RETURNING TO TIES BETWEEN TURKS, ARMENIANS
Hurriyet, Turkey
March 7 2010
History is, of course, written as much by mistakes as by what we
get right. Had Napoleon listened to his advisors on the weather, he
might not have lost the Battle of Waterloo to the Duke of Wellington
in 1815. Our world would be different today.
It is interesting to imagine what might have ensued had the alliance
forged in 1907 between the nationalist "Young Turks" and the
nationalist Armenian "Dashnaks" not broken down in 1912.
Had neutral Turkey’s entry into the World War I not been precipitated
by bungling over the delivery of gunships commissioned from England,
and the "gift" of the re-flagged German cruiser Goeben, who knows how
very different the history of the early 20th Century might have been.
The recitation of such events is, however, just an empty exercise in
historical nostalgia. The list of the mistakes by ignorant political
leaders is a long one. But much shorter is the list of errors knowingly
made in the face of warnings, pleadings and the best advice available.
We cannot imagine, for example, that six weeks before the April 10,
1998, "Good Friday Agreement" peace brokered between the long-warring
factions in Northern Island, that the U.S. Congress’s Foreign Affairs
Committee would have weighed in with an incendiary decree on the
political factors behind the Irish Potato Famine of 1845.
We certainly cannot imagine that sometime in August 1978, in the run-up
to the negotiations that led to the "Camp David Accords" signed by
Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat and Menechem Begin on Sept. 12 of that year,
the same committee might have decided to condemn Begin’s role in the
1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
Are there strong views on English complicity in the "Potato Famine?"
No doubt. Did Begin’s terrorist Irgun gang kill 91 innocent people?
Most historians agree he did. But no one in their right mind would ever
expect anyone with as grave and profound a set of responsibilities
as the chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee to do
something so blindly stupid.
But that is exactly what Democrat Howard Berman of California did. It
took years of quiet diplomacy, ceaseless efforts by academics and
journalists in Turkey and Armenia and earnest exchanges by artists and
musicians to lead us to the edge of a historic normalization protocol.
It took just moments for Berman to effectively kill it. Armenia is
likely to remain economically and geographically isolated for another
decade. Nationalists on both sides will feast on the fallout.
For what? We cannot know what Berman was thinking last week. We
do know he committed a meaningless and stupid mistake. Berman can
go back to Hollywood. We must go back to rebuilding ties in an
already-so-troubled neighborhood.