THE PAST IS DISTANCING ANKARA FROM EUROPE
by Vittorio Emanuele Parsi

La Stampa
March 6 2010
Italia

It was easy to predict that the Turkish Government would come up with
an extremely tough response to a vote taken by the US Congress’ Foreign
Affairs Committee urging Turkey to acknowledge that the slaughter of
hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the course of World War I was
full fledged genocide, similar in every way to the Sho’ah that the
Nazi regime was to perpetrate a few decades later. But how come the
authorities in Ankara still adopt such an inflexible stance almost 100
years after those tragic events which, what is more, were perpetrated
by an institutional player (the Ottoman Empire) that is not the same
as today’s Turkish Republic? The answer is that the Armenian people’s
genocide is the most embarrassing thread linking the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire with the birth of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s Republic.

The genocide reflected a plan to "Turanize" ("Turkify" – La Stampa
editor’s note) the empire, replacing people’s previous and now obsolete
loyalty to the sultan with a new and vigorous loyalty to a national
Turkish homeland which had yet to be built, to be "invented," as was
the case with other countries that took shape in the course of the
century. The plan intersected and partly rerouted the last desperate
attempt to reform the empire made by young Turks from the mid-19th
century on.

The reforming movement’s nationalistic slide finally prevailed after
the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, and it was fuelled by the massacres
and enforced expulsions of the Muslim populace in the European
provinces that the empire had owned until that moment – massacres
perpetrated by Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians. The Turks responded
to those atrocities, which had not spared the Jews in Thessaloniki
either, with the first expulsions and massacres of Armenians and
Greeks in Anatolia.

Ethnic cleansing rose to new heights in World War I, reaching a peak
with the events of 1915. This cleansing operation was as ethnic and
it was religious, and it was explicitly and lucidly pursued by the
empire’s new leadership class, a large part of which was to then
transfer to the new Republic established by Mustafa Kemal after the
victorious war against Greece and against the other occupying powers.

Even Kemal Ataturk himself, a renowned "nonconfessional," actually felt
that equating the concept of "a real Turk" with "a Sunnite Muslim"
served his cause perfectly. In fact, it is no mere coincidence that
he was hostile to all other religious faiths (including other branches
of Islam), or that he accorded Sunni Islam special treatment with the
Ministry of Religion, in accordance with a vision of the relationship
between "church and state" that bore a far greater resemblance to
King Henry VIII’s English model than it did to the French republican
model with which it is often mistakenly compared.

In defending the Republic’s origins from an embarrassing original sin,
Ankara’s new overlords have shown that, albeit from a far more "pious"
standpoint, they continue to feel that Turkey’s national identity is de
facto inseparable from its Islamic and Sunnite identity. In so doing,
they are taking another step that distances Turkey from the European
haven which they still formally claim to want to reach.