RAFFI K. HOVANNISIAN URGES TURKEY NOT TO BE AFRAID OF ASSUMING RESPONSIBILITY FOR GENOCIDE OF ARMENIANS

ArmInfo
2009-04-06 14:44:00

ArmInfo. In his item ‘Nothing Personal: Turkey’s Top Ten’ Raffi
K. Hovannisian, representative of the parliamentary opposition party
Heritage, the former foreign minister of Armenia, urges Turkey not
to be afraid of assuming responsibility for Genocide of Armenians.

Thus, R. Hovannisian writes: ‘…There is so much evidentiary
documentation in the US National Archives, the British Public Record
Office, the Quai d’Orsay, and even the German military archives to
disarm the various instruments of official denial that have been
employed over the years. But this is only the paperwork. The most
damning testimony is not in the killing of more than a million human
souls in a manifest execution of the 20th century’s first genocide
or, in the words of the American ambassador reporting at the time,
"race extermination.’

R. Hovannisian highlights that ‘worse than genocide, as incredible
as that sounds, is the premeditated deprivation of a people of its
ancestral heartland. And that’s precisely what happened. In what
amounted to the Great Armenian Dispossession, a nation living for more
than four millennia upon its historic patrimony– at times amid its
own sovereign kingdoms and more frequently as a subject of occupying
empires– was in a matter of months brutally, literally, and completely
eradicated from its land. Unprecedented in human history, this
expropriation of homes and lands, churches and monasteries, schools
and colleges, libraries and hospitals, properties and infrastructures
constitutes to this day a murder, not only of a people, but of a
civilization, a culture, a time-earned way of life. This is where
the debate about calling it genocide or not becomes absurd, trivial,
and tertiary. A homeland was exterminated by the Turkish republic’s
predecessor and under the world’s watchful eye, and we’re negotiating
a word. Even that term is not enough to encompass the magnitude of
the crime’. He also writes: ‘What is unfortunately unique about the
Holocaust is not the evil of the Shoah itself, but the demeanor of
postwar Germany to face history and itself, to assume responsibility
for the crimes of the preceding regime, to mourn and to dignify, to
seek forgiveness and make redemption, and to incorporate this ethic
into the public consciousness and the methodology of state. Germany,
now a leader in the democratic world, has only gained and grown from
its demeanor’. He is sure that Turkey’s allies can help it along this
way. Whether it’s from Washington and its transatlantic partners,
the European Union, the Muslim world or even Moscow, to which Ankara
has most interestingly been warming up of late, the message might
be delivered that, in the third millennium AD, the world will be
governed by a different set of rules, that might will respect right,
that no crime against humanity or its denial will be tolerated.

‘Hence, the process of official contacts and reciprocal visits that
unraveled in the wake of a Turkey-Armenia soccer match in September
2008 should mind this gap and structure the discourse not to run
away from the divides emanating from the past, but to bridge them
through the immediate establishment of diplomatic relations without
the positing or posturing of preconditions, the lifting of Turkey’s
unlawful border blockade, and a comprehensive discussion and negotiated
resolution of all outstanding matters based on an acceptance of history
and the commitment to a future guaranteed against it recurrence. Nor
should the fact of dialogue, as facially laudable as it is, be pitched
in an insincere justification to deter third-party parliaments, and
particularly the US Congress, from adopting decisions or resolutions
that simply seek to reaffirm the historical record. Such comportment,
far from the statesmanship many expect, would contradict the aim and
spirit of any rapprochement’, he writes.

‘Even such obviously Armenian homesteads as Mountainous Karabagh
and Nakhichevan were severed by Bolshevik-Kemalist complicity and
placed, in exercise of Stalin’s divide-and- conquer facility, under the
suzerainty of Soviet Azerbaijan. Accordingly, as improbable as it seems
in view of its ethnic kinship with Azerbaijan, modern-day Turkey also
carries the charge to discard outdated and pursue corrective policies
in the Caucasus. This high duty applies not only to a qualitatively
improved and cleansed rapport with the Republic of Armenia, but also
in respect of new realities in the region……Called Artsakh in
Armenian, this easternmost territory of the Armenian Plateau declared
its independence from Soviet Azerbaijan in 1991 in full compliance
with controlling Soviet legislation, customary international law,
and the Montevideo Convention. …a durable and equitable resolution
of the Azerbaijan-Karabagh standoff is substantively derivative from
the Turkish-Armenian relationship and the course of its development’,
R. Hovannisian writes.