TURKEY’S 95 YEARS OF DENIAL
Toronto Star
April 17 2010
Canada
As other countries apologize for atrocities, the 1915 Armenian massacre
remains taboo
Some were thrown into the Black Sea and drowned, while thousands
of other men, women and children were forced to march through the
blistering Syrian desert without food or water, dying en route to
concentration camps.
The 1915 killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians by extremists in the
Ottoman Empire’s "Young Turk" movement during the turmoil of World War
I has been exhaustively documented by scholars, diplomats, journalists
and the testimonies of survivors. Henry Morgenthau, the U.S.
ambassador to the empire, cabled Washington about a "systematic plan
to crush the Armenian race."
After the war, a Turkish court held war crimes trials and concluded
that the leaders of the massacre were guilty of murder – though they
were never jailed.
Ninety-five years after the onset of what has been labelled the 20th
century’s first genocide, Turkey has not come to terms with the dark
event, whose ghosts still haunt relations with neighbouring Armenia.
The months-long massacre is marked on April 24, the date when hundreds
of Armenian intellectual leaders were deported and killed.
"Turkey has a different perspective on history," says Fadi Hakura,
a Turkish expert at Chatham House in London. "It believes no genocide
took place: many Armenians were expelled for security reasons or
killed by the ravages of war."
Turkey maintains that local Armenians supported the invading Russian
army during the war, and rose up treasonously against Ottoman
authorities. And many Christian Armenians were killed along with
Muslims in what amounted to a civil war. Deportations occurred,
but no organized attempt to destroy the Armenian population.
Hence, no genocide.
Nearly a century later, everyone linked with the massacres is dead,
along with the Ottoman Empire. Turkey is an ally of the West, a global
trading partner and a candidate for European Union membership.
But Ankara’s efforts to wall off the past run counter to those of other
countries with clouded histories. A German president has apologized
for the Holocaust to the Israeli parliament and a former South African
leader asked forgiveness for the pain and suffering of the viciously
racist apartheid system. Last week, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin acknowledged the Soviet role in the slaughter of 22,000 Poles
at Katyn during World War II.
But Turkey still considers the subject of Armenian genocide taboo. So
international moves to recognize it continue to outrage Ankara.
When the U.S. House of Representatives foreign affairs committee
recently voted to recommend Washington recognize the genocide, Turkey
recalled its envoy and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip said the bill
"accuses the Turkish nation of a crime it has not committed."
Canada is among 21 countries to have recognized the genocide, although
more than 150 others have been reluctant to anger Turkey by formally
acknowledging it.
After nearly a century, why is Ankara so intent on suppressing the
grim events?
"Turkey has a duality in the way it’s governed," says George Shirinian,
who heads the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights
Studies in Toronto.
"There is a democratically elected government that runs its day to
day affairs. But there is a power behind the scenes known as the `deep
state,’ which consists of self-appointed protectors of the old ways,
mostly military and senior civilian bureaucrats."
Turkey, he says, was founded on the ashes of the old Ottoman Empire
by the military, which plays a prominent role in economic as well as
security matters. It wants to avoid any aspersions on the historic
military figures of a past that is "not as glorious as it appears."
While the country has modernized in a "very visible way," says
Turkish expert Henri Barkey of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania,
"there has never been a democratic culture in Turkey."
But there has been progress in the past decade, he adds. The rights
of the Kurdish minority, whose existence was once denied, is now an
acceptable topic of conversation.
The Armenian killings have remained under wraps for longer, and public
discussion was repressed.
After the 2007 shooting of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink – who
called the killings genocide – protests broke out and the prosecution
of outspoken intellectuals waned, although they are still taken to
court by nationalists who lodge damaging civil suits. Writers and
publishers have been charged with "insulting Turkishness" and jailed,
or forced to pay sizeable fines.
But Turkey’s young population, with an average age of 27, is more
progressive than its parents. And although the establishment is slow
to liberalize its views, the new generation is catching up quickly.
The government, meanwhile, has signed an historic agreement with
neighbouring Armenia to launch diplomatic relations and open the
borders. But the shadow of the genocide still hangs over the two
countries. Turkey says only that it would agree that a committee of
historians could investigate the events of 1915.
That is unacceptable to many Armenians, who remember the missing
family members whose fates are still unknown: of two million Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of World War I, fewer than 400,000
remained by 1922.