SHUT UP ABOUT ARMENIANS OR WE’LL HURT THEM AGAIN
by Christopher Hitchens
Slate Magazine
April 5, 2010 Monday
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?
The outburst strengthens the already strong case for considering
Erdogan to be somewhat personally unhinged. In Davos in January 2009,
he stormed out of a panel discussion with the head of the Arab League
and with Israeli President Shimon Peres, having gone purple and grabbed
the arm of the moderator who tried to calm him. On that occasion, he
yelled that Israelis in Gaza knew too well "how to kill"-which might
be true but which seems to betray at best an envy on his part. Turkish
nationalists have also told me that he was out of control because he
disliked the fact that the moderator-David Ignatius of the Washington
Post-is himself of Armenian descent. A short while later, at a NATO
summit in Turkey, Erdogan went into another tantrum at the idea
that former Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark would
be chosen as the next head of the alliance. In this case, it was
cartoons published on Danish soil that frayed Erdogan’s evidently
fragile composure.
In Turkey itself, the continuing denial has abysmal cultural and
political consequences. The country’s best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk,
was dragged before a court in 2005 for acknowledging Turkey’s role
in the destruction of Armenia. Had he not been the winner of a Nobel
Prize, it might have gone very hard for him, as it has for prominent
and brave intellectuals like Murat Belge. Turkish-Armenian editor
Hrant Dink, also prosecuted under a state law forbidding discussion
of the past, was shot down in the street by an assassin who was later
photographed in the company of beaming, compliant policemen.
The original crime, in other words, defeats all efforts to cover
it up. And the denial necessitates continuing secondary crimes. In
1955, a government-sponsored pogrom in Istanbul burned out most of
the city’s remaining Armenians, along with thousands of Jews and
Greeks and other infidels. The state-codified concept of mandatory
Turkishness has been used to negate the rights and obliterate the
language of the country’s enormous Kurdish population and to create
an armed colony of settlers and occupiers on the soil of Cyprus,
a democratic member of the European Union.
So it is not just a disaster for Turkey that it has a prime minister
who suffers from morbid disorders of the personality. Under these
conditions, his great country can never hope to be an acceptable
member of Europe or a reliable member of NATO. And history is
cunning: The dead of Armenia will never cease to cry out. Nor,
on their behalf., should we cease to do so. Let Turkey’s unstable
leader foam all he wants when other parliaments and congresses discuss
Armenia and seek the truth about it. The grotesque fact remains that
the one parliament that should be debating the question-the Turkish
parliament-is forbidden by its own law to do so. While this remains
the case, we shall do it for them, and without any apology, until
they produce the one that is forthcoming from them.