks from
Greece for the 1,400,000 Greeks who had survived the murderous course
of the Kemalist ethnic cleansing. Thus, the native Greek inhabitants
of Asia Minor had to give up their ancestral homes to the Turks after
more than 3,000 years of maintaining a civilization that had laid the
intellectual and humanistic foundations of democracy and the modern
Western World, as we know it.
Another bastion of Hellenic culture, the historic island of Cyprus,
which after centuries of Ottoman misrule and foreign dependency had
finally achieved sovereignty in 1960, barely fourteen years later,
on July 20, 1974, was invaded by the Turkish armed forces, in blatant
violation of the UN Charter and all relevant principles and norms
of international law. The Turks tried to ju stify their high-handed
action by the July 15, 1974 coup d’état instigated by the Greek
military junta in Athens against the Cyprus Government, a regime
against which, through active collusion with the Turkish minority of
the island, Ankara itself had been plotting since the very start of
Cypriot independence, trying to discredit and destabilize the Greek
majority administration in its attempts to establish ethnic harmony
through democratic methods.
Today, while knocking on the doors of Europe, begging to be admitted
in the EU, the Turks still keep one third of Cyprus under occupation,
having set up a puppet "Turkish republic" recognized only by
Ankara. In a move reminiscent of their exploits in the Caucasus 52
years earlier, they have managed to move the historic boundaries of
Greek irredentism away from the Kemalist state’s borders, into the
confines of a historically recognized Hellenic island nation.
To conclude, let us get back to South Eastern Anatolia where the
Kurds of Turkey are still denied basic human and civil rights. After
numerous bloody uprisings since the end of World War I, and the
arrest and incarceration of Ocalan, the leader of the latest and
longest lasting insurgency, Turkey has managed – at least for the
time being — to push its native Kurdish problem into Iraq, making
sporadic punitive armed intrusions – like the one planned for Armenia
on=2 0October 1993 — into Iraqi Kurdistan, trying to make sure that
Kurdish irredentism remains a purely Iraqi — perhaps even Iranian
and Syrian – problem. After all, there are no Kurds in Turkey, only
misguided ‘Mountain Turks…’
The fact is, behind the benign mask of present Turkish diplomacy,
seethes the murderous face of the Grey Wolf. In response to the
latest Turkish sales-pitch in the Caucasus, we can only respond:
Caveat emptor… Buyer beware!
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