Christopher Hitchens: Turkey Denies History

Slate
[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz
media fellow at the Hoover Institution.]

April is the cruelest month for the people of Armenia, who every year at
this season have to suffer a continuing tragedy and a humiliation. The
tragedy is that of commemorating the huge number of their ancestors who were
exterminated by the Ottoman Muslim caliphate in a campaign of state-planned
mass murder that began in April 1915. The humiliation is of hearing, year
after year, that the Turkish authorities simply deny that these appalling
events ever occurred or that the killings constituted "genocide."

In a technical and pedantic sense, the word genocide does not, in fact,
apply, since it only entered our vocabulary in 1943. (It was coined by a
scholar named Raphael Lemkin, who for rather self-evident reasons in that
even more awful year wanted a legal term for the intersection between racism
and bloodlust and saw Armenia as the precedent for what was then happening
in Poland.) I still rather prefer the phrase used by America’s
then-ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau. Reporting to Washington about
what his consular agents were telling him of the foul doings in the Ottoman
provinces of Harput and Van in particular, he employed the striking words
"race extermination." (See the imperishable book The Slaughterhouse Province
for some of the cold diplomatic dispatches of that period.) Terrible enough
in itself, Morgenthau’s expression did not quite comprehend the later
erasure of all traces of Armenian life, from the destruction of their
churches and libraries and institutes to the crude altering of official
Turkish maps and schoolbooks to deny that there had ever been an Armenia in
the first place.

This year, the House foreign affairs committee in Washington and the
parliament of Sweden joined the growing number of political bodies that have
decided to call the slaughter by its right name. I quote now from a
statement in response by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current prime minister of
Turkey and the leader of its Islamist party:

In my country there are 170,000 Armenians. Seventy thousand of them are
citizens. We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If
necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your country. Why?
They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country.

This extraordinary threat was not made at some stupid rally in a fly-blown
town. It was uttered in England, on March 17, on the Turkish-language
service of the BBC. Just to be clear, then, about the view of Turkey’s chief
statesman: If democratic assemblies dare to mention the ethnic cleansing of
Armenians in the 20th century, I will personally complete that cleansing in
the 21st!

Where to begin? Turkish "guest workers" are to be found in great numbers all
through the European Union, membership of which is a declared Turkish
objective. How would the world respond if a European prime minister called
for the mass deportation of all Turks? Yet Erdogan’s xenophobic demagoguery
attracted precisely no condemnation from Washington or Brussels. He probably
overestimated the number of "tolerated" economic refugees from neighboring
and former Soviet Armenia, but is it not interesting that he keeps a count
in his head? And a count of the tiny number of surviving Turkish Armenians
as well?..

Monday, April 5, 2010