ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND TURKEY: THEN AND NOW
Vicken Cheterian
Policy-Examiner~y2010m4d26-President-Obama-breaks- his-promise-to-recognize-Armenian-Genocide-again
2 4 April 2010
The destruction of the Ottoman Armenians began on 24 April 1915.
Almost a century later the contemporary political relevance of the
"great catastrophe" remains undiminished, says Vicken Cheterian.
About the author Vicken Cheterian is a journalist and political analyst
who works for the non-profit governance organisation CIMERA, based
in Geneva. For Armenians everywhere, 24 April is a day of special
commemoration. It marks the beginning of the genocide of 1915: the
uprooting or killing by the leading figures of the Ottoman state of
almost all the 2.2 million Armenians who lived in historic Armenia,
using the circumstances of Europe’s "great war" as a pretext.
The ninety-fifth anniversary on 24 April 2010 finds the issue
as potent as ever in the global consciousness as well as in the
Armenian world. It is discussed in the international arena at all
levels of political, diplomatic, historical and cultural life;
its recognition as a historical reality has become a factor in the
deliberations of many legislative bodies, such as the United States
house of representatives’ foreign-affairs committee and the Swedish
parliament (both in March 2010).
This reflects a shift in the balance of argument about the genocide.
The outright negation of its truth is becoming rarer; more often,
those who oppose official recognition of the genocide tend tacitly to
admit that it did happen but that it would be politically inconvenient
to say so as this would anger Turkey – an increasingly powerful
and influential country, an important Nato member, and a strategic
partner of the west (albeit one more than ever inclined to follow
its own course) (see Carsten Wieland, "Turkey’s political-emotional
transition", 6 October 2009). The implication is that it is still,
ninety-five years later, too soon to face reality.
A related but distinct case is that what happened in 1915 belongs to
the past and should be left to historians.
Both the "too soon" and the "too distant" cases are wrong, as brave
voices in Turkey too are beginning to affirm (see "Turks urged to mark
Armenia’s ‘great catastrophe’ in Istanbul", RFE/RL, 22 April 2010).
The debate about the Armenian genocide is about politics, and about
people living today. In this short article, I make four points that
underline the contemporary political relevance of the genocide.
The closed frontier
The first point is the very existence, almost a century later, of the
Armenian diaspora: the grandchildren of the genocide survivors. Their
persistent mobilisation in search of recognition and justice is fuelled
by the continuous denial of the Turkish authorities (alternating with
assertions that if there were deportations and massacres, it was the
fault of the Armenians themselves).
This generation is not going to disappear, forget, or be silenced.
They will not be at peace until modern Turkey – the successor state
of the Ottoman empire – recognises its responsibility (see The Great
Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of
the Ottoman Armenians [Oxford University Press, 2005]).
The second point is that the shadow of the genocide of 1915 is
still hanging over the contemporary politics of the Caucasus. When
in 1988, during the last years of the Soviet Union, the Armenians of
Nagorno-Karabakh – the enclave inside Azerbaijan – raised the peaceful
demand to be transferred from (Soviet) Azerbaijan to (Soviet), the
result only weeks later was an anti-Armenian pogrom in the Azerbaijani
town of Sumgait. It was followed by half a dozen others, from Kirovabad
(now Ganja) to Baku. The message was clear, and sometimes explicit:
both the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis understood it as a reminder
of 1915, and a warning of its possible repeat.
In the troubled era of the Soviet Union’s slow disintegration, the
fear on one side and the threat on the other re-emerged. If by that
stage Turkey had recognised its responsibility in the destruction of
the Anatolian Armenians, the political conflict over Karabakh might
in principle have been solved in a non-violent way. In the event,
the conflict erupted into open war in 1992-94, following the Soviet
collapse; this was won by the Armenian side, despite Turkey’s military
assistance to its Azerbaijani ally and its subsequent blockade on
Armenia in an effort to squeeze both its economy and its support for
Karabakh (see Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan
Through Peace and War [NYU Press, 2004]).
This is the last closed frontier of the cold war, and an unresolved
conflict that could yet explode once more. The "protocols" signed
by Armenia and Turkey in Zurich on 10 October 2009 agreed that
the neighbours would normalise diplomatic relations and open the
border between them (see Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, "Armenia and Turkey:
forgetting genocide", 12 October 2009) Since then, the process has hit
a series of obstacles, among which Turkey’s insistence on Armenian
concessions over Karabakh (which is not included in the protocols)
ranks high. In response, Armenia on 22 April 2010 suspended the
parliamentary ratification process.
The Azerbaijani leadership today continues to threaten Armenia with
military action to regain the territories lost in the 1990s. The
Azerbaijani defence minister has even declared: "If the Armenian
occupier does not liberate our lands, the start of a great war in
the south Caucasus is inevitable." Again, if Turkey recognised the
genocide – and took a neutral position in the Karabakh conflict – this
would greatly ease tensions and decrease the risk of yet another war
in the Caucasus (see War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled
Frontier [C Hurst & Columbia University Press, 2009]).
The opened book
The third point that highlights the genocide’s contemporary political
relevance is about Turkey itself. After the vast majority of the
Armenians were eliminated, the Republic of Turkey from its foundation
in 1923 pursued a strictly unifying ideology that turned an intolerant
(and often violent) face towards internal minorities and dissidents:
Kurds, Assyrians, Greeks, Alevis, trade-unionists, human-rights
activists. Some of the most intense violence came during the conflict
between the Turkish military and the (Kurdish) PKK guerrillas in the
1980s, when as many as 3,000 villages in eastern Turkey were destroyed
and their inhabitants forced to migrate west to major cities.
This one-party system, historically dominated by the military (and
often mistakenly described as "secular") is today crumbling, and in
a way that opens the possibility of democracy and pluralism (see Bill
Park, "Turkey and Ergenenkon: from farce to tragedy", 10 March 2010).
In this struggle, the Armenian question has again become a subject of
public debate – in great part thanks to journalists, scholars (such as
Taner Akcam) and activists who have risked their lives to challenge
official taboos. Some have paid a heavy price for this audacity;
not least the journalist Hrant Dink, assassinated in January 2007 in
the street outside the offices of his newspaper (Agos) in Istanbul.
More recently, the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
has raised the rhetorical stakes and engendered new fears in his
response to the Swedish parliament’s resolution, when he spoke
about expelling "100,000 Armenians" from Turkey (see "’There can be
no talk of genocide’", Spiegel Online, 29 March 2010). Once more,
Turkey’s recognition of the genocide of 1915 would be a great step
towards erasing the fear and violence that has long characterised
Turkey’s internal political life (see Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act:
The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility
[Henry Holt, 2007]).
The fourth point is that the official acknowledgment of the Armenian
genocide is about everyone, not just Armenians and Turks. For it
raises the crucial question: how is it possible to talk about the
transformation of international relations and the peaceful resolution
of 21st-century conflicts if the first major genocide of the 20th
century is denied?