UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

The Times
ding_article/article7066163.ece
March 18, 2010
UK

Turkish threats to expel Armenian migrants to make a political point
are shameful

Deportations have powerful symbolism in modern European history. The
notion that the government of a would-be member state of the EU
might propose the forced collective expulsion from its territory of
a specified nationality ought to be unthinkable. Yet that course was
casually threatened yesterday by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish
Prime Minister, against 100,000 Armenian migrants (see page 27).

Its purported justification was the recent passage of non-binding
resolutions in the US Congress and the Swedish parliament. These
motions describe as genocide the mass killings of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire during and after the First World War. Turkey takes
strong issue with the claim of genocide. The history and politics
of TurkishArmenian relations are convoluted, but the ethics of
Mr Erdogan’s remarks are not. His intervention is demagogic and
disreputable.

The US and Swedish votes were carried by narrow margins and were
opposed by their respective governments. The historical events that
they recall began with the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
in 1915. The very word "genocide" is a post-1945 coinage, intended
to define the peculiar barbarity of Nazism. Only gradually did the
Armenian massacres come to be recognised as the first authentic case
of genocide in the 20th century. But so they were. On conservative
historical estimates, around a million Armenians were killed in a
xenophobic purge that continued till 1923. It was a crime without
precedent in modern history.

Historical truth matters. It is extraordinary that the Government of
modern Turkey should resist it. No one alive today was responsible
for these barbarities. They were committed by an imperial power that
has long since passed into history along with Wilhelmine Germany,
to which it was allied in the First World War. While running for the
presidency, Barack Obama declared his intention of being a leader
who would speak the truth about the Armenian genocide. In practice,
while his views are a matter of record, Mr Obama has been conciliatory
in relations with Turkey.

Mr Erdogan has little cause for complaint about the symbolic diplomacy
of resolutions on historical events. He has no justification whatever
for threats against Armenian migrants. Turkey is home to thousands
of illegal immigrants from Armenia. Few would dispute that sovereign
nations have the right to determine barriers to entry on the part
of non-citizens, but these are migrants who have sought refuge from
disaster. Forming an impoverished population that does necessary but
low-wage work, they include many whose homes and livelihoods were
destroyed in the Armenian earthquake of 1988. Mr Erdogan estimated
yesterday that of 170,000 Armenians in Turkey, only 70,000 held
Turkish citizenship. He threatened directly to tell the rest to leave.

Turkey is a member state of Nato and a strategically important power
within the Western alliance. It borders Iraq, in whose stability the
Western democracies have an intense interest. But the Government
in Ankara cannot exploit that status in order to advance its own
diplomatic goals at the expense of liberal values. To object to a
proper historical accounting of awesome crimes is a demeaning and
destructive stance. But then to retaliate against the most vulnerable
people within Turkey’s borders is unconscionable.