Sunday’s Zaman, Turkey
March 21 2010

Armenians and our speaking prime minister

by IHSAN YILMAZ

I wrote here a few times that thanks to a kind of strange Turkish
exceptionalism, our military generals should speak every day so that
people will see their intellectual caliber and so the army’s meddling
with politics will no longer be tolerated. After seeing that our
generals are also mere mortals, the people will know they are not
super-humans and that in some exceptional cases, quite the contrary
may also be true. In addition to my abovementioned strange
undemocratic offer, here is the second one: Our prime minister should
speak less, for the sake of our democracy and for the well-being and
prosperity of our country and nation.
All right, I loved `one minute,’ and I still do, but when it comes to
spontaneous reactions, our prime minister is very rarely that lucky. I
can list here several examples of how he inflicted himself and
democratic forces in society harm by his spontaneous and definitely
unnecessary reactions. That is why, knowing this weakness of the prime
minister, his opponents everywhere try to provoke him.

The last incident is his unfortunate — maybe misunderstood — remark
on illegal Armenians immigrants who have been working in Turkey
illegally, numbering up to 20,000 people. To date, the Turkish state
has turned a blind eye to their existence as a good gesture and sign
of goodwill. It is also known that Turkey has helped Armenia when they
had food shortages, etc. The prime minister warned Armenia last week
that Turkey may send these illegal workers back. Speaking to
journalists in Africa, President Abdullah Gül said the prime minister
was misunderstood and so on. Even this sufficiently shows that there
is something troubling in the remarks of the prime minister.

As a sovereign state, it is Turkey’s legitimate right to do so, but
what happened to our self-declared morality, tolerance, understanding,
loving the creature because of the created characteristics? It seems
that politics pollute everything they touch. We may have issues with
the Armenian state, the Armenian diaspora and Machiavellian and
opportunistic American politicians, but threatening people who sought
refuge and shelter in Turkey because they were starving back in their
country as a result of their politicians’ mistakes and unjust and
illegal occupation of areas surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh that resulted
in 1 million Azerbaijanis being forcefully exiled from these areas is
out of line. Should we not as Turks show first to ourselves and then
the outside world that politics can sometimes, if very rarely, take
into account morality, ethics and compassion?

I have been thinking about the classic Turkish counterattack of
threatening the US with the closure of the US military base in
Ä°ncirlik, Turkey, as a reaction to the US congressmen’s annual threats
to pass a resolution to condemn Turkey because of what happened back
in 1915 that have never arrived at a conclusion. But I think if
politics pollutes everything it touches, if these canny American
politicians touch anything, they pollute it twice. No, I will not
mention the redskins, the forefathers of the American Indians! But,
the US politicians can start with the massacres in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Bush, neocons, etc., and then continue going back. When the buck stops
at 1915, they can question Turkey.

But, saying this does not negate the ultimate truth that Turkey has to
face what happened in 1915. And we should do this without any foreign
pressure. I am not saying that we are guilty and am perfectly aware of
the Turkish claims that many Turkish villagers were massacred by some
Armenian terrorists who thought that embattled Ottomans could not
fight on all fronts and that it was a good opportunity to establish an
independent Armenian state. But it is obvious that the social
Darwinist, crudely positivist, negative nationalist Young Turk leaders
of the state who came to power after staging a coup and silenced
everyone paved the way for the death of hundreds of thousands of
innocent Armenians. It is equally obvious that they — at least —
could not protect these civilians. It is also equally obvious that
everything these wronged people left — farms, houses, everything —
was illegally captured by others. I would not be surprised if many of
those capturers are the ultranationalists of today. Anyway.

Instead of constantly speaking, can we not simply declare that Turkey
is ready to give everything back to their rightful and legal owners if
they can produce documents or the state is able to find the records in
the archives? Doing this does not mean that our politicians accept the
genocide claims of Armenia or the Armenian diaspora, but it would
simply substantiate our claims to morality, ethics and, above all,
humanity.

21.03.2010

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress