GERMAN MP CRITICIZES GOVERNMENT FOR POSITION ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

news.am
March 12 2010
Armenia

Member of the German Parliament Katrin Werner sent a letter to
Minister of State at the German Federal Foreign Office Cornelia Pieper
expressing disagreement with German government’s position on Armenian
Genocide. Toros Saryan informed NEWS.am that the letter reads:

"With this position, the German government quite openly endorses
the official position of the Turkish government, which would like
to entrust a commission of historians to clarify this question. If,
however, the German government is of the opinion that what has long
since been the consensus of the overwhelming majority of historians has
yet to be clarified, then the question posed to me is: what was the
meaning and aim of the of the German parliament’s motion from 2005,
in which at least regret is expressed for &’the organized expulsion
and annihilation of the Armenians’.The crux of the matter is that the
German government thus undermines its motion, which at the time had
been voted up unanimously, if it suddenly thinks that historians,
in face of the vast, empirically documented facts, have to decide
afresh whether or not these historical facts apply at all.

Alongside the numerous original source documents which are to be
found in the archive of the German Foreign Ministry, the genocidal
quality [of the events] can be recognized even solely from the methods
that the Young Turk government of the time adopted to carry out the
deportation of the Armenian population. The so-called &’resettlement’
of 1915/1916 was directed against the Armenians as a group, whereby
the men of arms-bearing age were mainly massacred and the women,
children, and aged, were subjected to such physical living conditions
that made it impossible for them to survive in the north Mesopotamian
desert. These were bona fide death marches, mass deaths through hunger
and epidemics, deportations of children and young women as well as
mega-killings by regular police guards, irregular killer squads, and
marauding gangs. If this does not correspond to the criteria of the
U.N. Genocide Commission of 1948, then I do not know what genocide
otherwise should look like.

Similarly, I can not agree with you that it is primarily Turkey and
Armenia which should undertake the necessary task of working through
and appraising the past. This must, in my view, apply to Germany even
in a special way. At that time, the German Empire, as most important
military ally of the Ottoman Empire, was both in the know and in part
complicit. German military personnel were involved in the execution of
the genocide. In the Ottoman Empire, active German firms like Philipp
Holzmann and the Deutsche Bank made a profit from the deployment of
Armenian slave laborers in the construction of the Baghdad railway,
slave laborers who were then dispatched to a certain death. In
addition, after the First World War, Germany protected leading persons
responsible for the genocide from legal prosecution. For these reasons,
today’s German government has a very special obligation, even here at
home — as, by the way, that parliamentary motion defined as a task —
to educate children in school classes, for example, about the genocide
of the Armenians. This would be important for all schoolchildren,
whether of immigrant background or not.

We know from German history how important an honest clarification
process is for the democratic development of a society. It is only
through acknowledgement of the darker sides of one’s own history
that one can sharpen one’s consciousness that something similar will
hopefully never be repeated. Now, a full 95 years after the fact,
Armenian descendants of the genocide survivors, here in Germany too,
are still suffering the psychological effects of having to prove that
their ancestors were even victims of a crime. This is an unacceptable
way of dealing with the victims. Moreover, embracing such a position,
the German government is discouraging those forces in Turkish civil
society who are taking personal risks to fight for a critical review
and working through of the historical record. As you yourself remarked
in your answer, over the past few years in Turkey an increasingly open
discussion process has happily begun to unfold. And in this process,
Turkey would require concrete support and encouragement from the
German government. This, however, assumes that the German government
itself first unconditionally acknowledge the historical truth about
the Armenian genocide including German complicity."