Turkey’s Guilty Conscience

One of the world’s thorniest historical conflicts is on the verge of
being solved.
But long-term peace between Turkey and Armenia might be as hard to
achieve as a lasting Middle East truce.

Foreign Policy Magazine
October 9, 2009

BY CHRISTIAN CARYL

Pop quiz: Can you name one part of the world where the United States
and the Russian Federation have been making common cause? Correct
answer: in Turkey and Armenia, where the two powers have been
collaborating of late.

And that’s only one of the many remarkable twists to emerge from a
diplomatic quest that, for sheer complexity and emotional
explosiveness, is likely rivaled only by the search for peace in the
Middle East. It has been a wild ride, and it’s not over yet. Ankara
and Yerevan are signing two historic agreements that could pave the
way toward a major diplomatic rapprochement and an opening of the two
countries’ common 325-kilometer border, which has been closed for the
past 16 years.

"I think we’re seeing a series of high-water marks in a long process,"
says the International Crisis Group’s Hugh Pope. "Considering where
we’ve come from 10 years ago to where we are today, it’s nothing short
of amazing."

But there’s still a long way to go. Like the Israelis and
Palestinians, the Turks and Armenians share a lot of history, and
that’s not always a good thing. As in the Middle East, the Turks and
the Armenians are separated by religion, harshly felt territorial
disputes, and the poisonous legacy of killing on a scale so vast that
it boggles the mind. Small wonder that the two peoples have spent most
of the past 100 years locked in mutual antipathy.

The issue that looms over all else is 1915’s "Great Calamity," when
more than 1 million overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian Armenians met
their deaths at the hands of mostly Muslim Ottoman Turks during the
turmoil of World War I. Armenians, and most non-Turkish historians,
say it was genocide. The Turks, for their part, have long denied that
it ever happened — perhaps becau
ay Republic of Turkey, which was established in the aftermath of the
war. A controversial Turkish law that prohibits insults to
"Turkishness" has sometimes been used as a basis for prosecuting those
who would dare refer to the events of 1915 as genocide.

Understandably, many Armenians have insisted that a clear Turkish
acknowledgment of the 1915 massacres precede any diplomatic opening
between the two countries — and that’s precisely what hasn’t
happened. Instead the two governments have agreed to sidestep the
issue by appointing an independent historical commission to discuss
it. Armen Ayvazyan, director of the Ararat Center for Strategic
Research in Yerevan, speaks for many Armenian nationalists when he
denounces this move as "outrageous." Imagine, he says, that an
unrepentant Nazi Germany had called for a "historical commission" to
debate the Holocaust. Politically, the move has also enabled the Turks
to argue that countries that have been considering parliamentary
resolutions officially condemning Ottoman actions in 1915 as genocide
— read "the United States" — should postpone doing so, at risk of
derailing the current rapprochement.

And yet, as Pope insists, merely denouncing the current normalization
process as a sellout to an unrepentant Turkey misses a key point. He
notes that, since 2000, a growing number of Turkish intellectuals have
been steadily challenging the traditional taboos, openly challenging
the official version that downplays the 1915 massacres as a few random
atrocities rather than a systematic state-orchestrated campaign of
killing. (Among the dissenters: Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan
Pamuk.) They’ve been organizing academic conferences and pushing for
the publication of long-suppressed documents, such as the diaries of
senior Ottoman official Talat Pasha, which clearly show his intimate
involvement in the killings. Last December, a group of 200 Turks even
organized a petition expressing a Turkish apology for 1915, and it’s
since been signed by some 30,000 people.

Given the hi
st surprising things about the normalization process is how much
support it has managed to find. When Turkish President Abdullah Gül
launched the present initiative by heading to a September 2008 soccer
match in Yerevan, a poll in Turkey found that 69.6 percent approved,
while some 62.8 percent thought Turkey should develop economic and
political ties with Armenia. "The more they [Turks and Armenians]
meet, the more they realize how similar they are," notes Diba Nigar
Göksel of the European Stability Initiative, pointing out that there
are already some 70,000 Armenian guest workers in Turkey. (At the same
time she bemoans the lack of the myriad exchanges and contacts of the
kind that have considerably enlivened relations between Turkey and
Greece over the past two decades). Still, she notes, public opinion in
Armenia itself predictably remains more complicated: Ask Armenians if
they support opening the
border, and they overwhelmingly approve; ask them if the border
should be opened if Turkey doesn’t acknowledge the 1915 genocide, and
they overwhelmingly don’t.

There’s another complicating factor waiting in the wings: the status
of the "frozen conflict" between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Azeris
are ethnic Turks and have been viewed with corresponding suspicion by
the Armenians, even when both groups were living in their own titular
republics back in the old Soviet Union. In 1988, fighting broke out
when the majority Armenian inhabitants of the enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh inside Azerbaijan insisted on joining their brethren
in Armenia proper.

The war ended in 1994 with Armenian forces in tight control of
Nagorno-Karabakh and the two republics — which became independent
countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union — locked in a state
of mutual hostility that remains to this day. At first the Turkish
push for normal relations with Armenia didn’t make resolving the
Azeri-Armenian logjam a precondition. But an outcry in Baku, as well
as harsh criticism from the powerful nationalist opposition in the
parliament in Ankara, forced the government of Turkish Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdo?an to put Nagorno-Karabakh back on the agenda —
despite apparent promises he’d made to the Armenians on that
score. Lately Erdogan’s government has reaffirmed that the
rapprochement with Yerevan will go ahead regardless of progress on the
Azeri-Armenian peace talks.

The stakes are enormous for both sides. The Turks closed their border
with Armenia in 1993 as a rebuke for Armenia’s seizure of
Nagorno-Karabakh, and since then Armenia’s only land link with the
rest of the Caucasus has been through Georgia. Opening the border
would give a huge boost to the Armenian economy. The Turks would
benefit from vastly expanded geopolitical influence in the
strategically sensitive Caucasus. Over the long term, say analysts,
the Erdogan government would also be able to demonstrate much greater
diplomatic credibility in its dealings wit
at, with the European Union (which maintains reservations about
Turkey’s human rights record and democratic bona fides). Ankara would
also, potentially, be able to counter the chronic bad publicity it has
received around the world for its persistent denial of the genocide —
no small thing given the enormous political traction of the Armenian
diaspora in Europe and the
United States.

Moscow and Washington apparently think they have something to gain,
too — even if they hold that belief "for very different reasons,"
Pope notes. Washington wants to see a reduction of conflict in the
Caucasus that would enable energy from the region (and the neighboring
countries of Central Asia) to find alternate routes to the West (a
desire shared, if less assertively, by many in Brussels). Moscow,
meanwhile, thinks that bringing its old ally Armenia and its new
friend Turkey closer together will diminish the pull of "extraregional
actors" (i.e., the Americans and the Europeans) in the Caucasus. And
the fact that lifting the iron curtain between Turkey and Armenia will
substantially reduce the geopolitical weight of Georgia, Moscow’s
declared enemy, probably contributes as well.

Yet the deal is still a long way from done. The protocols that will be
presented by the two governments this month still have to be approved
by the Turkish and Armenian parliaments. "The crucial point is
ratification," says Sinan Ülgen of the Centre for Economics and
Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul. "This is going to be ratified if,
and only if, Azerbaijan and Armenia can come to agreement on
Karabakh." And that is far from a sure thing, given the long legacy of
mistrust. Laurence Broers of the London-based nonprofit Conciliation
Resources points out that there are precedents from Turkish and
Armenian leaders who tried to build rapprochement without sufficient
backing from their own peoples — they failed. "So I am not very
optimistic."

Let’s see what happens next.

Christian Caryl is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy. His
column, "Reality Check," appears weekly on ForeignPolicy.com.

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