TURKEY KEEPS GENOCIDE CONTROVERSY ALIVE
AOL News –
April 6 2010
(April 6) — Earlier this year, the House Foreign Affairs
Committee narrowly passed a resolution to officially label Turkey’s
state-orchestrated murder of 1.5 million Armenians, which began
95 years ago this month, a genocide — a move that in turn led the
Turkish government to recall its ambassador from Washington.
Then, in March, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened
to expel 100,000 Armenians living in Turkey illegally if foreign
governments continued to agitate for the genocide designation for the
mass killing (earning a filleting from Christopher Hitchens in Slate).
It wasn’t Erdogan’s first such fulmination, but it also is in keeping
with long-standing Turkish policy when it comes to discussing the
deliberate Ottoman destruction of Armenians during and immediately
following World War I.
So why can’t Turkey own up to its bloody past?
"Fear of rewriting history is the main fear of modern Turkey," says
Hayk Demoyan, director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in
Armenia’s capital of Yerevan.
Indeed, the founding of modern Turkey and the state’s campaign against
Armenia go hand in hand. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s revered
"founding father," who secularized the country, is implicated in
the killings of Armenians, Demoyan says. "It is a fear of facing
historical reality and causing a total collapse of the ideological
axis that modern republican Turkey was formed around. Turks get
panicked when you compare Ataturk’s legacy to Lenin."
Instead, Turkey and various pro-Turkey groups have consistently
maintained that the Armenian death toll has been exaggerated, and
that while hundreds of thousands may have died, it was because of
starvation and disease — not at the hands of Turkish troops.
Increasingly, this account has been challenged by both foreign
governments and dissenters within Turkey itself.
"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," Hitchens writes. "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."
Turkey’s continued denials come at a high cost, most notably
endangering its entrance into the European Union. But even if Turkey’s
ideological foundations are as fragile as Demoyan contends, many
nations have had to confront their unsavory pasts, to own up to them
and make amends (even if only symbolically) in order to move forward.
Germany’s done so for its Nazi past. Australia apologized to its
Aborigine population. Congress has apologized for slavery and the
mistreatment of Native Americans. Such measures may do little,
but they are at the very least an acknowledgment of wrongdoing,
and part of a growing process that Turkey, to its own detriment,
refuses to engage in.
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