TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By Christopher Hitchens
The Slate
April 6 2009
We must resist Turkish pressure to distort history.
Barack Obama addresses the Turkish Grand National Assembly. Even
before President Barack Obama set off on his visit to Turkey this
week, there were the usual voices urging him to dilute the principled
position that he has so far taken on the Armenian genocide. April
is the month in which the Armenian diaspora commemorates the bloody
initiation, in 1915, of the Ottoman Empire’s campaign to erase its
Armenian population. The marking of the occasion takes two forms:
Armenian Remembrance Day, on April 24, and the annual attempt to
persuade Congress to name that day as one that abandons weasel wording
and officially calls the episode by its right name, which is the word
I used above.
Genocide had not been coined in 1915, but the U.S. ambassador in
Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, employed a term that was in some
ways more graphic. In his urgent reports to the State Department,
conveying on-the-spot dispatches from his consuls, especially in the
provinces of Van and Harput, he described the systematic slaughter
of the Armenians as "race murder." A vast archive of evidence exists
to support this claim. But every year, the deniers and euphemists set
to work again, and there are usually enough military-industrial votes
to tip the scale in favor of our Turkish client. (Of late, Turkey’s
opportunist military alliance with Israel has also been good for a
few shame-faced Jewish votes as well.)
Related in Slate In 2004, Kim Iskyan asked whether Armenians
could forget Constantinople in favor cultivating peace with the
Turks. Shmuel Rosner wrote about U.S.-Turkey relations under the Bush
administration. Geoffrey Wheatcroft explained how Turkey lost its
shot at joining the European Union. In 2006, Richard Morgan wrote
about a new wave of anti-American pop culture in Turkey.
President Obama comes to this issue with an unusually clear and
unambivalent record. In 2006, for example, the U.S. ambassador
to Armenia, John Evans, was recalled for employing the word
genocide. Then-Sen. Obama wrote a letter of complaint to then-Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, deploring the State Department’s cowardice
and roundly stating that the occurrence of the Armenian genocide in
1915 "is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view,
but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming
body of historical evidence." On the campaign trail last year, he
amplified this position, saying that "America deserves a leader who
speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide and responds forcefully
to all genocides. I intend to be that president."
For any who might entertain doubt on this score, I would recommend two
recent books of exceptional interest and scholarship that both add a
good deal of depth and texture to this drama. The first is Armenian
Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, by Grigoris Balakian, and
the second is Rebel Land: Travels Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples,
a contemporary account by Christopher de Bellaigue. In addition, we
have just learned of shattering corroborative evidence from within
the archives of the Turkish state. The Ottoman politician who began
the campaign of deportation and extermination, Talat Pasha, left
enormous documentation behind him. His family has now given the
papers to a Turkish author named Murat Bardakci, who has published
a book with the somewhat dry title The Remaining Documents of Talat
Pasha. One of these "remaining documents" is a cold estimate that
during the years 1915 and 1916 alone, a total of 972,000 Armenians
simply vanished from the officially kept records of population. (See
Sabrina Tavernise’s report in the New York Times of March 8, 2009.)
There are those who try to say that the Armenian catastrophe was a
regrettable byproduct of the fog of war and of imperial collapse,
and this might be partly true of the many more Armenians who were
slaughtered at the war’s end and after the implosion of Ottomanism. But
this is an archive maintained by the government of the day and its
chief anti-Armenian politician, and it records in the very early days
of World War I a population decline from 1,256,000 to 284,157. It
is very seldom that a regime in its private correspondence confirms
almost to an exactitude the claims of its victims.
So what will the deniers say now? The usual routine has been to
insinuate that if Congress votes to assert the historic truth, then
Turkey will inconvenience the NATO alliance by making trouble on the
Iraqi border, denying the use of bases to the U.S. Air Force, or in
other unspecified ways. This same kind of unchecked arrogance was
on view at the NATO summit last weekend, where the Ankara government
had the nerve to try to hold up the appointment of a serious Danish
politician, Anders Rasmussen, as the next secretary-general of the
alliance, on the grounds that as Denmark’s prime minister he had
refused to censor Danish newspapers to Muslim satisfaction! It is now
being hinted that if either President Obama or the Congress goes ahead
with the endorsement of the genocide resolution, Turkey will prove
uncooperative on a range of issues, including the normalization of
the frontier between Turkey and Armenia and the transit of oil and
gas pipelines across the Caucasus.
When the question is phrased in this thuggish way, it can be slyly
suggested that Armenia’s own best interests are served by joining in
the agreement to muddy and distort its own history. Yet how could any
state, or any people, agree to abolish their pride and dignity in this
way? And the question is not only for Armenians, who are economically
hard-pressed by the Turkish closure of the common border. It is for
the Turks, whose bravest cultural spokesmen and writers take genuine
risks to break the taboo on discussion of the Armenian question. And
it is also for Americans, who, having elected a supposedly brave new
president, are being told that he–and our Congress too–must agree
to collude in a gigantic historical lie. A lie, furthermore, that
courageous U.S. diplomacy helped to expose in the first place. This
falsification has already gone on long enough and has been justified
for reasons of state. It is, among other things, precisely "for reasons
of state," in other words for the clear and vital announcement that we
can’t be bought or intimidated, that April 24, 2009, should become
remembered as the date when we affirmed the truth and accepted,
as truth-telling does, all the consequences.